Chapter 17 – Rook
ROOK
F ucking coward.
It wasn’t the first time some big talker failed to live up to the noise, backing down at the last second because of some bullshit excuse.
I finished my whiskey and hollered around the curtain for another, tapping my empty glass on the cement wall as I swiped the back of my hand over my mouth.
Lighting my last cigarette, I went back to the benches in the private room, inhaling deeply until my lungs were filled with the sweet tarry taste of tobacco.
Grey held up his phone, showing Ava Jade a video of Alpha; the female fighter Diesel had wanted to acquire for a fight here since we started the events.
“See how she uses her legs,” Grey was saying, pointing to the screen, and Ava Jade nodded. “She weakens your stability like that so when she strikes up top you go down harder. She’s good on the mat, too. Don’t let her bring you down. If she does, you won’t be able to get out of it.”
Her cheekbones flared. She disagreed.
I couldn’t say whether she was right or wrong about her ability to take Alpha. I’d only seen her fight once, but she was a lethal combination of speed and size. The other girl, even one in the same weight class as her, didn’t stand a chance.
And Ava Jade was at least a full weight class down.
Possibly two weight classes. But then again, she’d almost had me that night out behind the apartment buildings.
She hadn’t needed her blades then, just the incentive of getting her winnings from betting on me in the fight and the rush of a challenge.
As twitchy as I was that I wouldn’t be smashing heads tonight after all, at least I got to watch this fight. It was the best alternative, and maybe I’d get a second hand release from watching her take Alpha down.
It wouldn’t lift the heavy burden pressing down on my soul, but it might soothe it. For another day. Another hour. Another minute at least.
If Julia didn’t call soon…
I finished off my cigarette and stomped it out beneath my boot.
“How are you on the ground?” Grey asked my Ghost, and her lips pressed together tight.
He took her silence and expression to mean something they didn’t. It wasn’t that she wasn’t good on the ground, it was that if she got stuck in a hold, unable to move with someone on top of her, she panicked. It was that panic that would be her undoing someday.
It was a scar that we needed to help her heal. It could save her life.
“Focus on what you’re good at,” I found myself saying.
Her gaze flicked up to meet mine, burning eyes boring into me. “Too bad I can’t use my blades,” she said with a smirk that didn’t reach her eyes.
“You don’t need them,” Corvus said, entering through the curtain with my fresh whiskey in his hand.
He passed it to me, going to kneel in front of Ava Jade with thin strips of torn cloth to wrap her knuckles.
“She might have more skill than you, but it’s at a professional level.
She won’t fight dirty, and she won’t be expecting you to. ”
“She also won’t expect you to be able to take a hit as well as you can,” Grey added. “You need to outlast her and wait for your opening.”
“She’s weak in the knees,” I put in. “During the fight I saw last year in Lodi, she took a hit to her inner right knee, not even a hard one, and it almost put her flat on her ass.”
Ghost nodded, taking it all in.
The noise and light from the main floor pushed into the private space as Diesel and Pinkie entered, throwing the curtain back shut behind them. “Alpha’s here,” he announced. “Fight’s in fifteen. Is she prepped?”
“Almost,” Corvus growled.
“Put this on,” Pinkie said, and I noticed the tiny ass top and shorts in his mammoth fingers. He tossed it to Ava Jade, and she caught it in the fist Corvus wasn’t currently wrapping.
Corvus snatched them from her fingers before she could get a good look at them. He pushed to his feet, holding them out to Diesel with murder in his eyes. A smile found my lips.
“The fuck is this, Dies?” he asked, holding the tiny shorts and sports bra between his fingers like they personally offended him. He shoved them back at Pinkie. “She isn’t wearing that.”
Ava Jade didn’t hide her amusement at the exchange, calmly offering her hand to Grey for him to finish the job Corvus started.
“She is,” Diesel said. “She can’t fight in a skirt and a baggy band tee, son.”
“That’s fucking lingerie,” he argued, jabbing two fingers to the outfit lying on Pinkie’s palm.
“It’s sport shorts and a sports bra,” Diesel corrected him.
“Her tits and ass will be all over the place in that. She isn’t wearing it.”
Diesel took the outfit from Pinkie and strolled over to Ava Jade, holding out the bits of dark cloth for her.
“Ava Jade,” he said, making a spectacle of asking her permission.
“Would you mind wearing this for your fight. Not only will you be able to move more easily, but its effect on many of the dimwitted rich in attendance will make for a better monetary gain.”
She looked between Corvus’ quickly reddening face and our father’s, taking the skimpy outfit with a tip of her head. “If it’ll help,” she said, sharing a meaningful look with Diesel that I wanted to deconstruct. If my brain wasn’t swimming in whiskey, I’d have been doing just that.
One thing was clear though, she was behaving. Doing as she was told. She agreed to this fight at the very last minute. Agreed to fight someone well above her weight class. Agreed to wear that .
And I got the sense she wasn’t doing it for herself.
Corvus wiped a palm over his mouth, physically holding back whatever else he wanted to say.
Ava Jade sent him a wink. “Let them look,” she said. “That’s all they’ll ever do.”
“If any of them touch you, I’ll fucking kill them.”
Diesel raised a brow at his eldest son, but Corvus’ hard gaze never left Ava Jade.
She smiled sweetly at him. “I would expect nothing less, Bones.”
In a move not even I could’ve predicted, Corvus sidestepped closer to me and took the whiskey from my hand, draining it in one long swallow, a sneering grimace on his lips as he stared down Diesel.
“The match is five, five-minute rounds,” Diesel told Ava Jade. “It’s best if you can last at least until the third.”
“So you’re betting against me?” she asked him.
He didn’t reply.
It was the wrong move. Even more so to let on that he had. It would only push Ava Jade that much harder to win. And win she would. Not without injury. But I felt bad for Alpha, she wouldn’t have a soul left once my Ghost sucked it clean from her bones.
“Winner will be determined by submission or knock out.”
She nodded her understanding.
“Or by climbing to the top of the cage.”
The room went collectively still.
“You’re dropping the cage?” I asked, something churning beneath my ribcage. “I thought we weren’t doing that anymore since?—”
“Since you killed your opponent?” he finished for me. “I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening tonight, and it adds something extra to the excitement.”
“You okay with this?” I asked my Ghost. If she wasn’t, Diesel wouldn’t be dropping the cage. Period.
She shrugged. “At least she won’t be able to get away.”
She flexed her fingers, feeling out the wraps as she stood, holding my stare with a wicked gleam in her eyes. My cock thickened in my jeans as I realized what I was seeing in her stare. She was excited.
No. Not just excited.
She hungered for this.
Lusted after it.
An opportunity for her to quell the same darkness that lingered deep inside of her. A darkness that no doubt was on the verge of chaos with all the shit she’d had to go through, and continued having to go through, since she first arrived in Thorn Valley.
She wouldn’t be getting what we knew she wanted out of tonight—to find the King who took out her father and start planning how she would take him apart—but this was a good consolation prize.
Corvus pushed my empty glass back at me before turning to Diesel. “I don’t think the cage is?—”
“She’s got this,” I interrupted, biting my lip ring as I looked over Ava Jade, seeing the readiness in every one of her muscles.
I nodded to Diesel. “We’re good here.”
“We’ll give you some privacy to change,” Diesel offered, pausing before he and Pinkie left. “And Ava Jade?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for filling in. The income from this match will be much needed in the weeks to come.”
For the war to come, he might as well have said. I expected we’d be meeting as soon as this match was through to go over the plan.
Ava Jade inclined her head, and he was gone, back out through the curtain with Pinkie on his heels.
“This is bullshit,” Corvus groaned, turning to pace a short stretch of concrete floor. “She hasn’t had enough time to train. Even after all that shit, he clearly still wants her dead.”
I stopped him, slapping a hand down on his shoulder, gripping tight. His nostrils flared. “She has this. She wouldn’t have agreed to it if she didn’t.”
“She didn’t know who she was up against.”
“Doesn’t matter, Brother. You can’t beat a ghost.”
The sound of Ava Jade’s knife belt clattering against the bench drew our attention back to her. She removed her t-shirt and bra without a second’s hesitation, wiggling her hips as she worked to get the skirt over her round ass to let it slip down her thighs to the ground.
The mark of my teeth in her flesh from rally night made my hard on jump in my jeans, and I pawed it, the phantom taste of her on my tongue.
Her nipples pebbled in the cool air under Sanctum, and here, under the lights, it was easier to see the evidence of all the shit she’d endured during the trials.
Her body was riddled with bruises in all stages of healing.
Some a purple so deep they bordered on black.
Others so pale yellow they were hard to discern from her unmarked flesh. And cuts.
The ones in her hips, nearly healed now, put there by me, didn’t bother me. The other did.
More than I ever thought I could be bothered by seeing a wound.