Chapter 7 – Corvus
CORVUS
“ I s that…?” Grey trailed off as Rook emerged into the back lot of the diner, dragging Ava Jade along by her wrist. Both of them grinning like fools as ice cream dripped down Ava Jade’s fingers, all the way down to her elbow, and a heavy sack swayed in Rook’s fist.
They rushed for the Rover, faces flushed and eyes bright.
Fuck.
“Start the car!” Rook called before they were even inside, hurriedly tearing open the back door to help Ava Jade into the backseat before slipping in himself.
“I said go, man,” he repeated, giving Grey’s arm a shove. “Unless you want us all to be ID’d and arrested.”
Sparrow laughed, leaning back in her seat with stars in her eyes as she caught her breath. I’d never seen her like that, and something within me pulled, straining against the confines I’d set for myself as a boy.
“What the fuck did you do?” I growled as Grey started the ignition.
“Forward, brother,” Rook said when Grey tried to put the Rover in reverse.
“But—”
“Just do it, we don’t need them seeing the Rover.”
Grey muttered something to himself but did what Rook demanded, driving over the cement barrier and out onto the hard-packed dirt of the desert terrain. He’d find a way to avoid the road for as long as he could before slipping back onto it.
“What. Did. You. Do?” I asked again, whirling in my seat as the Rover bumped over uneven ground.
Rook leaned back and wrapped an arm around my Sparrow, smiling down at her in a way that made my teeth clench. She leaned into him, wiping away a tear from the force of her laughter. “Fuck,” she said on a breath. “That was fun.”
“Our little misfit here just passed her first trial,” Rook said with a lopsided grin, and I frowned.
“What the fuck did you just say?”
“Diesel was busy,” Rook explained with a shrug. “He said I should devise something for her first trial until he could get around to having something set up.”
His words were like a punch to the gut.
Diesel had asked Rook for help with her trials, but he didn’t even tell me. He always told me.
He never kept me in the dark.
He wouldn’t?—
He would, I realized, the knots in my stomach tightening for an entirely different reason now.
Damn.
Diesel asked Rook specifically to facilitate her first trial because he thought Rook would scare her off. He’d be the most likely to. And the least likely of the three of us to care what happened to her.
Except Diesel was wrong.
About Rook.
About Ava Jade.
He was wrong about a lot of things.
He didn’t know that Billy the Butcher’s blood was on her hands.
Grey had filled us in on the footage he found on her phone.
Footage he’d erased from the drive for good.
She’d been there, watching us, and not only had she done nothing to try to stop us from giving Billy his warning, she’d decided that wasn’t good enough.
She’d not only hidden quietly as we tortured him, but also finished him off after we left.
Even I still didn’t know what to make of that.
My controlling nature told me she should be punished for her insubordination.
We had a system. A way of doing things, and she was upsetting that. Fucking it up beyond repair.
And my inquisitiveness had me begging the question of whether it was the first time she’d killed. I didn’t think it was. She wasn’t haunted by it. I’d seen her the very next day, and she’d looked rested. Happy, even.
Like Rook after a kill. As though something inside of her had been sated.
She’d surprised us in every possible way. She continued to surprise us. She would continue to surprise Diesel, too, until she would win him over. I was sure of it. So long as she lived long enough.
“We should dump the phones,” Sparrow said, licking around the base of the ice cream cone to clean up the drips of vanilla in a way that drove me absolutely mad.
I shook my head, the situation coming back into focus as Grey drove over a deep hole in the terrain and I bounced in my seat, hitting my head on the roof with a curse.
“Phones?”
“We took their phones,” Sparrow explained. “We should dump them before we get too far away so they can’t trace our route.”
I narrowed my gaze on Rook, who shrugged.
“You held up the diner?” I asked redundantly. “With her ?”
“You should’ve seen her, man.” He bit his lip ring as he gazed down at her eating her ice cream, happier than a pig in shit. “She didn’t know shit, but when I put the gun to her head, she played them all like fiddles. Could’ve had a career as an actress. I’d watch that movie on repeat.”
She let out a little giggle, still high from the job, her pupils wide and dark.
“You put a fucking gun to her head?” Grey demanded, making Sparrow squint at the back of his head in the front seat while Rook began picking cell phones out of a bag of cash and tossing them out the rear window, unperturbed.
“She’s still alive, isn’t she?” Rook asked with a raised brow and Grey shook his head, his jaw flexing from what I could see of his side profile.
My face heated with rage, and I turned back around to face the moving landscape around us, trying to maintain a sense of calm. “It was stupid to organize it alone,” I deadpanned. “You should’ve come to me. What if you missed something?”
“I didn’t.”
“What if?—”
“I know how to run a fucking job, Corv. There’s no CCTV out there. We parked around the back. No one saw the Rover. No one saw my face. My hands. No tatts. We took the phones. No prints. It’s fine .”
“They saw her ,” I corrected him.
“They saw the face of a victim. A hostage.”
“And when the hostage is never freed? When the hostage never goes to the police? When does your hostage start looking like an accomplice ?”
And there it was. The hooked bait.
It was half the point of the trials, wasn’t it?
They saw her face. But as long as she did what she was told and didn’t betray the Saints, we’d back her.
She’d always have a solid alibi. She’d have access to the best lawyers money could buy.
She’d stand before a judge who’d already been paid handsomely for the outcome of her trial.
So long as she was one of us .
Ava Jade put her face to the hot, dusted wind blowing in through her window and smiled, not giving two shits about the argument going on right next to her. I doubted she was even listening.
Rook, ignoring my comment, rifled through the bills in the bag before pulling out two large stacks and dropping them into Ava Jade’s lap. She startled. Looking down at the cash and back up to Rook.
“Your cut,” he explained, winking at her. “You earned it.”
The way she smiled at him…
She’d never smiled at me like that. Never smiled at me at all.
“You still owe me,” she replied, smug as she licked her ice cream. “I bet seven grand on you.”
“A solid investment. Too bad you lost it on your second gamble, Ghost.”
She pursed her lips, but even that couldn’t hide the smile still trying to weasel its way onto her lips. I got the feeling I was missing some private joke between them and jealousy roiled in the pit of my stomach.
I turned around at the same time Rook reached forward and jammed the auxiliary button, connecting his phone to the car’s speakers.
The beginning notes of Queen’s We Are the Champions played low before he reached forward again to crank it louder.
I watched in the mirrors as he sang along, putting his arm back around Ava Jade.
Rook rocked her side to side as the main chorus played, until she sang with him.
He gave Grey a shove in the front seat. Then kicked the back of the seat until Grey sang with them too, driving us off the uneven desert terrain and back onto a side road, leading to our next destination.
“Come on, Corv,” Rook called over the music between verses. “ We are the champions ?—”
“We are the champions,” Sparrow and Grey echoed. The dark cloud that’d been hanging over Grey for days seemed to lift, his eyes brightening as he gave himself over to a second hand high.
So easy for him to forget his burdens. To shuck off the weight of his reality.
I wished it were even half as easy for me.