Chapter 22 – Corvus
CORVUS
M y head pounded like a fucking jackhammer, making my vision waver and double, smeared with a hazy blur, smudged with bright spots. The lights burned. My body ached like it’d been crushed by a fucking steamroller.
Sour bile coated the back of my throat and I coughed, choking on it as I heaved my battered body up, half rolling off the bed to land on my hands and knees. I vomited onto the tile, the sharp twinge of broken bones along my rib cage protesting the squeeze.
Voices shouted all around me.
Cold fingers wrapped around my biceps and I flung them away, getting unsteadily to my feet.
“Where is she?” I roared, my voice a slurred, raw sound I didn’t recognize.
A sting in the back of my hand had me tearing an IV needle free from my skin, untethering me. I crashed into a large square object that chirped at my attack. The machine whirred as I used it to get my balance.
“Doctor!” someone shouted.
A siren alarm sounded all around me, making me cringe as it bored into my ear canals, making the pain in my head double.
“Sir,” someone was saying. “Mr. James, I need you to?—”
I lashed out in the direction of the speaker, my arm connecting, sending the person to the floor.
“Where is she?”
I pressed my palm flat against my ears, hunching as a wave of intense vertigo made the floor beneath my feet shift. “ Where is she? ”
“ Move ,” a voice I recognized growled.
“Get away from him,” another added, and I blinked, trying to get my eyes to cooperate as I lifted my head, stumbling into the wall, the heat in my chest suffocating under the pressure of whatever was wrong with me.
Making my heart race and blood vessels constrict until I my ass connected with the floor and an icy sweat slicked over my chest.
“ Where… ”
“Someone turn off that fucking alarm,” Grey hissed, and I struggled to lift my chin as the rough touch of my brother gripped me by the shoulders.
“Corv. Corv . You with us?”
“He can’t be moving right now,” a foreign voice joined theirs. “He needs to be lying down. He needs monitoring. We need to?—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Rook seethed at whoever was speaking. “We’ll handle it, just give us some fucking space.”
There came no more argument as the cool tile beneath me slowly brought me back from the edge of darkness, and I was able to focus on their faces.
Rook and Grey came into focus, kneeling on the floor of a mostly-destroyed hospital room. My upper lip twitched as the pain in my head and side grew sharper, whatever they’d given me to dull it wearing off faster than it should’ve been with all the adrenaline pumping in my blood.
“Where is she?”
Rook’s jaw clenched.
I wanted to punch it.
They were supposed to find her. They were supposed to save her.
My mind chugged to catch up to the present moment, the rooftop coming back in broken pieces. They were supposed to find her because…
I remembered his hands on her body. Her struggle in that chair.
“Breathe, Bro,” Rook pushed. “You need to keep your BP level. You’re lucky to still be alive.”
The sharp edge to his tone gave away what he wasn’t saying. He wanted to shove me off that roof all over again for being so stupid. But he wouldn’t have done it any differently, would he?
Now, with my thoughts disjointed and loose in my skull, it all seemed so fucking pointless. Why had I jumped?
What good would it have done if I died?
Would it have even stopped him?
I dropped my gaze.
“We need to find her.”
I tried to get to my feet.
“Whoa,” Grey chided, pushing down on my shoulders until I grunted, dogged by his resistance. “No, you don’t.”
“We need to find her .”
“You aren’t doing shit,” Rook said in a dead monotone. “Look at yourself, man.”
This time when I looked up, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the upturned metal tray leaning against the base of the hospital bed. Warped and blurry, I cringed at my own reflection, lifting an unsteady hand to my shaved head, finding a wide bandage at the top rear of my skull.
“You had a subdural hematoma,” Grey was saying, adding something around burr holes and acute fractures that I didn’t understand.
“ English , Grey.”
“Your brain was bleeding,” Rook explained. “They needed to drill holes into that thick head to relieve the pressure. And you busted some ribs.”
“Is that all?”
Rook barked a laugh. “If the roof of Dies’ Camaro hadn’t broken the worst of your fall, it would’ve been a lot worse.”
Fuck.
“Don’t worry, we convinced him to kill you after you finished healing.”
“Where is he?”
“On his way,” Rook answered. “Now come on, we need to put you back in bed.”
I pulled against their attempt to help lift me. “No. We need to find her.”
…before he…
I closed my eyes against another wave of nausea.
Grey let go of my arm. “I have a lead.”
“What?” Rook and I said at the same time.
“I found footage of Drake taking AJ after the Docks. They went south. I’m going to follow their trail using every surveillance backup I can get my hands on.”
I tucked a knee, curling to stand on my own. “What are we waiting for?”
A curse slipped past my lips as the pain in my ribs intensified and wetness spread over my lower stomach, dripping red on the floor.
“Nurse,” Rook called, his voice back to the dead tone I knew meant nothing good. “Knock his ass out before he bleeds to death.”
I twisted to glare at him.
He glared right back.
The nurse came forward with a syringe and I gave her a withering stare that made her hesitate.
Rook stood, snatching the syringe from her.
“Don’t make me use it.”
“You wouldn’t.”
He flipped the syringe around in his fingers, a sly smirk twisting one corner of his lips.
“Want to find out?”
“We’re going to find her,” Grey interrupted, his arm hooking under mine to grip me around the back, pushing my lame ass up to my feet. “But if we let you die trying to be the hero, she’ll just kill the rest of us when we do.”
I woke from a forced sleep sometime later, and if it weren’t for Diesel sitting there beside the hospital bed with a shotgun across his lap and thunder in his eyes, I might’ve tried to escape.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“I wasn’t thinking of shit.”
“Sure, you weren’t.”
He sighed, resting a hand on the barrel of the gun, lifting his eyes to meet mine. A rare glimpse of his true emotion showed through the veil of iron he wore, and I recoiled from it, guilt curling its ugly fist in my chest.
“Where are the guys?”
A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Gone after your girl.”
I shot up in bed and nearly passed out from the sudden movement, falling back onto my elbows. “They found her?”
Diesel shook his head at me. “Not yet. But I got some info from that agent who owed me a favor, and Grey’s been gathering security footage from every gas station, convenience store, and doorbell cam from the Docks, through Edgewood, all the way to Lennox since last night.
“And?”
“And they’ve traced his path from the Docks to a service road just outside Lennox before they lost him.”
My chest ached with hope. “They’re there now?”
Dies twisted his wrist to check the time. “Should be any time now. They’re going to drive the area where the footage Grey found ended while keeping within the radius of the last cell tower his burner phone pinged off of.”
He must’ve seen the desperation in my eyes because he lifted a hand to settle me. “It’s a wide area, Corvus. At least thirty-square miles.”
The hope cracked but didn’t shatter. This was what we’d been looking for. Rook and Grey—they could work with this. And I had no doubt that they’d comb every square inch of those thirty-square miles within the next twenty-four hours.
They’d find her.
They had to find her.
Because I could barely sit up straight.
“It’s your own idiotic fault, you know,” Diesel said. “That you’re stuck in here while they’re out there doing what actually matters.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what , Son?” Diesel snapped. “Don’t be upset that my son threw himself off the roof of a fucking building? Hmm?”
I pinched my eyes closed, remembering what it had felt like to give in. To fall.
The most terrifying thing about it was that it wasn’t scary at all. It felt like the sweetest sort of release.
It didn’t matter that I hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time in weeks and wasn’t thinking straight.
It didn’t matter that I’d almost killed a guy for making a backhanded comment about my girl in a blacked-out rage.
That I’d been slowly, steadily losing this controlled version of myself since the first time I woke up to realize she wasn’t there.
It didn’t matter that now, in the light of day, lying useless in this fucking bed that I could see how completely pointless my death would’ve been. I still couldn’t bring myself to fully regret it.
I’d do it again to save her.
And again.
And again.
If my death meant she suffered for even a minute less than she had to. I’d give her the knife and beg her to end me.
Diesel leaned forward over the shotgun in his lap, his expression hard. Lips in a taut line. “You’ve really got nothing to say?”
“You don’t know what he was doing to her, Dad.”
His lips parted at something he saw in my eyes.
“He had her tied. Practically naked. He was…”
A knot formed between his brows.
“…touching her. He threatened to…”
I couldn’t even say it without the rage threatening to boil over inside. My head spun, the testosterone and adrenaline at war with the pain killers keeping me floating on a cloud where they couldn’t quite reach.
“I couldn’t watch him do it,” I said after a moment of tense silence between us.
Diesel hesitated before responding, pressing the tips of his fingers together to steeple them in front of his mouth, thinking. “We’re going to find this guy, and when we do, the things I did to the man who took my Jacqueline from me will pale in comparison to what he will suffer.”
The promise of violence shining in his eyes made me shiver with relief.
“But you have to promise me, Son. No matter what this motherfucker does, you will not throw your life away. You have far too much to live for.”
I looked away. “I won’t.”