Chapter 14 – Rook #3
She struggled to get free and shoved me, making me jerk a step back. “Don’t you have a gun or something?” she blurted, and I sighed, my back muscles going taut as the sound of something else crashing in Ava Jade’s room echoed all around us.
I snatched Becca’s wrist and jerked her back when she made another go for Ava Jade’s door.
“Go back to your room,” I ordered her. “I’ll handle it.”
She frantically looked between me and Ava Jade’s door, her eyes gleaming with frustrated, confused tears. It wasn’t fair for Ghost not to tell her friend.
“She’s taking the trials to become a Saint,” I explained simply. “This is one of them. She’s going to be fine.”
Becca’s brows drew together, but after a beat, her shoulders lowered slightly, and she closed her mouth on a heaving breath. “It doesn’t sound like it.”
Ava Jade cried out and a tremor of wrath flashed up my spine like lightning.
“Just go to your room,” I growled at Becca before turning for Ghost’s door, my vision darkening at the edges. Hot air pushed out from my lungs as I waited outside, listening carefully to the sounds within.
A male grunt.
A hard blow.
A cry of fury that could only be my Ghost’s.
I was inside in an instant, dodging an elbow as Ava Jade tackled the tall masked man to her bed. They rolled off onto the floor, and she gasped for air as they struggled.
She has this .
He’ll back off any second. Tell her she passed.
She managed to get on top of him, and I strode farther into the room, watching her as her fist connected with his jaw, knocking his head violently to the side.
Yes. Come on, Ghost.
I groaned at the violence of it. At the look on her face as she hit him again. A quiet determined fury edged in something sharper.
Wait…
She wasn’t detached like she was that night with Bri at the Docks. She was on edge. Something about this attack spooked her.
I didn’t like that.
Not one fucking bit.
Who was this guy? He was in a mask for the trial, but still, I should’ve recognized him. He was tall. Wide through the shoulders. Crowley? No, maybe Derrik?
My Ghost’s eyes alighted on me for an instant and it was the opening the Saint needed to turn the tables. He flipped her onto her back, and I saw a flash of something silver in the moonlight.
Ava Jade shrieked, stopping whatever it was with a forearm, her teeth bared.
I couldn’t help her.
It would render the trial void, or worse, result in an immediate fail.
She would either have to go through something like this again, or her trials would be at an end, and I shuddered to think what that could mean.
Shit.
“ No ,” she hissed, and then frantically, she shouted. “Rook!”
My beast responded. It didn’t matter who he was anymore.
I didn’t even register what I’d done until he was off her and I’d knocked whatever was in his hand onto the floor before throwing an elbow into his face. The window shattered and he sailed through it. Tossed out like trash to drop the two stories to the ground below Ava Jade’s window.
The thud of his body against the earth was followed by silence only broken by the sound of Ava Jade’s coughs and strained breathing.
I stomped to the wall and flicked on the light, finding her clutching her throat where a ring of quickly darkening bruises were rising to the surface of her skin.
Heat seared along the back of my neck, and I bristled, nostrils flaring as I knelt and drew her against me.
She fought my hold, her voice hoarse and cracking, making her cough as she tried to speak.
“ He… ” she managed hoarsely, getting her voice back. “ ...in...”
I rushed into her bathroom and filled a glass with water, hurrying back to kneel once more and put it to her lips.
She took it greedily, sitting up straighter and wincing as the cool water snaked down her throat. “He was trying to inject me,” she said after another watery cough.
“What?”
Her mouth opened in surprise as she darted forward, almost knocking me over as she retrieved something from beneath her bed. She stared at it in her hand, barely breathing.
A slender plastic syringe with a short, needled tip was gripped there. A clear substance in the chamber.
I snatched it from her, turning it over in my fingers before looking her over for injection marks. “Did he get you?”
“No,” she breathed. “No, I don’t think so.”
She coughed again, rubbing and massaging her windpipe.
“What the fuck was he going to inject me with? I didn’t sign up to be fucking drugged.”
I shook my head, my stomach turning. This wasn’t right.
There was one trial that involved ingesting a substance, but not drugs. Never drugs. He wouldn’t dare. Not after what I went through. What many Saints had gone through, the lives they’d come from and left before joining the gang.
I raced back to the window, leaning out, ready to climb down and demand answers from what was probably a corpse but.
..there was no one there. No body, living or dead.
I jerked my head up, searching through the trees to the left and the edge of the parking lot and curving road leading to town to my right.
Nothing.
“Fuck,” I hissed, pocketing the syringe in favor of my phone.
Corvus answered on the first ring.
“What is it?”
“We have a problem.”
“Tell me.”
“Get over here now. Bring Grey. Either Diesel’s lost his damned mind or there’s a bigger problem.”
“Get out,” I heard Corvus growl, and Tiny began to protest when I heard the Rover door shut and the engine rev.
“Be there in ten minutes,” he snapped a second later, and the line went dead.
Ava Jade stood, her baggy white t-shirt torn to expose part of a breast. Stained red with blood dripping from a shallow cut in her forehead. “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Depends,” I snapped, the fury still making my vision blur with patches of darkness not so easily released this time. “Do you have anything you want to tell me?”
A muscle in her jaw clenched.
I ran my hands through my hair and inhaled sharply, trying to get control. Bending forward, I planted my palms on my knees and leaned against the wall until my vision cleared.
“Rook?” Ava Jade hedged and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I shoved the door to her room open, making it bounce loudly against the opposite wall as I stormed out.
What was Diesel thinking?
If this was Diesel…
And if it wasn’t Diesel…
Someone was going to pay for this. We just needed to figure out who.