Chapter Twenty-Two Pax
Chapter Twenty-Two
Pax
“What the fuck was that?” It flew from my mouth as I floundered upright in bed.
Aria was already sitting up, chest heaving as she searched for the oxygen she couldn’t seem to find.
“What happened, Aria? What’s going on?”
“It was Ambrose,” she rasped as she tossed off the covers and slipped from the bed. Anxiety bound her in chains, her entire being vibrating with trepidation.
I scrubbed both palms over my face, trying to break up the confusion. To orient myself after being yanked from one reality to the other. One minute, Aria and I had been tracking through Faydor, and the next, she’d been distraught, racing into the nothingness.
A flash of a second later, we’d both tripped, like our spirits had snagged on a branch and we’d been sent toppling forward.
And we’d landed here.
Awake.
Still two hours before dawn.
“What do you mean, it was Ambrose?” The question cracked through the disordered air.
Aria rushed her palms up her arms as she hugged herself. “It was like he was right there, riding a thin line between Faydor and wherever he was. That place, I think . . .” She inhaled a shattered breath. “He called it Baahg.”
“The place you’d gone to? That night?”
“Yes.”
Rage and hate lit up my insides. “Was he trying to drag you back there? Compel you?”
“No,” she wheezed, and her eyes slammed shut.
Distress held her in a fist. “He was showing me what he was going to do.” I shifted off the side of the bed, and I slowly rounded the end of it to come to stand in front of her.
In front of this woman whose spirit was shaking so badly I could feel it battering into me. “What did he show you?”
“Dani.” She choked on her name.
Dread spiraled through the center of me.
“He’s going for her,” I said, the words blunt.
Filled with the fury this bastard evoked.
I wanted to end him. I wanted to end him with my bare fuckin’ hands. Destroy him for the destruction he’d employed. But I knew it was going to take so much more than me.
“He wants to hurt me. Make me suffer before he brings me to my end.” Aria’s voice tremored.
“Or it’s a fucking trap. A manipulation to get you where he wants you.”
“He can obviously find me anywhere, Pax. That was the whole plan, wasn’t it? That I’d draw him to me.”
“It worked before the bastard ran away.”
“And I think he’s changing tactics. He’s filled with hatred. He wants to torture me. Weaken my resolve by stealing the ones who mean the most to me.”
“Because he’s afraid,” I said. “Afraid of what you can do.”
Aria blinked those pale, pale eyes in the dimness of the room. Sparks of white flamed in their depths. “I don’t know what his twisted intentions are, but I can tell you I’m not going to let him get to her.”
She went to her phone, which was charging on the nightstand, her face pinching as she input the number, faltering over a couple of them. She wheezed in frustration, “I don’t know if I remember the exact number.”
She made the call anyway. It rang and rang. Never doing anything.
“Dang it, Dani.” Worried frustration rolled from her before she grabbed her duffel from the floor, where we’d left our things packed in case we had to leave quickly in the night. She tossed it onto the bed, unzipped it, and dug through to find a change of clothes.
“You know where she lives?” I asked.
Aria sniffled as she shucked off her sweats and dragged on a pair of jeans. “Yeah. I’ve always known she lives in Oregon, but I got her address the other night. She lives in a small suburb outside of Portland.”
“Shit.” That was almost a two-day drive straight through.
I paced the floor, roughing my hands through the mess of my hair as I toiled through my thoughts. I turned back to Aria, who was pulling a pink sweater over her head.
“Maybe he’s manipulating you, Aria. Sending you on a wild-goose chase so you’re distracted from your purpose.”
“And you know I can’t take the chance that he’s not.
” She turned toward me, her hands fisted on her chest, agony whittled into every gorgeous line on her face.
“This is Dani, Pax. My mentor. The one who was there for me through my entire childhood. The one who tried to prepare me for what it was going to be like when I first descended on Faydor. My friend. My sister.”
It was horrible what was happening with our Laven family. To all Laven. But I knew there was a special bond between Aria and Dani, just like there’d always been one between me and Timothy.
There was no way Aria would turn her back on her. And I wouldn’t be the asshole who tried to stop her.
“Do you have any idea when? What his intentions were?”
Dejection roiled in her spirit. “I just saw him outside her house . . . waiting for her. It was in the middle of the day. What day that was, I don’t know, and I can’t take the chance of waiting to warn her tonight.”
My head bobbed as I calculated, and I knew there was only one thing we could do.
“Hurry and get your things together. We’ve got to go.”
An hour and a half later, we were speeding along a remote narrow road that cut through snowed-over fields that lay dormant in the middle of winter. We were about fifty miles outside the city.
The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon, spraying pinks into the dusky gray sky, and every so often, we passed by the sporadic farmhouse tucked within the croplands.
Everything was quiet and still.
It felt like we’d gotten lost in the middle of nowhere.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Aria murmured as we flew down the road. Lines weren’t even painted on the asphalt.
“Yeah.”
Seemed crazy that this threat loomed so distinct, yet here, in this moment, there was peace. Like the world hadn’t gotten the message that things were about to go to shit. We had to keep it that way.
“In a quarter of a mile, you will reach your destination.” That generic, generated voice came from the speaker of Aria’s phone, and in the distance, we could see the metal buildings rising on the left.
A few evergreens poked up around them, and in the emerging morning light, a small prop plane took flight, its low whine filling the air as it slowly ascended.
“Do you think this is going to work?” Aria asked, fidgeting with the hem of her sweater.
We couldn’t take the chance of booking a flight on a commercial airline.
No way we could leave evidence of us flying across the country.
Not after I’d broken Aria out of that facility and the pictures on the news of her had been easily identifiable—not to mention the fact that we’d left a trail of bodies behind us.
“Don’t know. Hopefully, if you’re convincing enough.” I quirked a teasing brow at her. A slight prodding question.
She huffed. “I doubt that I’m much of an actress—but I’ve had to tell plenty of lies in my life, so I suppose I’m pretty good at it.”
I reached over the console and took her hand. “The lies you told were never malicious, Aria. They were told for your survival. Both for yourself and the ones you love.”
“I know,” she whispered.
I slowed as we approached the entrance to the regional airport, and I took the left onto the short path that led to a squatty building with a slightly pitched metal roof.
It was fronted by glass and two double doors.
There were only four cars parked in the lot.
We took the fifth spot, and I killed the engine before I shifted to look at Aria. “Are you ready?”
She gave a clipped nod. “Let’s do this.”
She tossed open her door at the same time I did mine, and I rounded to the trunk, grabbed our two bags, then followed behind Aria, who was already jogging toward the entrance.
A slight edge of hysteria was wound into her demeanor. I doubted she had to dig too deep to find that facade, her anxiety from last night easy to exploit.
She burst through the door and went straight to the counter, since there wasn’t a single person in the lobby except for an older woman behind a desk. She was dressed in jeans and a floral button-down top, her thin gray hair cropped at her chin.
Aria and I both kept our sunglasses on so that we wouldn’t have to deal with the negative strike of setting someone on edge at the sight of our eyes, though they were likely to feel it anyway.
The woman lifted her head at Aria’s approach. Concern immediately twisted her expression. “Can I help you?”
“I’m so sorry to bother you, but I’m hoping you can help me.”
“Well, that’s what I’m here for. My name is Madge.” The woman had a tenderness about her as she stood from the desk she’d been sitting at and came up to the counter.
I could sense it. There wasn’t a bad bone in her body. I let go of a fraction of the tension.
“What can I do for you?” she asked.
Aria’s tongue stroked out to wet her lips.
“My husband and I . . .” Aria glanced back at me in a flurry of exasperation before she turned back to the woman.
“We’re on our honeymoon. Touring both Chicago and Indianapolis.
I got a call last night that my mom was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack . . .”
Aria croaked it, then stammered for a beat before she rushed on.
“She lives in Portland, and we immediately purchased tickets to get back to her so we can be there for her surgery, but this morning, we found our car had been broken into. Our suitcases we’d packed, to be ready for our early flight, and my purse were stolen . . .”
Madge gasped in outrage. “That’s horrible.”
Aria pressed the heel of her hand to her temple as she wheezed, “God, I was so stupid to leave it sitting on the seat for them to see it. I was just asking for this to happen. But I was so flustered I wasn’t thinking straight.”