Chapter 28 – Ava Jade
AVA JADE
“ I t’s been five days.” Corvus was snarling at the doctor when Rook and I entered his hospital room to find him struggling to untie the knotted hospital gown. “I’m done lying in that fucking bed.”
“If you could just allow a few more tests to ensure?—”
“No.”
“Mr. James, it’s important for you to keep your blood pressure down. If you could just sit?—”
“I said no .”
“Corvus motherfucking James,” I hissed from the doorway just as he managed to get his fingers on the strings at his back and untie them.
His hospital gown dropped to the floor, showing all six feet five inches of glory that was his body.
Even with the bruising over most of his left side and the bandages on his bald head, he was every inch the rock-god I knew.
Right down to the flaccid, but still insanely impressive length of his cock brushing against his thigh.
“Sparrow?”
“Sit the fuck down,” I ordered him, but he stood his ground, somehow managing to look intimidating despite the fact that he was just as naked as the day he was born.
His hands curled in like talons at his sides. “I can’t sit there anymore.”
“Too fucking bad.”
Rook cleared his throat, and I didn’t have to turn around to see the smirk I knew I’d find on his lips. No one talked to Corvus James like this. No one except me could get away with it.
There was a thrilling sort of power in that. And call it a high from just finding out that I was not, in fact, totally insane, but I was feeling pretty damn good.
“Tell her what you told me,” Corvus implored the doctor, whose expression clearly said he’d already given up on trying to make this stubborn bastard do anything he didn’t want to.
He ran his hand through his sandy hair and sighed. “I said that he was progressing well.”
“And?” Corvus urged, a vein in his neck bugging out as he crossed the floor on remarkably steady feet and grabbed a pair of folded jeans from the windowsill. The fact that the curtains were wide open seemed not to concern him as he bent to pull them on, covering himself.
“And that the scans we did this morning gave me cause to believe there won’t be any lasting brain damage.”
Corvus padded barefoot to the private bathroom, making us all wait while he took a piss before he returned to the room.
The doc leaned in to whisper in my ear. “To be cautious, I’d like to keep him for another day or two under observation.”
“Then he’ll stay.”
“The fuck I will,” Corvus growled, plopping his ass down in the chair in the corner to lace up his boots.
I vibrated with rage. “You’re the idiot who threw yourself off a building,” I spat. “The least you can do?—”
“ Ava Jade ,” he snapped back, inhaling deeply to check himself with palms rubbing down his face. “Rook told me you refused the wheel chair.”
“That’s different.”
“It’s not. I’ve stayed in that bed like my father wanted. Like you all wanted for five days. I have a massive fucking headache and my whole body hurts, but the doc says I’ll be fine as long as I take it easy. Isn’t that right?”
The stare he fixed the doc with would’ve reduced a lesser man to a stuttering fool in a puddle of his own piss. The doc lifted his chin. “I did.”
Corvus jerked his chin in Rook’s direction. “You got a problem with this?”
I spun to give Rook a warning stare to which he raised his hands and stepped farther away from me. “Fuck no. I’m not getting in the middle of this shit.”
“What are you doing out of bed,” Grey asked, stepping into the room behind me, forcing me to get out of the way for him to come in.
“ Thank you,” I said. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
Corvus tipped his head back, letting out an exasperated groan. “Look, Sparrow, I’ll do whatever you want, okay? Anything except get back into that fucking sickbed, you get me?”
My nostrils flared. “Do the tests then.”
“What?”
“Can you schedule all the remaining tests you wanted to do for this afternoon? We have to leave here by six.”
The doc raised his brows. “That’s a bit short notice, I’d have to move a lot of things around and I’m not sure?—”
“Move them,” I told him, leaning into that Saint power. “Corvus will submit himself to every test you want to run, and then he’ll come home with us, but you will send a nurse to check on him every morning until you’re certain he’s in the clear.”
Corvus pinched the bridge of his nose, clearly put off by my non-negotiable suggestions, but he’d finally shut his stubborn mouth so that was a win.
The doc’s bedside manner mask slipped as he nodded, revealing just how pissed he was at this entire arrangement, and being the one on the hook for Corvus’ recovery.
I hated to think what Diesel St. Crow would do to him if Corvus didn’t completely pull through from his injuries. It wouldn’t be pretty.
“Thank you,” I called after him earnestly as he left the room.
Corvus stood, going to fetch the shirt that went with the jeans Diesel left for him and pull it on. “Pretty fucking happy with yourself, aren’t you?” he asked without looking in my direction at all.
“How does it feel to give up some of that control, Bones?”
At his nickname, he jerked his eyes up, and I watched something inside of him tighten with hope.
“Like I just swallowed a bitter pill.”
“Get used to it, you’ll be swallowing a lot more of them before we finish this.”
I wouldn’t make him suffer too much. I played a crucial part in our monumental fuck up, but there was one thing he was right about, and it was that I wouldn’t stand for any man speaking to me the way he did that night on the Docks.
I deserved to be reprimanded but not like that.
Not from him . Not to mention that the jackass tried to kill himself to stop me being raped, as if one was worth the other.
As if stopping my pain and torment was somehow worth his entire fucking life.
That was what I was mostly angry about, despite how it also broke my heart in the most brutal, beautiful way.
Okay… and it was kind of amazing to watch him grovel.
Ava Jade, bringing big bad men to their knees since 2022.
“Speaking of bitter pills,” Grey said, crossing the room to sit in the chair Corvus had vacated, opening a laptop. “Are we ready to get started? I’ve hit a wall with what I could find based on the information AJ gave us already. I need more to go on.”
He spoke so matter-of-factly, I knew I couldn’t be the only one to pick up on it. There was no emotion there. He’d cut himself off from me, and I didn’t know how to stitch us back together.
My heart hurt, watching him not look at me as he adjusted himself in the chair, likely opening up a notepad on the screen to take any notes that might help him later on.
My guys watched me and with the searchlights of their stares blazing into me, I felt like I had an audience of thousands instead of just three.
“Take your time,” Corvus said, all the stubbornness he’d been holding onto gone now with something more important for him to focus on.
I could tell, even more than the others, that he’d been starving for this moment.
His analytical mind hungry for information it could store and use to our advantage.
No time like the present to disappoint him.
I imagined myself as an omniscient presence in the room, watching myself speak instead of doing the speaking myself. It was easier to get through it that way, telling it like a scary story rather than as something real and tangible. A thing I’d experienced.
If I let the disgust—the absolute rage—show on my face while I told them how he’d kicked me while I was down and unable to move, touched me while I was tied down, and every other sick thing he’d done to me, it would only hurt them too. Exacerbate their rage.
And right now, I needed them thinking clearly.
We all needed to be thinking clearly if we were going to beat him.
I didn’t like how quiet it’d been since I escaped. Quiet wasn’t good. It meant Drake was planning something and we needed to stop whatever the fuck that was before he could follow through.
When I finished, none of them spoke. The room had a dark aura hanging over it, the sort of shadows not even the deep orange glow of the sunset through the curtains could cut.
“You set yourself on fire to escape?” Rook asked, his dark eyes stroking the length of the bandage on my arm with something close to reverence even though his face was a shade of pale green I’d never seen before.
I nodded. “It was the only way.”
Grey squinted at me in disbelief. “And then you ran over twenty miles through the forest to the road?”
“About that. I don’t really know exactly how far it was. That was what it felt like. It could’ve been less. I passed out somewhere in the middle.”
“And then you two just happened to find her on the road?” Corvus asked the guys, and I didn’t miss how they were focusing their inquiries on my escape rather than my capture. It took me a couple days to be ready to recap it. It would take them longer.
Rook nodded. “She was trying to hijack a minivan.”
“How else was I supposed to get back to Thorn Valley? Walk?”
Rook shook his head, his attempt at a smile dying before it could be born. “No one’s judging, Ghost.”
“What do you think he meant about Thorn Valley rightfully belonging to him?” Corvus asked, changing the subject.
“I don’t know, but I fucking knew Mav was just a front man. Guy has no balls.” Rook sniffed, rubbing his nose between his thumb and finger. No doubt it was still bothering him.
At least my intel gave him something else to think about. I didn’t realize I even had so many little useful tidbits until I started going through it all step by stomach-churning step.
Grey cocked his head to the side. “Does this mean we were right about the Kings gunning for us from the start?”
Rook sighed. “Diesel is going to shit a brick.”
A tap on the door interrupted their questions and I didn’t think I’d ever been so happy to see a man in uniform. “Mr. James,” the doc said, coming in without an invitation. “We’re ready for your final tests.”