CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Griffin
W hat in fuck’s sake is happening? How the hell is Hadleigh here? Where the hell is Ava? All those thoughts get pushed aside when Hadleigh rushes toward me with a bloodied knife.
“Whoa,” I say and reach out my gloved hand to grab the knife. It falls from her hands, and I kick it away. “Hadleigh, it’s me, stop.”
Still screaming nothing intelligible, she turns in my hold, hooking her legs around mine to take me down. A practiced move I saw her being taught in BUD/S training.
I land on my back, the AR that I swung behind me digging into my lower spine. The added weight of Hadleigh on top of me doesn’t register. She’s punching me in the nose, the mouth, the jaw. Her bloodied hands keep slipping from my grip to stop her from fucking rearranging my face.
“Jesus!” Connor yells and grabs her from behind while she kicks.
I get to my feet, and feeling I have no choice, I pull my rifle forward, pointing it at her. I’m so fucking shaken and on edge.
Shane rushes in, pointing his gun, too. “What the bleedin’ hell?”
“Lass, we got you. Calm down,” Connor says, putting her in a chokehold.
She screams, the sound matching what I heard until she gasps for air and collapses like all her bones turned to rubber and melted.
Uh oh.
Connor lowers her to the floor, his eyes wide. “Shite. I’m sorry. She...”
Stunned, we stand over her. Her eyes are closed but she’s breathing. I circle her, confused as all fuck
“What the hell happened to her?” Connor says, looking around. “Holy fuck, is that Brandon?”
“Aye,” I answer, shaking. “She was carving him up when I turned that corner.”
“Look at her,” Shane says, his breath hitching. “She looks like shit. She’s skin and bones. I saw a cage in the other room. What the hell did Brandon do to her? Poor Ava.”
I swing around, and I know I’ll sound like a lunatic.
“That’s not Ava. That’s... That’s a woman named Hadleigh. I... I met her seven years ago at Coronado. She was training to be a SEAL. She had blonde hair, but those eyes...” I’d know those haunting sable eyes anywhere.
Shane and Connor cinch their foreheads at me, looking like I have ten heads.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Shane pulls his phone from his back pocket and holds it up. “ That’s Ava Zervas. Ares just sent me this photo of her.”
I gawk at the woman, fearing she’ll carve me up next when she wakes up. With my mind in a vortex, something catches my eye underneath all that dark hair.
My stomach doing flip flops, I bend down and brush the long, thick strands away from her ear.
A raven tattoo.
“Shane, what does this mean?” I ask, slightly terrified to be honest.
He hesitates to get close to her like she’s a bomb. She already blew my world apart. Finally, he takes a few steps to get a look behind her right ear.
After snapping a photo, he turns and runs it through databases he’s hacked from every possible source. He releases a tired sigh and then pinches the bridge of his nose.
“I believe you that she’s a woman you met in SEAL training.” Shane clears his throat. “That tattoo is a symbol of a covert CIA unit called the RAVENs. A black ops team made up of female soldiers from various branches of the military.”
“And what do they do?” I ask, my brain ready to explode.
“Kill people,” Shane answers.
Wonderful...
***
“W HAT TIME IS IT?” I ask Shane.
“Almost eleven a.m.”
“Clean-up crew is almost done, got extra guys in for this one,” Connor says, coming into one of the bedrooms in the ground-level apartment where I laid out Ava on a floor mattress.
The block is still mostly abandoned, but the clean-up team is managing the fallout and making sure we get the hell out of here without a fucking police escort straight to Rikers.
Keller was a squatter, so there’s no record he lived here. Other than the router, which was hot, and paid for with a stolen credit card. We’ll leave the place clean, and when someone finally checks on it, they’ll never know what happened.
I pick up Ava, still passed out, and bring her to a bathroom next to the bedroom. After gently laying her on the floor, I cut off these damn bloodied rags, and gasp seeing scars. Old scars. Battle scars.
“Hadleigh, what the hell?”
No, this isn’t Hadleigh. This is Ava Zervas. The woman I’m supposed to marry. The Greek princess who obviously used an alias to serve in the Navy.
Mind. Blown.
I run the shower and when it’s hot and steamy, I strip out of my blood-stained clothes. Nothing she hasn’t seen before.
I carry her into the shower stall and sit her under the spray, letting the water run across her naked body. Nothing I haven’t seen before.
She’s still toned, but way too skinny from being a prisoner for five months.
Using a washcloth, I wipe away the blood.
Ava gasps awake and tries to punch me again. I hold her fists against the tile wall behind her.
“Stop. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m cleaning you up.”
Her eyes focus on me, lips quivering, but she says nothing. Maybe all that screaming popped blood vessels in her throat. A throat I came down a few times when she sucked me off.
“Do you remember me?” I ask, wanting that connection again.
“I sure do,” she says, monotone and hoarse. “Kill me or get off me.”
“I’m not going to kill you. I was never going to kill you,” I whisper.
“Leave me alone.”
“I’d love nothing more. But we have to talk.”
When she tries to kick me, I have no choice but to straddle her, pinning her against the shower wall with my thick thighs. The hot spray hits my shoulders and water sluices across her chest.
“Why am I naked, you pervert?” Her perfect nipples harden.
“Your clothes were blood-soaked.”
“Why are you naked?” She blinks down at my cock, thickening more with every second from her heated gaze.
“Isn’t this how you remember me?” I lean in and whisper against her mouth.
Her sable eyes leave my cock and roam my face. “I don’t remember your lips being so big, or your nose out of whack. What happened to you?”
“You beat the hell out of me just now.” And I loved it...
“I have new clothes for you both, Griff,” Connor peeks behind the shower curtain. “Hey, moved right to the honeymoon?”
I use my elbow to push him away. She’s naked and she’s my... Christ, I don’t know what to think about her anymore.
“Ava, listen to me...” I have to get my shit together if I’m going to survive this day. “We need to get cleaned up and get out of here. Did you kill Brandon’s guards?”
“No comment.” Her vacant eyes don’t leave mine, but it’s like she can’t see me.
Me...
I can’t imagine Brandon would decide to kill them, but it doesn’t matter.
“I’ll punch you again the second my arms are free,” she murmurs.
“It’s over, Ava.”
“Hadleigh.”
“I know you’re Ava Zervas. Your brother made a deal for you and me to be married.”
“I’m not marrying you or anyone. ” She struggles not to cry and it breaks me.
“Sorry, once I bring you back to your brother, he’ll explain it better to you.” It’s not my job to convince her. “Now, I’m getting up. You can hit me some more. You can try to escape. You won’t. I have my two brothers with me and eight other guys here to help us take you home.”
“Fuck you,” she says with a husky cadence that stiffens my cock.
“Right now? We are supposed to get married.” I lean into her ear. “I seem to recall you loved my cock.”
She struggles in my hold with bruised and scarred arms. “Get off me.”
I could lob another sexual innuendo at her, but I loosen her hands. Plus, the water is running cold. Shrinkage will set in. Leaving her hands slack, I wait to be punched again.
But Ava just sits there and pulls her wobbly knees into her chest until she’s rolled into a ball. The water is running clear of any blood from our bodies, so I get up and turn it off, keeping my eyes on her.
“The sooner you get up, dry off, and put on clean clothes, the sooner I can get you back to your brothers.”
When she doesn’t say anything, I step out of the shower and yank a towel from a rack to dry myself. The clothes I came here wearing, the bloodied ones are gone, taken away, and given to the clean-up crew.
Hanging on the back of the door is a...a suit.
My phone on the counter buzzes, drawing a frown. “Aw, fuck, Trace’s wedding.”