Chapter 11 – Rook
ROOK
“ W e’ll meet you at the hospital,” Corvus told the paramedic as they loaded Rebecca into the back of the ambulance, like it was a threat instead of a promise.
“If she dies, so do you.”
The paramedic paled, giving us one terse nod as he climbed into the back with Rebecca, closing the doors behind him. Lights flashing and sirens blaring, they sped down the road into Thorn Valley, leaving a plume of sand in their wake.
I turned and decked Corvus in the jaw, catching him off guard. He stumbled back a step, hand going to his chin with murder in his eyes.
“Rook, what the fuck?”
“That’s for being a fucking idiot,” I spat at him, practically preening at the sting in my knuckles, salivating with the urge to hit him again.
“What—”
“ She was alive ,” I shouted in his face. “And you just stood there like a lump of dead flesh.”
“I—”
“Save it, man. What is going on with you? I’ve never seen you so fucking out of it. Where’s my brother? Hmm? Because we need his ass here right now, not this motherfucker who stands there like a mute statue instead of doing literally any fucking thing useful.”
His mouth pressed into a thin line, a knot forming between his brows. I could see it. That thing inside of him that he liked to keep locked up. There it was, right fucking there, tormenting him, begging him to be let free. But he clenched his fists against it. Swallowed it down. Snuffed it out.
I shoved him in the chest. “Come on,” I egged him on. “Let it out, Bro. If you don’t, your brain’s going to be drowning in it, and we need you right now. We need this.”
I jabbed the side of his temple twice with my fingertips, making him recoil, his upper lip curl.
“We need to call this in,” he said through gritted teeth. “Don’t push me, Rook.”
I laughed, but the sound of it was violent even to my own ears. I’d never been so fucking tired and so wholly unable to sleep in my entire miserable life. Wired didn’t even begin to cover this feeling and the fact that the thing squatting in my chest was hungry again wasn’t fucking helping.
My hands ached for violence. To do something. Anything that might bring me closer to my Ghost. Bring my Ghost back to me.
I was ready to go door to door with an AK and blow the heads off anyone who didn’t have her face. I’d find her eventually. And when I did, we’d sharpen our blades together and gut the filth that hurt Becca.
A shuddering breath escaped my lips at the beautiful, bloodstained imagery playing like poetry across the backs of my eyelids.
“Fine,” I said, the reel of promised revenge with my Ghost like ASMR to my fractured soul. I shakily brought a cigarette to my lips and lit it up, inhaling deeply. “Call it in. While you do that, I’m going to go back in and make sure we didn’t miss anything.”
I blew the smoke in his direction, watching the flashing lights in the distance vanish.
He should’ve been the one to do the looking, but he wouldn’t find a damned thing, not with his brain soaking in unspent testosterone-fueled rage.
“You call,” he argued. “You’re already bleeding through your fucking bandages again. Stay here.”
The laugh I was planning to have at his attempt to subdue me died before it could reach my lips.
“What time is it?”
His brows drew down. “Why?”
“Who do you think that is?”
I pointed the red cherry at the tip of my cigarette to the headlights flashing like strobe lights through the trees as the sun finally broke over the horizon.
I glanced back up at Briar Hall behind me, finding more than a few curious faces in the windows, watching from the semi-security of their bedrooms.
The last fucking thing I wanted to deal with right now was the principal. Though the mouse of a man would probably take one look at our blood-coated hands and turn his fat ass right around and go back home where he was safe.
“That’s not the principal’s car,” Corv said, echoing my thoughts as the older model Volvo rounded the bend onto the front drive of the academy, pulling up in front of the entrance.
“Not the cops, either.”
Corv made it clear to the operator that we only required an ambulance and not to send anyone else. Name dropping Diesel made arguing a moot point.
We watched as a man stepped out of the driver’s side, unfurling to his full height, closing the door behind him.
I reached around my back and slid my tacky fingers around the smooth grip of my Browning Hi Power, flicking my cigarette away after one final drag.
The other door opened and a girl stepped out. Her height and the shape of her frame made all the weight fall from my shoulders, before the shadow over her head fell away. It wasn’t my Ghost.
This girl had short dark hair and a small oval shaped face.
The two of them argued in hushed tones in front of the Academy before the girl finally shut her door too and they ascended the stairs to the front door.
“Who are they?”
Corvus shook his head. He wasn’t sure either. “We’re about to find out.”
I followed him across the lot, listening intently to the electronic voice coming through the speaker at the entrance.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t allow visitors outside of regular school hours, you’ll have to come back another time.”
“Well, when’s that?” the girl asked in a whiny voice.
“Eight forty-five,” the new security guard replied.
“Look, we just want to check on a friend. Her name is Ava Jade Mason.”
The girl leaned down to shout into the mic while the other guy hovered behind her, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans.
“She hasn’t been answering any of our calls or texts and we’re really worried that something might’ve happened to?—”
“Who the fuck are you?” Corvus asked, and the girl gasped, pivoting to face us with surprise in her eyes.
“And how do you know Ava Jade?” I added, analyzing the pair of them.
The new security guard’s voice came back over the speaker with a sigh. “Look, I’ve told you already…”
I stalked through the newcomers, forcing them to separate, and jammed the intercom button. “Stop talking,” I spoke into the mic. “Go back to your Diet Pepsi and Takis like a good mall cop. Oh, and be a peach and turn the fucking cameras off, yeah?”
“Right away, Mr. Clayton.”
I waited until the red light blinking on the overhead camera went dark before turning my attention back to the girl.
“I believe we asked you some questions.”
Her throat bobbed.
The fear hitching her shoulders high, leaking into the azure blue of her eyes, made a smile pull at my lips.
“Look, I don’t know who you are but this isn’t your business,” the guy said, glancing between Corvus and me with something in his stare that whispered to me not to trust him.
I didn’t like the way he was looking at us. Like he was gauging our height. Our builds. The distance between us and him.
He widened his stance.
A fighter, then.
“Wait. I know you,” Corvus said suddenly, ignoring the guy’s misinformed statement. “You’re Kit. Kitrick Dagwood. From Lennox.”
He fixed his cold blue’s on the girl next. “Which would make you Dominique.”
Kit.
Kit?
I racked my brain, dredging up information from the bits and pieces I picked up on my own from my brother’s more intensive PI work. The exhaustion clinging to my skull like lead weights made it difficult, but not impossible.
This was the self-defense instructor she’d been fucking. And the friend who all but abandoned her when she moved here.
I analyzed them in a new light.
Kit stood a little shy of six feet from the ground. With reddish brown scruff on his jaw that grew up into darker hair cropped short. Shit brown eyes. A decent jaw. If you liked the ass chin thing.
Not her type.
And fucking old.
Not that I was one to judge, but this guy had to be thirty five. And not a threat. It was clear Corv was thinking this pissant might be Ava Jade’s stalker, but no. This guy couldn’t be him.
“And you are?” Kit replied to Corvus, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Your worst fucking nightmare.”
“Look, man, I didn’t come here for trouble. I came here to check on a friend.”
“A friend?” I echoed. “Don’t you mean fuckbuddy?”
Even saying the words made a twist of jealousy twinge in my stomach.
Not my thing. Never was. But Ghost was mine.
Ours. The fact that this pansy ass motherfucker came here meant on some delusional level he thought he still had a claim on her.
He needed to understand that he didn’t. And never would again.
“That’s not your business.”
Dead wrong.
“You should leave,” I said, the one and only warning I would give. Only spoken at all out of respect for my Ghost and the fact that she may not like to return home to find her old friends dead.
Corvus squared off against Kit, who raised his hands in a placating gesture my end-of-his-rope brother wouldn’t be placated by.
A shiver of anticipation rolled down my spine at the look in his ice cold eyes. The dead look. The one that spoke of murder. A smile pulled at my lips.
“Look, I get it. You’re the new flavor of the week, right?”
Corvus didn’t give him a reply, his eyes tracking Kit’s every movement.
“You don’t want to do this, man,” he told Corvus, letting out an exasperated sigh, like he was dealing with a fired up toddler rather than one of the most deadly men in the state. “How old are you? Eighteen? Twenty? You’ve got too much to live for. Let it go, man. I’ll crush you.”
A hysterical laugh rose from my throat unbidden, and I hunched over at the force of it, sides aching as tears welled in my eyes.
“What’s so fucking funny?” Kit asked, looking offended.
Dom grabbed Kit’s shoulder, trying to pull him back toward the car. “Come on, Kit. Let’s just go.”
“No,” he said, rolling his shoulders back, shucking Dom off. “I want to know what’s so fucking funny?”
I swiped a tear away from my eye with my knuckle and leaned back against the wall, tugging out a cigarette to put it to my lips. “You should listen to your friend,” I said through the last of the dark laughter still shuddering in my lungs. “Get the fuck out of here.”