Chapter 15 – Corvus
CORVUS
T he tires skidded as I drove us into the parking lot, not fast enough to cut the wheel before making us knock into a low cement piling.
Grey and I both jumped out, slamming the doors behind us.
I could inspect the damage to the Rover later.
I had a gut wrenching feeling whatever I was about to walk into would put that damage to shame.
Rook rarely sounded like he had on the phone exactly nine minutes ago.
I braced myself for whatever was bad enough to get him that worked up, the muscles in my arms flexing and unflexing with the clenching of my fists as we found our way into Briar Hall through the front door. I’d already called ahead and told security to have the door open.
“She’s okay, right?” Grey asked in a solemn tone as we shoved through the front doors unimpeded and marched up the stairs.
“I don’t know.”
“Was it a trial?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, did Rook say anything about?—”
“ I don’t fucking know anything ,” I growled at him, slicking my hair back as we neared her door.
I hadn’t seen my Sparrow or heard from her since this morning. I didn’t know how I’d handle it if she asked me to leave.
Watching her break this morning opened some long-forgotten wounds deep inside. I felt for the first time in a long time. I felt her pain as acutely as I once felt my own before I learned to block it out.
I’d never wanted so badly to be someone who had the ability to comfort someone else. And that song. My song.
I couldn’t get the sound of her voice singing my words out of my head all fucking day. I got why Rook had taken to calling her Ghost. She was haunting me, too.
The door was open when we got to it, and we pushed our way inside with ease, my hand unconsciously going to the butt of the gun tucked neatly into the back of my jeans.
Rook sat, elbow on knees on the couch, his fingers steepled against his lips. Ava Jade and Becca sat on the couch opposite him, and it seemed we’d interrupted some hushed conversation between them. Becca was deathly pale. Her bloodshot eyes strained with the knots in her forehead.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to see her there, and yet I was. Did this have something to do with her?
That’s when I noticed the bruises. In a ring of purpling flesh around Ava Jade’s throat. The crusted blood in her hairline and the shallow cut it’d come from. How pale she was, too.
“AJ,” Grey said on a breath and her eyes snapped to mine for an instant before falling away as Grey approached her, going down on one knee before her on the couch to reach up and gently touch the bruising on her neck.
I wanted to break the hands of the person responsible. Saint or not.
“The attack trial?” Grey asked, and I cleared my throat, drawing his eye. I looked pointedly at Becca.
“She knows,” Rook said, finally dropping his hands and sitting up straight. “We should have told her from the start.”
My jaw ticked, but arguing wasn’t going to help whatever the hell this situation was right now.
Rook pushed to his feet and gave Grey a nudge with his boot before shouldering past me towards Ava Jade’s room.
His face betrayed a storm cloud of dark emotion he was working hard to keep under control.
“A word,” he muttered as he passed, and I glanced between Ava Jade and him, jerking my head to tell Grey to follow.
Becca tucked herself into her friend’s side, avoiding the blades strapped to Ava Jade’s thigh and the one clutched in her hand. The one with the crow etched into the handle.
I made myself leave her there; it took everything I had not to demand answers right there and then. I wanted to shake Rook. To shake her . Make them tell me exactly what the fuck happened and why the fuck she thought it was okay to lie to us about her mystery texter for so damn long.
But that wouldn’t win me any fucking points now, would it? And with the sound of her broken song still in my ears, I found I just couldn’t do it.
Rook shut the door behind us and drew something out of his pocket. It took me a second to register what it was.
“What the fuck is that?” I asked, even though it was obvious. My skin prickled, burning up like my edges had been ignited and I was nothing but paper. “Is she on drugs?”
Rook’s dark eyes met mine, and he shook his head once.
I noted the broken window behind him and frowned.
“She was attacked,” he explained. “And whoever attacked her tried to inject her with it.”
He was fucking playing with me. There was no way...
Grey snatched the syringe from Rook and pressed on the plunger enough to let a drop of the liquid slip out the top of the short needle head. He rubbed it between his fingers and sniffed.
A smell like limes tickled my nose. Familiarly mixed with the tarry scent of pine.
I leaned in towards the substance coating Grey’s fingertips, but it wasn’t whatever the liquid in the syringe was.
That was odorless, this was something else.
So faint I could barely detect it, but it was there all the same.
So familiar it grated on my nerves that I couldn’t place where I’d smelled it before.
“Do you know what it is?” Rook asked.
Grey shook his head, but he already had his phone out. He dialed a number. Hung up and dialed again. On the third attempt, the line connected. “I need you to ID a substance for me.”
A pause.
“Greyson Winters.”
An exclamation on the other end.
“I need you to come and get it from Briar Hall. It’ll be waiting for you with security. I need to know what it is within the hour.”
Another pause.
“Tell no one of this. You are only to give the information to myself or my brothers. No one else .”
He ended the call and pocketed the phone.
I didn’t know who it was, didn’t care, my mind was still reeling. I stared openly at the syringe, my blood going cold. “Diesel wouldn’t…”
“If not Diesel then I can think of only one other potential,” Rook put in, his anger flaring across his cheekbones.
“Her stalker,” Grey uttered, curling his fingers tight around the syringe.
“Tell us the rest,” I demanded, and Rook explained the entire thing from front to back, humoring me each time I asked for clarity.
He’d left her alone, like a fucking idiot, but it was too late to fix that. And the lack of anything useful in his story drove me near to madness.
“You didn’t know who he was?” I asked for the third time. “Are you sure?”
Rook pinched the bridge of his nose. “I told you, I couldn’t tell. It was dark. He was masked. Could have been a Saint. Might not have been.”
“It could’ve been a Saint and still you threw him through a window two stories above the ground?” Grey asked, raising a brow as though that was surprising.
“Could you have stood there and let someone strangle our girl?” he challenged Grey and that shut him up. He dropped his gaze, pensive as he considered the implications of his response.
I began to pace the narrow slice of carpet between her bedroom and the bathroom, thinking. Connecting. Formulating a way to move forward.
“Okay,” I said after a minute. “Okay, so we can’t ask Diesel if this was him because he’ll know something is up, and I’m not sure we want him knowing if this is something other than a trial. At least for now. He doesn’t need more reasons to want her gone.”
“We can find out ourselves if a Saint has been injured,” Rook suggested, and I’d been getting to that. “He’d been fucked up pretty good after that fall. Wouldn’t be hard to pick him out.”
I nodded.
“This couldn’t have been Diesel,” Grey said, repeating what we were all thinking, and I felt like an absolute piece of shit for even considering it.
But he’d made his obvious distaste for her clear. He didn’t want her around us. He didn’t trust her.
“How far would you go to protect your family if you thought there was a threat?” I asked, meeting each of their hard stares, nodding when neither replied.
“We can’t rule him out, but I don’t think this was him. If it were a trial, he’d be ringing your neck for interrupting it,” I told Rook, and his upper lip curled.
“Not if he felt guilty for trying to alter the results with whatever’s in that syringe.”
“We need to explore the other option,” Grey said, his eyes fixed on the door and the Sparrow beyond it.
He was right. This wasn’t going to be pretty, but it needed to be handled. After tonight, there was no way she was being left alone again. Not even for a second. She needed to know why. She needed to know that we knew what she’d worked so hard to hide from us.
I followed Grey through the door and back out to the living room where Ava Jade was placing a warm mug of tea in her friend’s hands. Leave it to her to comfort her friend after she was the one who was attacked.
“She doesn’t need to be here for this,” I said before I could soften my tone, indicating Becca. “Do you have somewhere you can go?”
Sparrow curled a hand around her friend’s wrist to stop her from standing. “She stays. I don’t want her going anywhere alone right now. Whoever that fucker was could still be outside somewhere.”
Becca shuddered and remained sitting.
“Fine,” I managed, resisting the urge to press my argument.
Grey walked into the living room, sitting on the edge of the coffee table facing Ava Jade so there was only an inch of space between their knees. He leaned over, and I could imagine the gentle expression he would wear as he told her.
“We know about your stalker,” he said, his tone somehow managing to sound hard and gentle all at once. It brokered no room for argument. He was stating a fact, and giving her an opening to tell him the truth.
Her mouth pressed into a hard line. “I don’t know what you’re?—”
“ You should have killed the dark one while you had the chance, but now I see I’ll have to do it for you. Nobody touches what’s mine,” Grey said, repeating the text message from where it’s seared into his memory.
Her brows drew together and a flash of hot fury danced in her eyes.
“Don’t worry, my love, I’ll help you...but if you let them touch you again, I’ll have no choice but to punish you.”
“Stop,” she growled in reply, and I saw how Becca was clutching her friend now, worry in the tight lines around her eyes.
“Aves?” Becca prodded. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was handling it,” she all but hissed in reply, fixing her stare on Grey. “You went through my phone?”
He nodded slowly. “The, uh ...the day at the diner. It was all planned. I had the laptop ready when you got out. Took a while to decrypt the files, though.”
Her face reddened and she opened her mouth to speak, but I beat her to it.
“You should have told us,” I said as gently as I could, given the situation. “Especially after whoever this clown is threatened Rook. Definitely after he threatened you.”
Some of her anger seemed to burn off at that, and I placated myself in the knowledge that she clearly knew what I was saying was true, even if she didn’t want to admit it to us or to herself.
I knew how hard it was to ask for help. To admit you might not be able to handle something alone. I’d chosen the harder path, but if I could go back and change that choice, things might’ve been different for me.
I might’ve been different.
“Has he sent anything else since the messages about fight night?”
Her ice-cold stare burrowed into me. “I didn’t read it,” she admitted. “He sent something, but I only read the first line. I warned you … then I deleted the message.”
“Can you recover it,” I asked Grey.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Give him your phone.”
Ava Jade balked at the command, and I gritted my teeth. I wanted to punish her for this. I wanted to bend her over my knee and bring my hand down on her bare ass until it was cherry red. I wanted to make her admit her mistake and apologize for putting herself and my brothers in danger.
But what I wanted didn’t matter right now. What mattered was keeping us all safe, and the only way to do that was not to scare her into running or make her pull away from me even more.
“Please,” I barely got the word out, and I sensed Rook stiffen beside me at the request, his eyes boring into the side of my face. “We need to know what it said.”
“You think this was him, don’t you?” she asked. “It couldn’t possibly be your perfect gangster pops,” she scoffed.
I shook my head. “We aren’t ruling that out.”
She was taken aback at that, and thought quietly to herself for a second before plucking her phone from her pocket and handing it to Grey.
“Do you have any idea who this person is?” Grey asked, catching her hand in his. He gave it a reassuring squeeze before she pulled away.
She shook her head.
“Someone from your past, maybe?” Grey asked. “A spurned lover?”
What?
I stared at the back of Grey’s head, wondering what other messages he’d recovered along with the ones from the apparent stalker. Clearly more than we knew.
Ava Jade glared at him. “No. It’s not Kit.”
“Because you don’t want it to be or?—”
“It’s just not him. Trust me.”
He nodded. The conversation done for the moment and already I’d committed the name to memory, ready to scour every inch of Lennox for this guy.
“I’m going to take this downstairs,” Grey said and held up the syringe as he stood, leaving the apartment to bring the syringe down to whoever was waiting on him.
Rook sauntered back into the living room and fell onto the sofa opposite the girls with a deep sigh. “Until we figure this out, you can’t stay here,” he told Ava Jade. “The window will take time to fix and the Nest is more secure.”
“No. I already told you I’m not staying there. Besides, I won’t leave Becca here alone. What if he comes back?”
Rook nodded. “Okay. Fine. She comes, too. You can both stay in the loft above the garage.”
Surprise flashed in Sparrow’s eyes, and I mirrored the sentiment. What the fuck was he thinking? But if it got Ava Jade to agree to stay with us, I’d deal with it.
“ Uh, I’m good,” Becca croaked, speaking up for the first time. “I really don’t want?—”
“At least until the window’s fixed and you can have your dad install a security system,” Ava Jade interrupted her, suddenly liking the idea if it meant she could ensure her friend’s safety. Clearly that was more important to her than her pride. “Please? I can’t leave you here.”
Becca slumped. “Fine. Yeah, I guess that wouldn’t be too bad.”
Honestly, I expected her to put up more of a fight, or request to stay elsewhere. I was sure her millionaire daddy would happily put her up at The Vandermark just outside of town. I would have rather that, but if I wanted to stay on Ava Jade’s good side, I could allow this. At least temporarily.
“Pack up,” I said, planting my hands on the back of the couch either side of Rook’s head. “This is your last night at Briar Hall for a while.”