Chapter 23 – Ava Jade
AVA JADE
T hink, bitch.
Think .
I stared at the lighter through watery vision, as though it might whisper to me the secret to my escape. And my revenge.
Without the ability to move, it was useless.
I growled my frustration at it, pushing the darkness to new heights within. Little good it did me now. My skin prickled with it, my chest expanding wide with heavy breath. That nameless power I drew from in critical moments like this one was wasted on me.
What good was it if I couldn’t. Fucking. Move.
I bared my teeth, carefully maneuvering the lighter between my fingers so I wouldn’t drop it, flicking the flint wheel until spark and flame erupted from the metal. The heat of it singed my finger hairs, scorching my skin.
Shit.
I flicked the top closed and the flame snuffed out, the slight burn on my finger smarting with a dull pain.
“Yes,” Rook crooned. “That’s it.”
I tipped the top back on the lighter again and struck a new flame, watching it dance above the wick.
My gaze strayed to the wooden arm of the chair that I was still tied to. It was solid. Ancient. Probably fucking half petrified. But it was wood .
The lighter stilled as the shake in my fingers steadied and whatever had been knotting in my chest unfurled. My lips parted, realizing there was one way I could still get out of here.
I couldn’t twist my wrist enough to burn off the leather restraint. Or even catch the cloth gauze around the wounds there aflame. I could only touch this flame directly to the wood.
And if it caught, the fire would spread up the arm of the chair, burning everything in its path. The leather restraints. The tied cloth. Me .
All I needed was that one arm free and I could untie the rest of me.
…but it was going to hurt.
“Only for a second, AJ,” Grey’s smooth voice reassured me. “You got this.”
“Whatever it takes,” Corvus purred in my ear, the vibrations of his rich timbre shaking loose another tear from my eyes. I sniffed, clutching the lighter tighter.
“Burn it all,” Rook urged, and when I opened my eyes, he was there.
His hand guided mine, pushing the flame ever closer to the wooden edge of the arm of the chair.
The tattoo over his knuckles…
The rings on his fingers…
He was so real.
So close.
I’d do anything he said if he’d just promise to stay.
I shut my eyes, trying to feel him, leaning into the madness. Willing this beautiful hallucination to carry me through as I pushed the flame to the wood and grit my teeth.
I bit back feral screams as I peeled my burned flesh from the flame-licked wood, the burning leather strap around my wrist stretching like pulled taffy until it finally released its hold on me.
The heat made rational thought the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. So hot. Too hot. Sweat coated my face, my chest. Ran down my arms. Doing absolutely nothing to douse the flames getting steadily larger as they ate the wood from under my arm.
I shook, my eyes rolling back at the ceaseless burn . If there was a hell, this was what it would feel like.
Darkness threatened at the edges of my vision, but I breathed through it, unable to look at the pink, red, white, and black menagerie of pain that was my left hand and forearm.
I choked on stomach acid as the fire worked its brutal magic, scorching the sensitive underside of my forearm for another few seconds before the cloth tie burned enough for me to pull through that too.
I lifted my wrist to my mouth with a sob, biting down on the still burning gauze wrapped around my wrist to tear it off, screaming through my teeth as the cinders also left little burns on my lips.
I spat the gauze out and cursed when it landed on my thighs.
I shuffled enough to let it fall between them, down to the piss pot below.
My arm shook violently as I pulled as far away from the fire as I could, taking my first full breath in what felt like a century, my entire body convulsing as the burning sensation rang through my entire being. Shot bright spots against the backs of my eyelids.
The wood cracked and sizzled.
Bright orange light had me snapping my eyes wide. The fire roared in my ears as the flames spread, licking higher, catching on the back part of the chair.
“Fuck,” I managed through the dam in my throat, wincing as I shakily reached for the strap around my forehead. My fingers sloppily tried to work the buckle, putting my elbow back into the fire.
I jerked away reflexively, my stomach dropping.
“We don’t give up,” Corvus reminded me, and I held onto his voice, willing it to be louder than the wind of the fire rushing past my ears. Singeing my hair. “We never give up.”
I thrust my elbow back into the fire, latching onto the buckle with renewed purpose, my fingers stinging and numb all at once.
The buckle came loose, and I let my head fall forward, choking on the cloth still tied around my neck. I worked on that next, coughing as the smoke wafted into my face, filling my lungs and already aching throat with its scratching claws.
As soon as my head fell free, I curled my body away from the flames, racing against the growing fire to untie the cloth and buckled straps on my right arm.
This wasn’t the clean, sharp, pain of a perfect cut. It wasn’t the press of fingers into flesh, caught up in a moment of bruising passion.
This pain didn’t call to the broken parts of me, giving me release. It fucking burned.
It doesn’t hurt, I growled in my mind. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt.
Another arm freed and I threw myself forward, using both tingling hands now to untie the rest of my binds, the fire licking at my back. Any second now and the baggy t-shirt was going to catch.
“Come on. Come on .”
One leg out and the shirt caught, the breath of the fire blowing hot air up my back.
I shifted my hips away, crying out at the pain in my belly as I threw myself to the floor with one ankle still strapped in, rocking back and forth over the cold cement floor until the fire went out.
The acrid smell of burned hair assaulted my nose and I choked on it as I fumbled with the last strap, kicking the chair when I was finally, fucking blissfully free.
Palm pressed into cement, I willed my body to ignore the burns, the aches, the exhaustion and get up .
The chair was almost entirely engulfed in flame now and black smoke stained the ceiling, billowing out toward the close walls, rushing downward.
“Stay low , Sparrow.”
I made for the door, pausing when my hand wrapped around the handle.
The cameras.
“We need to know what he knows. What he’s seen,” my mind spoke with the voice of Grey, and I hunched, covering my nose and mouth in the crook of my elbow as I made for the screens, tapping the spacebar to open them up.
The monitors came to life, reflecting with flickering orange light from the fire burning behind me, warming my back through the remaining tatters of the t-shirt hanging from my frame.
My hands hovered over the keyboard.
“The folder with the video feeds,” Grey reminded me. “Go to it.”
I did, clicking through video feed after video feed, finding a feed of Sanctum and then another. One that looked to be positioned across the street. Another that rested behind the bar in the underground fight club.
There were three in and around the Crow’s nest.
Two in mine and Becca’s shared apartment at Briar Hall. One in the living room. The other in my fucking bedroom. The angle was awkward and I struggled to figure out where it could be coming from.
There seemed to be countless others. One in front of Diesel’s house. Another near the Docks.
These had to be top grade gear. Otherwise there was no way we wouldn’t have noticed them. Was there?
I couldn’t count the number of times I’d swept the apartment at Briar Hall, that the guys had swept the Nest, after my stalker had pushed his way into our lives.
Unless these were newer?
I tapped a saved video, my eyes burning from the smoke, throat burning, and watched Drake slither up to my bed at Briar Hall, hunching over my sleeping form in the dark.
My stomach turned, watching him reach down between his legs, his jerky movements giving away what he was doing under the cover of darkness. His body shuddered, and I watched, gagging, as he carefully touched his fingers to my lips, rubbing his seed there. Claiming me.
I exited the feeds, committing their locations to memory so we could take care of each and every single one of them when I got away from here, but a folder labeled simply ‘Angels’ on the desktop caught my attention.
I clicked it, knowing I was running out of time as the smoke thickened and the reflection of the fire on the monitor’s surface brightened at my back.
Photos filled the screen, little snapshots of dead girls.
Each one more gruesome than the last.
All of them strangled to death.
The bruising on their necks clear in each overexposed frame.
They were his trophies, I realized, and the floor shifted beneath me when I realized something else. A similar quality between them all. Long, dark hair. Light colored eyes. Full lips. A familiar curve to their facial structure.
They all looked… like me.
I squinted through the burn in my eyes, coughing uncontrollably as I scanned the room quickly for something I could use, finding the long tweezers Drake had used to dig the bullet out of his arm.
I grabbed them and a swath of fresh gauze in my fist and ran to the door, heaving it open to stumble out into the hall.
The fresh gust of air drawing the fire to new heights, filling the corridor with smoke.
My watery eyes searched the long hall, finding more than a few doors lining the walls in either direction. Many not unlike the one I just exited. But there were more still that were the other kind. The kind like the one in the first room I wound up in.
Solid steel, with small openable slots near the bottom to push through food.
I paused only long enough to wrap the gauze around my burned arm, but finally allowing myself to look at it, I found I couldn’t.