Chapter 28 – Ava Jade #3
I forced myself to look at her, my chest a hollowed-out shell filled with dark, but she brought the light.
There was no lie on her face. She’d fucked up. She’d made a mistake. She fell in with the wrong guy. Becca was smart, but even the smartest women could be fooled by the vilest of men.
A miasmal sense of foreboding wrenched the air as I wondered what exactly Diesel and the Saints would do with this new information.
An Ace was trying to infiltrate Thorn Valley, gather privileged information, and take them all out.
Diesel had been right not to trust the Aces.
They were working against him in secret all this time. This was how gang wars started.
Wars that almost always resulted in innocent casualties. Likely what happened to Becca’s mom.
And I remembered.
I remembered why I hated the Saints. Why I hated all gangs.
They’d taken Becca’s mother.
They’d also taken my father.
Would I not have done the same thing if I were in her shoes? Did I not promise myself that I would return to Lennox and collect on the blood debt owed for my father’s life?
And then it clicked.
This trial was never if I could save Becca.
It was whether I would save her.
Which meant I’d already failed.
The timer began to beep as the countdown rolled to 59 seconds and Becca started crying anew, her whole body shaking.
“Oh god ,” she croaked through the tears.
“Call them out!” I shouted to her, racing around the pallets. “Becca!”
A gasp, and then she screamed, “On your right!” and I went skidding to my knees, throwing a blade for the Saint’s neck.
It sliced across the side of his neck as he dodged the throw, sending a spurt of blood cascading in an arc over the floor.
He immediately went to his knees, choking as he tried to splutter a yield from his lips.
There was no time to disarm him or make sure he didn’t get back up so I moved on, the crow handled blade and my blade at the ready in each hand.
I rounded a tower of tires and Becca screamed, “Watch out!”
I ducked just in time to miss an axe coming straight for my head, using the Saint’s momentum against him to drive an elbow down into the back of his neck, hearing the satisfying crack! of bone as he went down. Went still.
“Hold on, Becks!” I called as she worked furiously to get her hands free from the binds keeping them tied behind her back.
The timer read twenty-seven seconds and my throat closed as I sprinted through the last of the maze, every muscle in my body burning. The wound in my shoulder and the tear in my knee begging me to stop, but I didn’t dare.
I rounded the last wall of pallets and lifted my blade, not hesitating this time when Diesel came into my field of vision.
He threw an ax, but I dodged it, rolling and up again before he could reach for an alternate weapon.
I tossed a blade and it found a snug home in his Achilles, sending him to his knees with a look of utter shock on his face.
He reached behind himself for the gun my fingers were already on. I tugged it from the back of his jeans and aimed it at his head.
“She betrayed you!” he hissed just as the buzzer sounded and two men, no more than shadows outside of the spotlight’s reach, pushed against the base of the pallet rack, trying to knock it from beneath Becca’s feet.
She screamed, and I fired two shots at the shadows. I didn’t think either hit, I was a shit shot, but the deafening sounds were enough to stop them.
“Touch that fucking rack again and I’ll kill him,” I hissed, aiming the gun lower, level with Diesel’s head.
“Boss?” one of them called.
“It’s all right, lads,” Diesel called in reply, his voice strained as his blood pooled around his ankle on the cement floor.
I found where the chain was connected to a metal beam against the wall and edged toward it, keeping one eye and the gun on Diesel while I freed the chain.
“Becca,” I called. “Can you climb down?”
“My hands!” she cried, a hitch in her voice.
“It’s just zip ties,” I said, assuming they used the same thing they used to bind my hands for the hunt trial. “Pull your wrists apart to put tension on them and then reach your arms back as far as you can.”
“Okay.”
“Okay now as hard and fast as you can, pull in toward your body and apart. It’ll hurt, but it should break them apart.”
She grunted. “It didn’t work!”
“It’s okay, babe. Try again. You got this.”
Two more grunts, and I heard the satisfying snap of the plastic.
“I did it!”
“I knew you could. Now just climb down.”
“You’re making a mistake,” Diesel said, seemingly unfazed by this entire ordeal. He just kneeled there, grim, and angry on the cement floor, eyeing me.
I gritted my teeth, so angry I wanted to beat him to death with his own fucking gun. “No.” I seethed. “ You made a mistake. She’s an innocent girl whose mother you stole. She was played. Manipulated. And tonight she almost died because of you.”
“She was feeding an Ace intel on my sons .”
“So, what? You thought, hey, two birds one stone? Your men could’ve swarmed me all at once but they didn’t. You wanted me to save her, so that I would fail the trial. So that you could turn around and kill us both.”
He didn’t deny it and that only made me even angrier.
But even I wasn’t stupid enough to think that I could kill Diesel St. Crow and get away with it. If I shot him, his men would shoot me. They’d kill Becca, too. I needed to get us out of here. Now.
The pallet rack squeaked and trembled as Becca made her way slowly down, holding onto the rusted metal for dear life until she was back on solid ground.
She sighed when her feet connected with the concrete, but when she saw the Saints on the other side of the rack, she squealed and raced to my side, putting herself behind me.
“I really wasn’t going to tell him anything,” Becca said to Diesel. “I swear I wasn’t. I was just?—”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to him,” I snapped, cutting off whatever Becca had been about to say next. “You owe him nothing.”
She fell quiet, and I saw her chin quiver in my periphery as she held back the urge to cry. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “This is all my fault. I should’ve told you about him from the very start.”
As if she was blaming herself right now. She and I were going to have a good long chat, just as soon as I got her out of here. “Come on, Becca. We’re leaving.”
I glanced toward the two goons still waiting in the shadows. “And if anyone tries to follow us, I will kill them.”
We backed out through the rear exit, and I kept Becca tight to my side as we made our way to the front. To the Rover I hoped would still fucking start after what I’d put it through.
“Stay close to me,” I reminded Becca, and she rushed to keep up as we stepped onto the road. Headlights flared on the road and the roar of an engine had me picking up the pace, grabbing Becca around the wrist with my blade hand.
She winced when I accidentally nicked her but she didn’t pull away, letting me guide her to the Rover. “Get in!”
“AJ!”
I whirled, stopping with my hand on the door handle as the car skidded to a halt and the three of them jumped out.
“Sparrow, are you hurt?” Corvus demanded, rushing to close the gap between us while Rook fed a magazine into his gun and cocked it back, eyeing the warehouse like he dared someone to come out of it.
“We saw what happened,” Grey rushed to say, his gaze sliding to where Becca was hesitating to get into the back seat of the Rover. His jaw clenched.
The surveillance camera. Diesel had sent them the live feed. And by the way they were looking at Becca...
I aimed the gun at Corvus, making him slow his forward trajectory. His brows drew together as he finally stopped.
“AJ, what are you doing?” Grey asked, stopping too, while Rook continued to watch my six, his gaze jerking warily between my gun and the warehouse at our backs.
“Get back in the car and go,” I hissed.
“Sparrow…”
“No.” I shook my head. “Tonight I’m not your fucking Sparrow, Corvus James. I’m the girl who almost watched her best friend die . Because of you. Because of all of you. Saints. Ha! Fucking sadists.”
“We can work this out,” Grey said, inching closer.
“ Don’t .”
I shot the ground barely a foot from Corvus’ boot, but none of them even flinched. They all watched with unconcealed hurt and horror at what they were seeing, but I couldn’t make myself stop.
They weren’t saying Diesel was wrong. They weren’t apologizing. They wanted to work it out . Work it out how ?
I didn’t want to find out.
“If you aren’t going to leave, then get the fuck out of my way.”
Corvus met my gaze and something inside me broke, twisting and shattering until drawing my next breath felt almost impossible.
“Ghost?” Rook asked, his gun lowering now, and I couldn’t bear to look at him, because I’d already decided what I needed to do next. “This isn’t right. Let me come with you.”
The necklace still clasped around my throat weighed heavily against my breastbone, making it even harder to get air into my lungs. But as much as I knew I should, I couldn’t bring myself to remove it. Not yet. “I can’t do that, Rook.”
“Just wait,” Grey all but begged. “Let us talk to Diesel. Maybe...maybe this is all a misunderstanding. We can fix this.”
My teeth ground together, bone creaking against bone. “ You can’t .”
It wasn’t something that could be fixed.
Not by anything they could say. Only by something I could do.
Something that could ensure this never happened again.
That no more mothers or fathers needed to die senseless deaths for the whims of a merciless kingpin.
The Saints of Thorn Valley, The Iron Aces of Edgewood, or the Kings of Lennox. ..they were all the same.
I just needed reminding.
“Let her go,” Corvus said, his tone the one I remembered from when we first met. Cold and detached. Emotionless.
“ Corv ,” Grey tried to argue.
“Move,” Corvus replied. “Let them go.”
Becca hopped into the Rover, not needing any more incentive, and I got into the driver’s seat, turning over the engine.
It started on the second try, and the cement barrier scraped along its side as I put her in reverse and turned around just as Diesel exited the warehouse, the two goons helping him walk out.
The other injured Saints limped and grimaced behind them. One fewer than there had been inside.
At least one dead, then.
I couldn’t bring myself to care.
“Keep your head down,” I growled to Becca and hit the gas, bearing us away from no man’s land. Leaving the Crows and everything they were a part of behind before I could change my mind.
My throat burned as I drove, aching until I couldn’t hold back the pain anymore and it overflowed, tracing warm paths down my cheeks. The gaping hollow spot in my chest where they used to be now scraped raw.
“Where are we going?” Becca asked quietly behind me, and I swallowed past the lump in my throat.
I pulled off to the side of the road, the Rover’s tires bumping over uneven ground, and yanked my phone free of the side pocket of my pants. My hands shook as I found the email I was looking for.
To: Vicky Doyle
From: Ava Jade Mason
Subject: RE: Swap Notes
I have what you need. Give me a location. I’ll be there.
“Aves?” Becca pressed, and I set down my phone, calculating the hours remaining until dawn.
“There’s something I have to do.”