Chapter 25 – Ava Jade
AVA JADE
T he broken pair of us used one another to stay standing as we walked back down the long hall toward the elevators. I choked on a breath, seeing my father standing behind the nurse in the box as the doors closed.
Not fucking real.
I squeezed Rook’s arm, feeling how solid he was. This was real. I tried to make my tired mind remember the difference.
“Where did Grey go?” I asked.
Rook licked his lips, running his teeth over the piercing at the edge of his mouth. “Gone to tell Diesel what’s up. We’re headed down there now.”
His hand trembled where I held it in the crook of my elbow. I squeezed it, but the tremble didn’t quit. “Are you okay?”
A dark laugh passed his lips. “Am I okay?”
“That’s what I asked.”
He went from licking dry lips to biting them, his dark eyes downcast. A knot between his brows. He looked so pale, I realized. The hollows below his eyes were beyond normal Corvus levels and that was saying something.
Tonight, he looked like the Ghost. Not me. I wondered how long it’d been since he slept. If it was me, I wouldn’t have wanted to sleep until I knew he was safe.
Scratch that, I wouldn’t sleep.
At all.
I pulled him to a stop, making him turn his attention to me. Rook looked down at me with a question in his eyes. Deep brown overtaken with iris’ blacker than I’d ever seen them.
My hand found his chest beneath the leather jacket he wore, and I pressed into him, needing him to feel me.
To know that I was here and safe. That he could relax the tension I could sense all over his body.
Pulling his shoulders tight. Flexing in his legs and up and down his tatted arms. He was wound tighter than a fucking top.
“I’m here, now,” I muttered. “You can breathe.”
Humoring me, he took a long, slow breath, but it came out shaky, and when he bent his head to mine, pressing our foreheads together, I felt the cadence of his heart beating against my palm.
A thundering gallop in his chest.
I gasped, pulling him closer, putting my ear to his chest, listening to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. The insane speed of his pulse thump-thumped against my cheek like a cheetah at full sprint.
When I pulled away, I could see it written all over his face. The guilt and shame. The pain. The fear.
“What did you do?”
He looked away, his jaw grinding.
He wasn’t going to get off that fucking easy. I snatched his hand and dragged him the few yards down the hall to a door labeled ‘Supply Closet,’ opening it and shoving him inside. I closed the door behind us.
“Where is it?”
He didn’t even bother trying to deny it, instead his gaze tracked to his left pocket, and I dug into it, coming up with a small ball of foil.
Hot tears burned in my eyes as I clenched it in my fist. “ Why? ”
“I needed it?—”
“That’s bullshit.”
He bristled, still unwilling to look me in the eyes.
“Where did you get it?”
My tired mind was already trying to work through the logistics of how to proceed from here. What I needed to do. Slit his dealer’s throat was number one on the list, followed closely by chaining his rogue ass to something immovable until all of it left his system.
He backed away a step in the tight space, leaning against a shelf full of mop heads and jugs of bleach. The whole room stank of it.
“I asked you a fucking question,” I snapped, closing the gap he tried to put between us, needing him to see how serious I was.
I may not have been there, but I knew what he went through from the stories the guys told me and all the things they didn’t say about those dark years but communicated about with their solemn silence and looks.
It was bad. And it had been even worse trying to get him clean.
“That,” he said, nodding at my closed fist and the drugs I held. “From a guy in Lennox. But the first eight ball came from?—”
He cut himself off, clenching his teeth.
“From who?”
“Take a guess.”
My lips popped open.
“He left it for me in the shed at the Nest. A gift.”
“And your first thought was hey, I’ll just put this right up my nose? ” I was screaming now, but I couldn’t help it. My skin was buzzing, burning with rage.
I shoved him hard in the chest. “What if it’d been laced? What if he was trying to kill you and you just?—”
“I didn’t do it when I fucking found it,” Rook interrupted, hurt in his coked out eyes. “I had it for weeks before I did it. It was only when?—”
“When what?”
“Fuck, Ghost, let me finish!”
I stifled the very real urge to punch him in the dick and walk out the door.
He sighed. “When you didn’t come back. That’s when I did it. When I realized that something was wrong and you needed me . You needed us.”
His words dulled some of the anger and fear dancing behind my ribcage, but I’d heard excuses from my mom a thousand times before. Addicts would say anything to rationalize their actions. The reasons why they ‘needed’ to use.
I tried . I tried not to let those past experiences taint what was happening right here and right now, but the fear-fueled rage inside was already building.
“I couldn’t let myself sleep,” he added when I said nothing. “I needed to stay alert. I needed?—”
I shook my head and he stopped talking.
The rage that’d been building didn’t crescendo, instead it shattered, my chest aching. Because it wasn’t rage at all. It was sadness. Fear. Guilt.
“You can’t do this to yourself,” I whispered. “I won’t let you.”
I opened my fist, looking down at the repulsive shining ball in the center of my palm, looking up at him.
Before I could drop it to the floor and stomp on it, Rook plucked it from my palm and did just that, grinding it under the toe of his black boot. “I don’t need it anymore,” he said quietly.
He reached into his jacket and grabbed the pack of cigarettes there, offering them to me along with a small metal flask he pulled from his back pocket.
“I don’t need any of it. Take it. I just…”
His Adam’s apple bobbed.
“I just need you, Ghost. I can’t do this without you.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat, my eyes burning. “Do what?”
He gestured vaguely all around us. “Any of it. It’s like I’ve been living in the dark, buried six fucking feet underground since you…”
He dropped his arms, defeated. “It’s like I can finally breathe. Finally feel the sun. I couldn’t go back. I can’t go back. Not now that I know what this feels like. So take it. Take it all. I’ll be whatever you want me to be.”
I shakily took the pack of cigarettes from him, fingering one out to put it to my lips, looking up at him expectantly, a ball of emotion tight in my chest.
His lips twitched at the corner, and he held back a laugh as he took the lighter from his pocket and leaned in, lighting the tip as I inhaled long and deep.
I blew the smoke over our heads, my whole body sighing at the release from the tobacco.
“I don’t want you to change for me, Rook.
” I tried to sound strong even though I felt far from it right now, with his words ringing in my ears, whispering that I was loved deeply.
More than I ever thought I deserved. “Don’t brighten your darkness or blunt your edges for anyone . You’re perfect the way you are.”
I pointed to him with the ash end of the cigarette, waiting for his eyes to align with mine, for him to see the darkness there, before I spoke. “But if you ever touch that shit again, I will fucking destroy you.”
He grinned. “ Mmmm ,” he purred, and a gear shifted between us. “Is that a promise?”
“I’m not fucking around.”
He bit his lip ring, crowding me in against the closed door until I could feel his heat against my chest, his breath against my cheek. I took another drag of the cigarette, outwardly ignoring his antics even though inside, I was aching with a need for him so strong I thought it might tear me apart.
“Swear to me,” I said, back arching of its own accord as his teeth scraped along the sensitive skin below my ear.
“Hmm?”
“If you get an urge that you don’t think you can suppress on your own…”
He gripped my left hip, pressing his semi into my belly as he continued a torturous trek of teeth and tongue down my throat to my collarbone.
My toes curled.
“…that you’ll tell me. So I can help you.”
He pulled back, and I saw the war he hid from everyone raging inside. The one I was willing to bet he waged on himself every day, hiding behind an aloof exterior but always fighting the darkness, and the need to dull it by any means necessary.
The battle he was no longer hiding from me .
“I swear.”
I dropped the cigarette, and he crushed the remnants of it on the cement floor, dropping the flask to the ground with a clatter as his strong fingers curled around the back of my neck, pulling my lips to his.
He kissed me like a man who’d just received a pardon from death row. Like it was the first time and the last time he’d ever be able to hold me.
I moaned against his lips as he took me, his tongue finding mine as he inhaled me deep, his fist twisting in my hair. I clutched his jacket like it was the only thing anchoring me to this moment.
My body ached inside and out with my need for him. When he pressed between my legs, I cried out, and he stilled, backing off, his lips leaving mine.
His eyes found mine in the dark before slipping low, to the bruises across my abdomen now hidden by the baggy hospital gown whispering against my pebbled nipples.
I could sense his hesitation, only making me grip him tighter. “No,” I all but snapped. “I need you. Right now .”
I’d never needed anything more.
His grip on my hip loosened, and I swear to Christ I almost hit him, but he didn’t let go, just relaxed his grip. His fist in my hair uncurled to trace a gentle path down the side of my neck to my collarbone. I shivered and his teeth flashed in the dim light.
“Then you’ll have me.”
Confused, I cocked my head, a question on my parted lips as he easily untied the string holding my hospital gown to my body and it slipped to the floor.