Chapter 37 – Ava Jade #3
I dipped a toe into the inky dark on the other side of the cellar doors and then kept going, letting it swallow me whole. I felt along the wall as I went, remembering the exact reverse of this moment. When I’d climbed, burned and broken up these same steps and found my freedom.
Found my way home .
I’d find my way home again. But this time, I wouldn’t go empty handed.
Careful not to make a sound, I descended to the very bottom of the stairs and reached for the door handle, seeing a trace of light through the soot covered window down the long corridor. The acrid smell of burned things stung in my nose, making it wrinkle.
I lifted a blade to eye level and released the handle, deciding to slip through the slim crack in the door instead of opening it wider, not trusting the hinges.
My tits pressed into the doorframe, and I sucked my ass in tight, just fitting.
I buried myself in the shadows of the corner next to the door, peering up where there was a camera. It was still there, but it was covered in gray ash like much of the floor, and the red light was dead.
Hopefully that meant it was, too.
No risk, no reward.
I crept along the wall, wiping the back of my hand over my eyes to get rid of the ash clinging to my lashes.
The light was coming from the very end of the hall, where a steel door hung open.
I wasn’t falling for another fucking trick.
I took my time, inspecting every room on my way down the corridor.
Some of the doors were still shut tight, locked, dark around their edges.
But others… they were filled with evidence of his abuse.
Chains bolted to the floors and walls. Crimson stains on concrete floors. Fingernails embedded in concrete walls.
My stomach turned at those, and I moved slower, checking each space as thoroughly as I could. Giving my guys more time to find me.
A sinking dread grew in my belly the longer it took them.
They should’ve found me by now.
What if me and the other snipers didn’t take out enough of the Kings to even the odds. What if…
I couldn’t bring myself to think it.
They’ll come .
“Fuck!” Carson bellowed at the end of the hall, and I covered my mouth with a palm to stifle the sound of my sharp intake of breath when an entire computer tower and monitor crashed across the opening to the room, cords snagging, keyboard keys clicking over the concrete.
“ Fuck, fuck, fuck! ”
Now or fucking never.
I ran on my toes, hopeful that the sounds of him trashing the room would conceal my advance.
I pressed my back flat against the wall outside the door, lifting a blade as something else crashed against the door and spilled into the corridor. A basket full of fucking burner phones. My skin itched with savage desire and it took everything in me not to rush in knives hot .
Maybe I should.
I clenched my teeth, sinking down to a crouch, remembering in vivid imagery the feeling of being powerless. Trapped in a cocoon of my own flesh as the drug he dosed me with took away all my fight. I couldn’t go through that again.
Angling the blade in my right hand, I pushed it closer to the door, trying to see his reflection in its freshly polished silver surface.
I couldn’t see him. What I did see was a cot pushed against a cement wall.
And another wall covered entirely in maps and images and notes and newspaper articles and a lot more I couldn’t decipher from the reflection alone.
All of it centered on us . Me. The Crows.
Diesel and the Saints. Rebecca. All interconnected with lengths of red string.
It was a serial killer wall. Fitting, since that was exactly what this filth was.
I twisted my blade just slightly and found a pair of blue eyes staring back at me. Carson cocked his head and I jerked my blade back, rounding the corner.
He dove and I threw, catching him in the thigh.
I threw my other blade, but he jerked a chair in front of himself and it embedded in the worn seat.
I bent to draw another from my ankle, unwilling to get closer to him, when he fired.
The shot grazed my forehead and knocked me back onto my tailbone. Blood gushed down into my eye, blinding me, but I couldn’t feel it. I kicked off the wall, curling up behind a desk, narrowly avoiding his next shot.
“You bitch!”
I squeezed my blood-coated eye closed and spied his back around the edge of the desk. I hurtled my other blade from lying on my side, and it thunked into the meat of his side, burrowing deep.
He cried out, and three more shots fired in the room, finding homes in the concrete as he jumped to his feet and wildly fired after me as I sprinted back out into the corridor. My eye burned, and I hissed, gasping as I slipped on a phone, landing face first on the floor.
A heavy weight pressed into my back, and I screamed as his fist twisted into my hair, rearing my head back to smash my face back down into the concrete floor, dazing me.
I coughed, choking on the coppery tang of blood in my mouth, fighting through the pain and the black spots in my vision. Wondering if I could reach his gun where he’d dropped it a few feet away.
He reared my head back again, and I used the angle to my advantage, grabbing my last blade from its holster instead and sheering it through my hair like butter.
My head came free, and I used all my upper body strength, pushing up from the ground to knock him off me, coming at him with a feral cry, blade raised, short tendrils of dark hair stroking my cheeks.
Carson fell onto his back, catching my wrist before I could sink the blade into his chest. The tip of the blade pressed through his lips parted in fear, but it was met with a tough resistance I noticed the ridges of the vest beneath his clothes.
Damn. This wasn’t going to be easy. I bared my teeth, shouting my wrath into his face as I pressed down down down with everything I had.
“ You’re no Angel ,” he spat in my face, the veins in his neck bulging like slithering eels.
“No,” I agreed. “ I’m your worst fucking nightmare. ”
With another feral cry, I locked the muscle in my back and shoved down, sinking the blade past the vest, seeing the moment it broke contact with skin from the widening of his eyes. He choked, his eyes rolling back, hands leaving my wrist to claw at his chest, gasping.
My darkness preened within and together, we shoved off him, reaching for the Wilson Combat strapped to my thigh to knock him the fuck out and drag him back to Rook’s murder shed. But the fucker was faking the punctured lung and he was fast . Faster than me.
My gun came free of the holster at the same time he pushed his against my breastbone, grabbing me by my vest to haul me close.
I gasped as Carson pumped two rounds through the Kevlar, one chasing the other, helping push it through the woven fabric to meet its mark.
The shock waves rolled through me and I felt hot wetness seep down my stomach.
My Wilson slipped from my grasp, my world tipped up, and I fell hard into whatever waited on the other side.