Chapter 23 – Grey
GREY
T he thumping bass vibrated through the rickety floor of the Docks, reverberating up through my feet. Setting my fucking teeth on edge. Becca sat with us on our makeshift stage, picking her fingernails at the far end of the worn leather sofa, her stare distant, thoughtful.
I snapped my fingers, and a pledge rushed over. I gestured to Becca. “Get her a drink.”
“What should I get for her?”
“I don’t know,” I snapped, heat rising in my core. “Why don’t you fucking ask her .”
He nodded before running away to do just that, and I pressed my palms into my eyes, trying to grind out the ache forming behind them.
Rook threw his flask at the pledge now begging Becca to pick something to drink so that he could go and get it.
“Refill,” Rook snapped while the pledge bent to retrieve his flask from the floor. “Now.”
The guy scurried off, and I turned to where Corvus sat next to me, hunched over his knees, fingers steepled near his lips in complete stillness. Utter silence.
“We need to cut that one loose. He’s useless.”
Corvus grunted in response, and I got the feeling he hadn’t even heard me.
“Corv, are you listening?”
“Hmm?”
My head pounded, making it almost impossible not to throttle him. How could he be so fucking calm right now? How was he not freaking out?
The Hunt was the worst ever idea for a trial Diesel had ever concocted. And he’d only come up with it because he decided he didn’t want Foley to make it through the trials. And Foley, the twenty-five-year-old college drop-out, already knew far too much to be cut loose.
Diesel was right, of course, like he almost always was.
It turned out he was being worked on by a cop.
And Foley, being the weak link Diesel was beginning to think he was, was close to folding.
Close to becoming an informant. Close to being formally inducted into our ranks, where he would’ve had access to even more sensitive information.
The Hunt was designed for a single purpose, to kill the hunted.
My stomach soured, and I got up, needing to move. To do something. But black spots crowded my vision and a wave of vertigo sent me back to the couch with a groan. “Fucking shit.”
“The fuck is wrong with you?” Rook asked, raising his voice to be heard over the music and the chatter of the crowd before us.
I shook off the fleeting feeling. “Nothing.”
But when I lifted my head to the strobing dance floor, the faces blurred in and out of focus, making my pounding headache that much worse.
Devil faces and witch faces and Barbie faces and every other Halloween costume that could be worn as a lingerie set with heels paraded past. They spun and jumped. Swayed and fell.
But none of them were AJ.
When the pledge came back, I snarled at him to get me some painkillers, hating my inability to control the rage I felt building inside.
Bianca’s face filtered past with the others, trying desperately to catch my eye, her bunny ears bobbing as she sashayed past the raised stage, biting her lower lip.
I didn’t know what part of stop fucking texting me she didn’t understand, but obviously it wasn’t sinking in.
She took a step toward the stage, and something in my face must’ve made her reconsider. Hurt gleamed in her eyes as she stepped backward instead, falling back into the crowd.
Good. I couldn’t deal with her shit tonight. Not on top of everything else.
“The meet with the Aces coming up,” Corvus said, his voice so low and deep it was almost impossible to distinguish it from the throaty bass. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. Something’s up.”
I couldn’t keep the shock off my face. “How the actual fuck are you thinking about that right now?”
Rook stared off into the crowd, but by the tiny twist of his lips, I knew he was listening, too.
“Diesel wants us with him for the meet. I’m trying to come up with the best way to play it.”
“ Right now ?”
I knew what he was doing, but I wasn’t fucking having it. He was deflecting. Not thinking about the thing he couldn’t control by thinking about something he could. A defense mechanism that wasn’t going to save our girl.
He’d just fucked her, you’d think he could act like he cared whether she lived or died for five fucking seconds.
“I have an idea,” Rook said, slipping from the arm of the couch to flop down onto the cushion next to Corvus. “Kill them all. Problem solved. Danger avoided. Risk factor? Reduced to a big fat fucking zero.”
His dark eyes glimmered with drink and malice in the red-tinted lights. “We could start tonight.”
Corvus finally broke his pose, fingers leaving his lips as he twisted to lay his eyes on Rook. “You can’t just kill every person you have a problem with, Rook,” he chastised our brother. “There are better ways of handling shit.”
“ Smarter ways,” I added, not knowing why I was bothering to add anything to this pointless conversation right now.
Rook shrugged. “Not easier ones.”
The pledge returned with some white pills and a bottle of water, and I swallowed them both down, guzzling the whole bottle before tossing it back at him. “Go.”
Rook and Corvus regarded me with matching lifted brows, and I grimaced. “Fucking headache,” I explained. “Lay off, okay.”
I never took painkillers. Never . But if I didn’t do something about the piercing, throbbing ache behind my eye sockets, I was going to snap.
A girl with light hair in an angel costume walked up onto the stage, swaying her hips as she approached Rook, bending to his eye level with her tits pushed out. I couldn’t hear what she whispered to him, but I saw the way her gaze tracked to the Red Room door and back and how she bit her lower lip.
Rook gazed up at her with a haughty disdain, giving her a one-word reply.
When she redoubled her efforts, placing hands on his thighs, his entire body tensed, and he shoved her back, sending her sprawling to her ass with a yelp as his nostrils flared.
He snapped at her like a wild animal as she scrambled to her feet, sending her scampering off back into the crowd, red-faced and shaking.
His rejection only made her come rushing back to the forefront of my mind.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, pushing my thumb and index finger into the fleshy corners of my eyes. “She’s going to be okay, right?” I asked, feeling something grow and clench behind my rib cage.
“I don’t know,” Corvus answered, and I let out a shuddering breath.
“Diesel wouldn’t…” Rook trailed off, settling back onto the couch, but he couldn’t finish the sentence and there was a reason why.
Diesel would if he knew something we didn’t.
He would if he believed beyond a shadow of doubt that she would be our downfall.
“There’s nothing we can do but wait,” Corvus hissed.
“It’s not good enough.”
“You don’t think I fucking know that?”
“Even if she lives, Diesel won’t be finished with her,” Rook mused, swirling his whiskey in the flask, staring down into the neck of it like the amber liquid inside might hold some secret to fixing this whole fucked up mess.
In a move so fast I hardly saw it coming, Corvus stood and flipped the low coffee table, throwing it into the unsuspecting crowd with a roar.
Becca squealed, and I heard the clack of her heels over the music as she backed away from the stage.
Corvus whirled on Rook. “What would you have me do?” he demanded of Rook, his eyes like burning embers. His teeth bared. “If we stop the trial, she fails, and she dies. If we save her, we’ve interfered, and she fails and dies .”
“We could leave,” I said, not even realizing I’d spoken out loud until Corvus’ searing gaze found mine, his nostrils flaring. “We could save her and then leave.”
He paled, and I felt the blood draining from my own face, too, giving the migraine wreaking havoc in my skull a pulse.
“No,” Corvus said after a minute, saying aloud what I wished wasn’t true. “We can’t.”
“You said she was going to be fine,” Becca said, and the three of us turned at once to see her standing behind the sofa, her arms tense with balled fists and trembling at her sides. “You knew she was going to die, and you just let her go. You fucking liars! You fucking pieces of shit!”
I stood, hopping the back of the couch to grab her. She just needed to understand, we didn’t have a choice. But Becca snatched her arm away before I could grab her and spat at my feet.
“If she dies, I’m coming for you. I’m coming for all your useless asses.”
She shouldered past me, the blow shaking me all the way to my core. She didn’t have to worry about retribution. If Ava Jade died tonight, I was coming for my fucking self.