Chapter 28 – Ava Jade #2
Becca thrashed when she saw me, the tape covering her mouth muffling a fearful shout as her eyes widened.
A mechanical whir sounded from outside and a spotlight flared to life, blinding Becca, painting her in a halo of white.
She stood atop a rickety old pallet pack over twenty feet up at the other end of the warehouse.
The metal chains around her neck were attached to a rusted metal pulley hanging from the rafters above.
The other end of the chain reached down toward the ground where I assumed it was tied off, but I couldn’t see where for all the walls and debris blocking my view across the space.
It didn’t look the same as it had that night all those weeks ago.
There were stacks of tires and old pallets and crumbling partition walls like before, but they were moved. The low piles of dirt and loose stone on the cement floor in lines across the room gave it away.
It was a course, I realized.
Diesel had put together an obstacle course, and I needed to get through it to the other side in time to save Becca.
Shifting movement inside the maze gave away at least one Saint’s position inside. Looking up, I saw Becca eagerly staring down into the maze and back at me, giving me his position somewhere close by on the left.
A chirp had me jerking my gaze upward, to the red numbers on the timer near Becca’s head ticking down.
I had a little under ten minutes to get through it, but this time, I wasn’t going to hold back.
A blinking red light drew my eye, and I found myself staring into the lens of a surveillance camera placed high in the far left corner of the warehouse.
Becca moaned and growled against the tape covering her mouth, and then sharply, she breathed in deep as the tape came loose, pried off with her tongue. One side fell from her lips, and she sobbed.
“It’s okay, Becks,” I told her. “I’m going to get you out of?—”
“I’m sorry,” she cried, the tears dropping from her cheeks catching the spotlight like falling stars. “I’m so, so sorry, Aves.”
What?
What could she possibly have to be sorry for? This was my fault. If I hadn’t made friends with her—if I hadn’t brought her into this—she wouldn’t be here right now.
She was here because I cared about her and Diesel wanted to use that against me. To see how far I was willing to go for someone whose life mattered to me.
He was about to fucking find out.
“Just hold on, Becks!” I called, keeping low as I darted forward, ready with a blade to throw at the Saint waiting just inside the row of tires to my left.
A sharp snare snapped around my ankle, slicing into skin as the crude trap dragged me upward.
My head smashing against the concrete as I was hoisted high into the air upside down.
My fucked-up knee protesting the pull of the thin rope.
Dark spots crowded my vision, and I worked furiously to blink them away, my head throbbing.
I groaned, seeing the attacker coming just a second before it would’ve been too late. He charged forward from his hiding place, upside down, a knife raised high in his black gloved hand.
Blades against blades this time. Diesel was trying to be fair.
I threw my blade and it sank into his heart, sending him staggering back with a grunt.
Except, it didn’t strike his heart at all.
The Saint lifted his head with a grin spreading wide over his lips, gripping the handle of my blade to tear it out of the bullet proof vest.
Motherfucker.
I reached for another, the move also saving me from my own blade as it was hurled back at me to thunk into a pallet wall six feet to my rear, deeper into the maze.
This time, my aim was lower, and the blade found a home in the meaty flesh of his inner thigh. I heaved my body upward, climbing the length of my leg to reach the blade at my ankle. Unsheathing it and cutting the trip wire holding me up in one fluid movement.
The air gushed from my lungs as I hit the cement floor, and I croaked even as I rolled, getting to my feet. I stormed forward, gasping as the Saint worked feverishly to staunch the flow of blood around the blade protruding from his thigh.
His eyes widened, flashing with terror in the ambient glow of the spotlight.
“Yield!” he hissed through clenched teeth, backing away from me. He released the pressure on the wound gushing his life’s blood over the cement to tug another two knives from his belt and toss them to the floor. “ Yield ,” he repeated as he knelt, lowering his head.
The muscles in my face twitched as I struggled to get air into my lungs, my left hand tightening around the handle of my blade as the darkness roared within, beckoning me.
Kill.
“Please,” he muttered, and I growled as I rushed the last four steps to him, reeling back to kick him in the head, sending him off to dreamland.
I grabbed his off-balance blades from the ground and threw them high, embedding them in some wood shelving twenty feet off the ground where no one would be able to use them.
They would be no good to me. I wanted my blade back.
I tore it from the fucker’s leg, unwilling to permanently part with another of my babies. He could bleed out for all I cared.
“ Yeah ,” Becca said, but her voice boomed all around me, and I looked up to find her on her hanging block, head bowed as she sobbed. “ One of them is staying with her tonight at Briar Hall .”
A recording. I searched and found the speakers placed high on other pallet racks around the warehouse.
“ Which one? ” A male voice asked, and a shiver rolled down my spine, making my toes curl.
“ Grey .”
“ And the others? ”
“ I don’t know.”
“Think you could find out for me, baby?”
What…
What the fuck was this?
The tape skipped and a new recording played.
“ They went out of town for something, ” Becca said in the recording, while my best friend sniffled across the warehouse, unable to look at me.
“ For what?” the man asked.
“I don’t know. She just said they would be back later.”
“Do you know when?”
A pause.
“ I could text her to find out.”
My stomach soured, and I held back the violent urge to vomit, heat searing across my chest.
I remembered the timer, and I looked up to find I had less than six minutes now. I started forward again, pulling my other blade from the pallet board and tucking it away so I held just one in each hand.
Whatever Diesel thought she’d done, he was wrong.
He had to be wrong.
She was telling someone things about me and the guys, but so what? It probably wasn’t what it sounded like. Or if it was, then she…she was being manipulated. Maybe even blackmailed. Maybe…
The recording started again, and I paused, my lungs wringing themselves of air in my chest.
“Listen, baby,” the male voice said. “ You know they’re monsters. Killers. They killed one of our men just last week. Diesel put a bullet between his eyes.”
My mouth fell open as it all began to fall into place in my mind, the jagged pieces fitting perfectly together where I wished they wouldn’t.
Becca was dating an Ace. That was why she was so secretive about him.
It wasn’t because it was a teacher or an older guy or any of the taboo things I might’ve assumed.
It was because he wasn’t allowed in Thorn Valley.
And if the guys had found out she was with someone from a rival gang, her life at Briar Hall would’ve been over.
The sound of something shifting on the recording alluded to movement I had to assume was Becca.
“ If my crew takes Thorn Valley, it’ll be safer, you’ll see. And if the Saints were gone, your Dad could finally come back. If Diesel isn’t here to keep buying up all the vacant properties, he’d have no reason to keep buying further south.”
“I just…” Becca trailed off. “I just don’t see how feeding you information on my friend is going to help you do all that.”
A condescending laugh from the Ace. “ Don’t you see? She’s one of them now . The Crows are Diesel’s best weapons. Take them out and he’s just an old man with a gun .”
No. No, Becca, why?
“ I don’t ?—”
“ Listen to me!” the Ace thundered and something banged loudly, crumbling as Becca gasped on the tape, making my skin crawl.
“ You’re scaring me!”
Heavy breathing. “ I’m sorry. I’m sorry, baby. I don’t want to scare you. I just need you to listen to me.”
“But they aren’t like you think. They’re good guys. Ava Jade is my friend.”
“You’re so naive. You have no idea what the world is really like. You know the Saints are the reason your mother died. What more incentive do you need?”
Another pause. So long I thought the tape had ended, but then Becca spoke again, a resolve in her tone that hadn’t been there before.
“If I help you,” the recording said, making my blood chill in my veins. “ Will you promise to leave Ava Jade out of it?”
Becca cried harder, her sobs echoing around the warehouse, but this time, I couldn’t bring myself to feel empathy for her pain.
“ All right. Fine. Now, tell me about the trials. And I want to know where they are at all times. Can you do that for me?”
“I…”
“This is for us . So we can be together. Isn’t that what you want? Don’t you trust me?”
Oh god. The betrayal stung more than I could’ve thought possible and my eyes burned with hot, angry tears.
“ Yes.”
“I didn’t do it!” Becca said through her sobs, shouting from the top of the pallet rack.
“I couldn’t. I saw how you were with them.
How they were with you and I…I couldn’t.
I hate the Saints . I hate that if it weren’t for them my mom would still be alive, but I wouldn’t do that to you! You have to believe me!”
But he ghosted you, I thought to myself.
This Ace, whoever he was, he’d cut Becca off. Stopped texting her. Stopped seeing her.
If he hadn’t ghosted her, would she have told him the things he wanted to know? Would Becca have caused the deaths of my Crows?
“When he texted me from that unknown number,” she said between sobs. “I mean, when Diesel texted me pretending to be him wanting to meet up, I was going to end it for good, Aves.”