Chapter 17 – Ava Jade
AVA JADE
D rake made it impossible for me to move and absolutely every fucking thing itched. That alone would’ve been enough to drive a woman insane, but with the drugs still lingering in my system, and that incessant dripping… safe to say I was absolutely mad. Delirious. Starting to question reality.
So when he came barging in, sweeping right into the room to head straight for the desk of monitors, I thought maybe he wasn’t really there at all.
I mean, fuck, I thought I’d seen my dad chilling over there in the corner, humming his favorite tune to the sound of a guitar strumming in my brain just an hour ago. Or maybe it was a day ago. Who fucking knew.
Either way, my dad was definitely dead, and I was definitely crazy.
Which was why I started to laugh when Drake manically smashed the spacebar on the keyboard, muttering to himself as the computers woke from their slumber.
He whirled, sneering at me, a smear of blood on his jaw.
I immediately stopped laughing.
Whose blood was that?
Whose fucking blood was that?
He realized where my eyes had strayed and looked down with a grimace, peeling off his leather jacket with a hiss.
He smelled like smoke and gasoline.
My heart thundered in my chest and I spoke through my teeth, trying to find the darkness inside that seemed to have abandoned me to my crazy sometime between being stripped of my clothes and dignity and being strapped into this godforsaken chair. “What did you do?”
He bared his teeth as he tore the sleeve from his black t-shirt, revealing a bullet wound in his shoulder, bloody and gruesome and enough to tickle my insides with fucking joy.
They got him. If only they’d hit a little lower. More to the right.
Drake grabbed the first aid kit he’d used to wrap up my wrists and tore a pair of long metal tweezers out of a plastic sleeve with his teeth.
He let out a mean cry, gripping the underside of the desk with one hand while he dug the pointed tips of the tweezers deep into the wound, coming out with a bullet a few seconds later. He dropped it to the floor and it clattered as it rolled toward the door.
“ Fuck ,” he barked, closing his eyes tight for a second before continuing to sanitize and wrap the injury.
“What happened?” I pressed again, swallowing past the thick cloth Drake had used to bind my head and neck even tighter to the chair, squirming the tiniest bit that I was able. My lower abdomen ached with even the slightest contraction of my muscles and my face pinched.
“I’m fucking talking to you, dickface,” I shouted hoarsely, coughing against the restraint of the cloth.
When he didn’t answer, the laughter came again, and with little control over what fell from my mouth, words tumbled out as though from a drunk Ava Jade.
But these words I didn’t care to stuff back inside.
“They figured it out, didn’t they?”
I laughed some more.
“They kicked your ass! Look at you? Pathetic.”
He turned on me, his fist closing around my throat, making me bite my tongue, my mouth welling with the coppery tang of blood.
I stared straight into his eyes, daring him to finish what he started, shoving down the knee jerk reaction to panic when my vision began to darken around the edges. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Kill me then, I dared him with my stare alone. I wouldn’t give him my soul, become the hollow shell he wanted to fill with his own desires, so he might as well take my life. Get it over with.
“Fucking bitch .”
Red veins flared in his eyes, and he squeezed harder, shaking with the effort. My lungs burned. If he squeezed any harder, I was sure my neck would snap.
Just before the lights went out, his hands moved and a gush of cool, sharp air filled my lungs, making me choke and splutter. Reality came back in patchy images spotted with dark circles as I breathed through the razor blades in my throat.
“You think so highly of them…” he said, his voice distant as I ebbed somewhere just outside of full consciousness. “You think they’re invincible, hmm? ”
I tried to spit out the blood in my mouth between coughing fits, but only managed to get it all over the oversized t-shirt still covering my body.
“I’m going to show you just how mortal they are, Angel. And once they’re gone, you’ll see it was always me . I’ll make you see.”
“Come on AJ,” Grey’s voice soothed me and a morbid grin graced my blood-coated lips. “Snap out of it, baby. I need you to focus. Watch what he’s doing on those screens.”
I opened my eyes wide to correct the lingering double-vision while also trying to swallow.
“That’s it,” Corvus crooned. “Good girl.”
The phantom touch of rough fingers brushed over the no doubt purpling skin on my neck, making me shudder. “Just picture him flayed and cockless,” Rook whispered in my ear, and I leaned into his touch, but it wasn’t there anymore.
And neither was he.
They were gone.
They were never here.
“…think they ruined my plans…” Drake was saying to himself, and I turned my attention back to him, squinting to try to see what he was doing on the monitors like Grey told me.
Like I told me, I corrected myself.
Not real.
Not real. Get it together Ava Jade.
“ Ha! They might’ve made it more difficult but this changes nothing.”
A phone rang somewhere, the echo of the factory setting ringtone bouncing all around the small room. Drake opened a drawer and pulled out an ancient flip phone, answering it.
“Go.”
A pause.
“ Fuck .”
He brought the phone away from his ear and squeezed it between his hands, closing his eyes, a muscle flexing hard in his jaw as he contained himself before putting it back to his ear.
“Shut the fuck up, Maverick. No. Don’t do anything.
You fucking sit there and you wait for my instructions.
Head for the warehouse. There’s something I need to take care of, and then I’ll meet you there. ”
Drake hung up before Maverick could’ve possibly given him a response, muttering to himself some more. And I thought I was crazy.
“What was that you were saying about them not ruining your plans?”
He stiffened but didn’t come at me this time.
Honestly? A little disappointing.
I watched Drake open up a program with what looked like about a hundred different tiny video cameras on it. He clicked on several of them and they flew over to the next monitor, opening live camera feeds in small boxes. A door. A cityscape I recognized to be Thorn Valley. Where was this?
What was this?
“In about ten minutes, there’ll be one less of them for me to worry about. One less of them in the way of me claiming what rightfully belongs to me. Thorn Valley should be mine by right.”
Drake moved away from the monitors, giving me a clear and unobstructed view of the almost motionless footage. The only reason I knew it was live was because there were clouds moving in the sky.
He came around the chair, putting himself behind me. He bent his head to my eye level, pressing his cheek to mine, making my stomach turn as he pointed directly toward the image of the city skyline. “You see that, Angel? We’re about to find out if Crows can fly.”