Chapter 25 – Rook
ROOK
D uring the last hunt trial, Foley was dead within thirty-five minutes.
I jammed the side button on my phone, displaying the time and a text message from one of my contacts in Lennox. A drug dealer who’d sold to me when all the ones in Thorn Valley were threatened away by my brothers.
DAN THE MAN
Sorry man, no one with that description or injuries. I’ll keep my ear to the ground though. Can I get you anything? I got some real good Columbian shit. Pure.
My mouth dried at the offer, and it took me a full minute before I forced myself to delete the message without replying. Keeping the knowledge in my back pocket for if Ava Jade…
No .
It was after midnight now. She’d been gone for over two hours.
It was either a very good sign, or a very bad one.
Happy fucking birthday to me. Putting her in the ground on the day I was born would just be the cherry on the bad memory pie. I already wanted to expunge this date from existence. Wipe it from the calendar completely and pretend it was never there. I didn’t think it could get any worse.
As usual though, I was wrong.
Corvus had a drink in front of him, and though he hadn’t touched it, it was the closest I’d seen him come to drinking in years.
Grey was a fucking wreck, getting up to pace every few minutes, only to sit back down. I knew the feeling. The sense of being absolutely useless dug deep into the marrow of my bones. Festered there.
Corvus had been right. There was nothing we could do but wait.
Ava Jade needed to prove herself, just like all the other Saints had to. Just like we had to. I could hardly blame Diesel for going harder on her given her history, but I would blame him if something happened to her. If she didn’t come back…
I couldn’t even imagine it.
Couldn’t let myself go there, or else I’d lose control.
No one would be safe until I saw that she was with my own eyes.
Another drink. Another minute of blissful numbness.
Wait. And drink. And wait some more.
I hadn’t worried about her at all in the previous trials, but this was something different. She was heavily outnumbered. Likely outgunned. I had every confidence in her, but with those odds?
I wasn’t even sure any of us would come out the other side alive, and we had a fuck ton more experience than her, not to mention firepower where she only had blades.
The last of the whiskey in my flask flowed down my throat, and I lit up a cigarette, the last one in the pack, and sneered. “You going to drink that or just stare at it?”
Corvus’ pale blue eyes slid to me with a murderous look before he lifted the short glass from the now-semi-busted coffee table and put it to his lips.
He paused, and I snorted, until I saw why he wasn’t drinking it. Something drew his eye and I followed his line of sight, searching, the shriveled black thing in my chest squeezing ever tighter.
“Ghost?”
Ava Jade stood no more than fifteen feet away, and for a second, I thought I was hallucinating her. Thought she was a phantom come back from the dead to haunt me.
Pale. She was so pale. Her long dark hair dripping wet and hanging in her face. Mascara running to her chin. A bleeding wound in her shoulder. All her weight on her left leg. Her dress in sopping wet tatters.
It was the best costume here, but it wasn’t a costume at all.
I saw it in her face just before it happened and rushed from my seat, off balance from too much drink, but not even that would stop me. I caught her as she collapsed, fingers curling over the back of her skull only a second before it would’ve connected with the wooden planks beneath our feet.
“Ghost!” I shouted, pushing wet strands of hair away from her face. “Hey. Hey, stay with me.”
A hand came down on my shoulder, and I whirled, my upper lip curling at Corvus.
“It’s me,” he said, and Grey was there, too, looking white as a sheet.
Corvus tried to take her from me, but I held her tighter, my mind in a fog filled with flashing lights and Ghost, Ghost, Ghost.
“Okay,” Grey shouted, pulling Corvus back from me so that he could step closer.
Around us, a crowd of onlookers was gathering, and I glared at them, my vision wavering so their costumed faces looked as though I was seeing them through a fun house mirror.
“We need to get her out of here,” Grey was saying and I focused, blinking to clear the haze from my eyes. “Take her to the back room.”
Out of here. Yes.
I lifted her to my chest, almost losing my footing until Corvus righted me. “Hurry. She’s lost a lot of blood, Rook.”
No. She was fine.
She would be fine.
Her wetness seeped into my clothes, drenching me in a brutal cold, nearly as cold as where my hands held her bare arms. She was too cold. She needed to be warmer.
Grey ran ahead of me, opening the door to the back room. He flipped a breaker and the music and lights behind us went dead as the heavy door shut. The partiers screamed and shouted their protest, but already their footfalls seemed to be retreating, leaving the Docks. Good.
Corvus knocked bottles and glasses from the top of the short black bar where we kept our stock, sending them shattering to the floor. The intoxicating smell of good bourbon and very good whiskey filling my lungs.
“Lay her down,” Corvus ordered, and I grudgingly set her down on the damp bar.
“She’s cold,” I managed, coming back to myself, the influence of the whiskey still churning in my stomach, waning in the face of an injured Ghost.
Warm. She needed to be warm.
I threw off my leather jacket and laid it over her chest while Grey worked to untie the strip of black cloth around her shoulder. The knot came loose, revealing a water-puckered wound. Too messy to have been a bullet.
“Diesel,” I growled, picturing the crossbow bolt that would’ve gone straight through her. In one side and out the other. Invading her flesh, corrupting her perfection.
I’d kill him.
I’d kill whoever shot her.
It didn’t matter who it was.
“Rook,” someone said, but their voice was so distant I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just in my head.
“Rook!”
I found Corvus’ blue eyes and flinched as he clutched my arms, shaking me. “Hey. Stay with us here, okay. She’s okay. She’s alive. She escaped.”
“She passed the trial,” Grey added, using his teeth to rip open a packet of gauze and jam it into the wound.
Ava Jade coughed, squirming as Grey packed her injury with the gauze, her storm-cloud eyes going wide. “ Fuck, ” she croaked, just barely holding onto consciousness.
Her fingers curled into my leather jacket over her stomach, pulling it tighter to her.
“Sparrow?” Corvus shouted, going around the other side of the bar to assess her. He lifted his phone flashlight high and pulled down her eyelids, checking dilation.
She weakly batted him away, her face screwing up in a sour frown. “S-stop,” she stammered, her teeth beginning to chatter.
“What happened, AJ?” Grey asked, winding a clean bandage around her wound.
She blinked, her eyes coming more into focus, and focusing on me.
I went to her, and when she reached for my hand, I let her take it, holding her clammy fingers tight until some color returned to her cheeks.
“I j-jumped,” she said, and Corvus and I shared a look.
“Hold on,” Grey muttered, running to the couch at the other end of our small private bar area and the arsenal of guns locked up against the wall.
He tore down the woven Saints banner hanging from the wall there and brought it back over, draping it over my jacket and her whole body.
She shivered, giving him a grateful look.
“You jumped from where?” Corvus asked, his gaze lethally steady as he waited for her to reply.
“The c-c-cliffs. A mile from here.”
“You swam a mile injured?” Grey asked, incredulous.
“A mile…” Corvus trailed off, the realization I’d just come to dawning on his face. Diesel had taken her to the same place he’d taken Foley. The Deadwood. Where we’d been burying traitors and enemies for years. Which meant…
“That’s a seventy-five-foot drop. At least.”
“What the hell were you thinking, Sparrow? You could have died.”
Her eyes flashed with malice. “I would have died if I didn’t j-jump.”
Heat rushed up my spine and warmed my face. This had gone too far.
The trials were meant to be a challenge and more than a few had died before they could earn a space on our crew, but the trials were always fair.
A challenge, made to push the one taking them to the limits of what they could survive, but fair .
There had been five Saints with Diesel. Six in total, against one.
Even with the head start I was certain he’d have given her, where was the fairness in that?
“Who shot you?” The question passed my lips without conscious thought. “I want a name.”
“ Rook ,” Grey warned, and I gave a look that dared him to challenge me again.
Ghost smirked, a tiny laugh stopped by her closed mouth that turned into a cough. “The stag,” she said and my brows furrowed in confusion. “But don’t worry, I took one of his eyes.”
It was my turn to smile now, and I gave her hands a squeeze. “Of course you did.”
“D-did you guys really think I wasn’t going to make it?” She coughed again, her whole body racking. “Glad to know you have s-so much faith in me.”
Her gaze slid from us to survey the dimly lit room, a knot forming between her brows. “Where’s Becca?
Grey dropped the empty packets he was holding and scratched an imaginary itch on the back of his head. “She uh… she got kinda pissed at us and took off.”
Ava Jade sat bolt upright, the color draining from her face again. Her eyes went unfocused as the sudden movement made her dizzy. “Well go and find her ,” she scolded, back to her fiery self already.
Corv gave Grey a nod, and he leaned in to kiss Ava Jade on her head before leaving. “I’ll be right back.”
“You should lie back down,” Corvus said, but Ava Jade just looked at him like he’d grown a second head.
“I’m good.” She winced as she tried to move her injured arm and peered up at me through her lashes. “I’ll take a drink, though.”
I rounded the bar and pulled a bottle of water from the small fridge beneath, handing it to her.
“ Not what I meant,” she said with an eye roll, but took the bottle and drank half, shivering again. “I think I drank enough lake water to be hydrated for the next year.”
Corvus’ knuckles turned white where he gripped the counter, but he relaxed them when he caught me looking.
He was doing a shit job of pretending he didn’t care.
Grey told me he and Ava Jade had finally fucked.
It wasn’t exactly the kind of news I wanted after searching for endless hours and coming up empty handed in the search for Ava Jade’s stalker, but that’s life.
And Corvus deserved happiness just as much as any of us. More so than I did for sure.
Ava Jade passed me the other half of her water. “Drink,” she demanded. “You look like shit and smell like a distillery.”
“Shall I get you a mirror?” I joked, earning myself a glare, but I took the water, knowing a level head might prevent a few deaths tonight.
The door creaked open behind us, and Grey returned, a bit breathless. “The whole place is cleared out,” he said. “I don’t see Becca anywhere.”
“What?” Ava Jade demanded, growling as she stepped down from the bar and almost fell flat on her face, grimacing as she gripped her right knee.
“You need to sit the fuck down,” Corvus growled, hopping the bar to grab her from behind, picking her up off her feet despite her protests.
“Let go!”
“No. You calm the fuck down and sit, and then I’ll let go.”
Ava Jade, too tired to fight him, slumped, defeated in his arms as he carried her to the couch and tugged his phone from his back pocket. “Here,” he said and handed it to Ava Jade. “Call her.”
“Already tried that,” Grey said, and Corvus sent him a scathing look.
Ava Jade dialed her friend, tensing with each ring that went unanswered. She didn’t leave a voicemail, instead hanging up to switch to messenger. She thumbed out a text to her friend and then waited.
Corvus crouched to her eye-level. “We can?—”
“ Shh .”
“She probably just?—”
“ Shh .”
The phone pinged in Ava Jade’s hand a second later, and she sighed as they read the message on the screen.
“She’s okay,” she said, typing out a less hurried message. “She’s with her boyfriend.”
“She has a boyfriend?” I found myself asking, doubtful. A fuck buddy maybe. Rebecca Hart didn’t seem the type to be pinned down.
“Something like that,” Ghost replied, finishing off the message. “He’s been ignoring her for a while. I guess he finally came to his senses and realized what he had. Good thing too because I was about twenty-four hours from tracking him down and forcing an apology out of his sorry ass.”
She sighed, handing the phone back to Corvus. I read Becca’s reply over his shoulder before the screen went dark.
REBECCA
I was so worried. Glad youre okay. Dont worry about me, Im just with you know who. Think Im going to stay here tonight so dont wait up, okay. Xx”
My jaw clenched, the lack of punctuation reminding me of the way someone else’s messages often arrived on my phone.
Just a coincidence. It had to be.
I started for the door.
“Where are you going?” Ava Jade asked, stopping me.
“To have a chat with Diesel.”
To my surprise neither of my brother’s protested, but my Ghost did.
“Can we stay together?” she asked, and when I saw the uncertainty in her eyes, I couldn’t say no.
“If that’s what you want.”
She seemed to think about that for a moment, then lifted her head and got shakily to her feet. “Take me home?”