Chapter 24 – Rook #2
“She’s going to be fine,” I lied, unable to tarnish the emotion I could see in her eyes.
She swallowed, her fingernails digging into my forearms where they held her, like she couldn’t let go of me yet, either. “Take me to them?”
“ Shit, AJ ,” Grey rasped, and I realized how he was looking at her. What he was looking at.
My pulse quickened to new, impossible heights at the shade of the skin showing through a tear in the shirt she wore.
I clutched a strip of it and ripped it off, revealing her naked body and a sweep of bruises all across her lower abdomen.
She tried to cover the injury with an arm burned from wrist to elbow, a raw mess of deformed skin colored in shades I recognized from my own victims. The kind of burns that usually preceded a long suffering death.
But on her. On my Ghost, it wasn’t art.
I bent, my vision darkening at the edges as the shadow inside swelled, aching for vengeance, making me shudder.
“We need to get you to a hospital,” Grey was saying, but it was like he was speaking underwater, growing more and more distant. “Come on, baby.”
“Rook?”
I heard her call, tried to latch on to it, let it drag me to the surface, but there was a stronger call from the deep.
My vision tinted red as I rose up, watching Grey with Ava Jade cradled in his arms as he carried her back to the minivan, opening the side door to help her into the seat.
Her eyes locked with mine, disarming me like a pin put back in a grenade. The need there so clear that it rattled me back to myself, shaking liquid from the corners of my eyes.
I had no memory of movement, but suddenly I was there, stopping Grey from closing the door, slipping into the backseat with her, gently lifting her body so that she could lie across my lap. Her hands wrapped around my thigh, holding tight.
Grey shut the door behind us, jumping into the front seat.
I brushed the sweat-dampened hair away from her overheated forehead, hating how pale she looked. How frail he’d made her.
She shivered at my touch. “Promise me…” she said, her voice a low growl in the dark, beckoning to the most savage parts of me.
Grey pushed the Jag off the road with the minivan, grinding gears, alternating between drive and reverse, cursing under his breath until the dark backroad was clear and we were moving again.
“Anything.”
“Promise me he’ll suffer.”
My vision darkened as I threaded my fingers through hers, gripping tight.
“No one will ever suffer more.”
What the fuck was taking so long?
I tapped my foot on the tile, flexing my jaw, leaning over my knees with my hands clasped together.
“Shouldn’t she be out by now?” Grey echoed my worry, pacing the hallway outside the door to the x-ray room at the hospital.
The one fucking place the docs vetoed us from entering while they took comprehensive scans of her stomach and pelvic region, checking for anything worse than what we could see on the surface of her skin.
It was the last item in an hours-long endeavor to have every inch of her checked.
Which she only agreed to after seeing Corvus and Becca for herself.
Pinkie and a few of the other guys in the hall guarding both rooms regarded her with obvious shock, making way for her to pass with nods of respect.
There had been no change in Becca’s status, and Corvus was doing well, resting with a knot in his brows even in sleep.
I was going to wake him, but Ghost said not to, leaning over to kiss his forehead and brush her fingertips over the shaved hair around the new scars on his skull before taking a seat next to him.
The only reason she left to have herself checked out at all was because Grey made Pinkie promise that he’d call us the second Corvus woke up.
They attended to her burns first. My Ghost refused the offer of pain medication before they set to cleaning the burns, removing the dead skin and applying grafts. She bore it with a sort of numb resignation, the only indication it hurt at all the occasional twitch of her nose.
Grey and I each held a hand as a nurse performed a rape kit on her after she admitted she didn’t know whether he’d violated her since she’d been unconscious most of the fucking time.
She wouldn’t look at us before or after the nurse finished, jotting notes down on a clipboard and promising the doctor would share them with her once the rest of her examinations were complete.
We waited as they inserted an IV needle into her arm to get her fluids she desperately needed. And while they drew blood afterward.
Always at her side.
Until now.
It didn’t matter that we had the entire hospital filled with Saints now.
Or that the staff were aware of a potential threat with all members of security holding a picture of Drake’s face in their phones.
Right now, this door separating us from her was the most repulsive object I’d ever seen, and if she didn’t exit it in the next three seconds, I was going to break it the fuck down.
Grey’s phone rang, and he lifted it to his ear, never ceasing his pacing footsteps in front of the door.
“What?” he answered.
“Who is it?”
“Dies,” Grey replied, listening to something our father was saying on the other end. “He just got back.”
I nodded.
“I can’t right now.”
I stood, feeling heavy and cold. My body aching for more of the white powder burning a hole in my pocket.
I didn’t realize I’d stuffed my hand in, feeling the spiky edges of the foil until Grey snapped something at Diesel on the phone and I tore my hand free, swallowing the taste of acid on my tongue.
I lit a cigarette, putting it to my lips as I strode closer to the door, trying to listen to what was happening inside. The ceaseless Christmas music blaring through the halls wasn’t fucking helping my nerves, either.
“You can’t smoke in here, Rook,” Grey said, covering the receiver with his palm. “It’s a fucking hospital.”
I lifted a brow at him, ashing on the floor. “Watch me.”
Thanks to a generous donation from Diesel of the rest of our working capital as well as a blackmail threat to some jackass on the hospital board, we owned this place. At least for the next forty-eight hours.
Nothing would be reported to the useless sacks of shit at Thorn Valley PD, and I doubted a bit of laced tobacco smoke was going to change that.
He rolled his eyes, saying nothing as he went back to his conversation with Dies. “Come up here, then. I’m not leaving?—”
“Go,” I told Grey, knowing our father would want a full account of everything straight from the horse’s mouth. He’d want to know where we found her. How we found her. And anything else she told us. Which at this point was almost nothing.
She’d been painfully silent since we found her, but I knew that would change. She just needed a fucking minute to catch her breath. I’d wait. And Diesel would fucking wait, too.
“What?” Grey snapped, his gaze straying to the closed door. “I’m not?—”
“I’ve got her,” I told him, taking another drag. “I’ll bring her back down to Corv’s room as soon as she’s done.”
His expression tightened, but he nodded, speaking more roughly as he replied to our father. “I’ll be down in a sec.”
He spared one more longing look at the door before turning on his heel to leave, storming down the hall to the elevator.
I inhaled deeply through my nose and stubbed out my cigarette beneath my boot, my hand absently going back to the tiny bulge in my pocket before I curled it into a fist and knocked hard on the door.
“Almost done in there?”
No answer. I tried the handle. Locked.
“Just a second,” came a muffled reply from the nurse. I couldn’t hear my Ghost.
I banged again. Harder.
“Open up!”
No answer.
My stomach dropped.
Three… two…
I stepped back, reaching for my gun to blow the entire handle off just as the door swung open and the nurse gasped at the sight of me, shuffling backward into the room.
I pushed past her to find my Ghost wincing as she sat up on the table, her legs dangling over the edge.
She smirked at me knowingly, the first sign of life I’d seen from her since we found her. “Can’t go without me for more than five minutes?”
I narrowed my gaze on her. “Not if I can fucking help it.”
She laughed, flinching as she got to her feet, walking around the wheelchair next to the bed.
“She should really be using that until the doctor goes over these x-rays,” the nurse pressed, indicating the wheelchair.
I lifted a brow at my Ghost.
She stared at me deadpan.
“Nah,” I said, reaching for her. “I got her.”
“Mr. Clayton, you can barely walk yourself. In fact, you should be using a wheelchair, too. Crutches at least.”
Ballsy, this one.
“She’s right,” my Ghost said, looking up at me with worry creasing her brow. “Your leg.”
It was my turn to smirk. “I’ll use the crutches if you sit your ass in that wheelchair.”
Her lips pursed.
“That’s what I thought.”