Chapter Two
White Ravens
Gage
It was dark. Not the simple night comfort that came when Gage closed his eyes, it was heavy and thick like tar.
Steel bars rattled, the thunder-clap of a cell door slamming shut vibrated in his chest.
He tried to lift his hands to rub at the irritation behind his eyelids and realized they were pinned down. Wrists clasped, knees braced, ankles shackled. He bucked, and somebody laughed near his ear, a cynical cackle with breath that smelled like rubbing alcohol.
“Hold him.”
Latex-gloved hands pressed into his shoulders. He tried to kick, but the straps bit into his thighs.
“Stop! Guards!” he yelled, wanting to yank off what was stuck to his face.
Gauze? Tape? Whatever it was, it clung to his face like wet leather. He shook his head, but there was no dislodging it.
“It’ll all be over soon,” a voice sang, cunning and sweet. “Easy now. Easy.”
“Let me go!” he shouted…or he thought he did.
His mouth moved, but no sound came out. Something was shoved against his tongue. A bite block.
Two fingers dug into the lines of his eye sockets, causing heat to flare behind the lids he couldn’t open. It stung, burned. Like acid, not fire. Like lemon juice poured inside them.
No, no, no, please. No more. He tried to wrench free, but his muscles betrayed him.
Another voice, deep and bored. “He’s spiking again. Push five milligrams.”
A cold river rushed into his veins, up his arm, and exploded in his chest. The world slowed, voices became muffled, and the echoes of the prison yard faded away.
Panic pounded like a hammer behind his ribs. He tried to yell for help, but it came out as a sorry whimper.
“Quiet,” the bored man ordered again.
“Shhh,” the sweet one crooned.
A knee bore down on his midsection, restraining him as if the cinched straps weren’t doing a good enough job.
He arched his back off the table like a taut bowstring.
“Stop,” someone snapped. “Quiet.”
He couldn’t draw enough breath to beg. He swallowed and choked, then tried again.
Something slapped his face.
“Wake up.”
A voice cut through the bindings and fire, a voice he couldn’t stand.
“Shut the fuck up, Gage.”
The straps released him, and he jolted back to reality. The mask fell from his eyes, but the burning behind them didn’t stop. It never stopped.
The impatient hands on his shoulders shook him harder.
“Gage,” the voice snarled. “Shut up, or I’ll shut you up myself. You’re gonna’ get us caught.”
Gage jerked upright, his forehead slamming into Scar’s sternum. He ripped away from the grip and shoved hard enough to hear a body hit the hardwood floor.
“Don’t touch me,” he raked out in a raw voice.
Had he really been screaming?
He sat up too fast, and the world tilted. His skull throbbed as if somebody was kicking him in the back of the head.
“Then quit yelling,” Scar snapped from somewhere a step or two away. “You want every hillbilly in this county on our ass?”
Gage breathed. The air was cool and wet and tasted like manure. He lifted his hand to his temple and found crusted blood, grit, and a swelling that pulsed under his skin.
“You’re the one who crashed us here, idiot.”
Scar’s exhale sounded like a growl. “I’m not a fuckin’ pilot.”
He shouldn’t be coming down on Scar. At least they were out of the Ravens facility and alive on the ground, not blown into pieces.
The memory added to his headache.
The sound of blades screaming, the cockpit shuddering, Scar breathing like a panicked bear in a trap, cursing at the controls he had no recognition of, the horizon a blur Gage couldn’t see. Then the bone-rattling impact, the skid into dirt, the scents of gasoline and upturned earth.
Afterward, Scar had dragged him through a field, fingers hooked in his collar, yanking him so harshly his knees still felt it now.
He swallowed what he wanted to ask… Where am I?
He forced himself to calm down so he could focus because he refused to ask Scar to describe his surroundings.
Tilting his head, the dark morphed into a gray haze. He could tell light from shade, but everything else was deception.
A square that might be a doorway was in front of him. A darker block, probably Scar, was to his right, breathing as if he were barely restraining his temper.
The floor beneath him was hard like boards, no, planks of wood laid over concrete. Splinters pricked at the heel of his palm—hay or straw.
The hardness beneath his sore back was a wall of more wood, cold and slightly damp. The scent of animal dung, ammonia, and dust made him want to gag.
Scar had them hiding in a goddamn barn.
“This was the only place you could find?” he gritted.
“Yeah, well, the Ritz-Carlton had no fuckin’ vacancies, you ungrateful piece of shit,” Scar said. “I could’ve left you in the damn chopper and been halfway to Chicago by now.”
That was true, so he clamped his mouth shut. The deal was after they escaped, they’d go their separate ways.
Locked away in the white walls of the Ravens facility, they’d worked together because they had to. They’d broken out, determined not to die as someone’s failed project. But it didn’t change the history between them.
He was loyal to West Side Chicago, and he could practically smell the stench of the South Side embedded in Scar’s bones.
Gage pushed his thumb and forefinger into his eye sockets until sparks exploded in the blackness.
He turned away, didn’t want tears to well up, but they formed and trickled down anyway.
What have I done to deserve this?
He made himself get to his feet. His back cracked and his hip remembered the crash.
The barn swayed until he set his stance wide and pulled his shoulders back. He could feel Scar’s glare on him, and he refused to show weakness or fear.
Scar had been king of the South Side once, commanding a crew of a hundred strong.
Had loyal lieutenants and sergeants who watched his back.
Dirty money stacked to the ceiling, men and women on corners running powders and pills he bought by the crate.
And he’d broken or eliminated his enemies with the ease of stepping on a cockroach.
Until he went too far defending his reputation and got caught standing over three bodies with a smoking TEC-9 in his hand.
The judge gave him three life sentences without the possibility of freedom ever again.
The three years Gage was sentenced for his crime as an accessory, had been two years, three hundred sixty-four days too long.
He’d done three months before the Ravens intervened, hijacked his life, and changed his fate.
He wasn’t surprised when he failed their tests.
He wasn’t a gang leader—he hadn’t even been a member—despite being labeled as one in the penal system. It was his ignorance that’d landed him in prison, not bravado.
He wasn’t street smart or raised by a gang like Scar. He’d only been coddled and protected by one that ruled the other side of town, but never officially allowed in.
No matter what the Ravens injected into his veins, he wasn’t the monster they tried to turn him into. So when he didn’t meet their expectations, he was no longer of use.
The director said he wouldn’t keep things that didn’t work.
But Scar, on the other hand, was a mastermind, and his plan had gotten them out of there.
Now here he was, terrified, clueless, and in the dark.
Something crinkled. Scar was chewing, smacking, and Gage’s irritation flared again as his stomach growled.
Of course he didn’t get anything for me.
He was startled when a small object hit his lap.
He groped at the rectangular item with rounded edges and cool glass that flipped open. He squeezed the sides, and it lit up, the light attempting to bleed through the layers of his ruined eyes.
It was a cell phone.
He angled it away and opened his mouth to snarl before he closed it again.
“We’re in Bumfuck, North Carolina. There’s a twenty-four-hour gas station a couple miles up the road, and a town I assume will wake up soon. Also, I’d hurry to make a call and ditch the phone before it’s reported stolen.”
“How do you know we’re in North Carolina?” he asked.
His suspicion of every word Scar said was automatic.
“License plates.” He moved, his shoes scuffing on dirt. “A billboard in a cornfield the size of three football fields said, ‘Tyrel County Revival.’ You can call someone to come get you. I’m out.”
Gage’s chest tightened. “Where the hell are you going?”
“Home.”
He laughed, harsh and humorless. “Seriously? You’re still a fugitive, in case you forgot about the life sentences you were serving.”
“No ones looking for a dead man,” Scar droned. “One of the doctors from that fucked-up lab said there was a story on the news about my transport van exploding.”
Gage pfft’d. “And you believed him?”
“Look, it’s what he fuckin’ said, okay?” Scar’s tone said he didn’t give a damn if Gg3w believed him or not. “And even if it is a lie, I’m still going home.”
“It’s suicide to go back to Chicago,” he said. “Your crew will think you’re a rat, or worse, an informant. Nobody is sentenced to life and reappears on the streets five years later.”
“My crew knows me. It’ll be a celebration.”
“Okay, sure. Good luck with that,” he scoffed.
He’d been annoyed by Scar from the moment they first met. He was a bully, thief, murderer, and a miserable jerk who blamed everyone but himself for his problems.
Silence stood between them.
“How do you know those killers on the roof aren’t still hunting us?” he asked, stalling without admitting it.
“Don’t care. I beat ’em once, ain’t no thing to do it again.”
The scrape of wood, and rush of cold air hitting his face, revealed the door was opening.
“You’re a fool,” he told Scar.
“Stay here, turn yourself in, become a farm hand, whatever. I don’t care.”
The shape that was Scar disappeared through the bright block before it went dark again.
Gage sat with the sound of Scar leaving and let it infuriate him for a long moment.
He flipped open the phone—the glare causing pain to pulse in the center of his forehead—and began clumsily swiping and jabbing at the screen.
He took deep breaths to quench the panic and waited.
With all the trauma the Ravens had inflicted on him, one thing they gave him from all those injections that he appreciated was enhanced strength, the feeling of invincibility, increased stamina, and a sharpened analytical instinct that accelerated his reaction time.
I got this.
There was but one name he could think of that would come through for him, no matter what, no questions asked.
He tried to recall his friend’s number and hit a blank wall.
He whispered combinations in his mind until one finally echoed true.
Of course the keypad was familiar, but he failed the first fifty or more tries. He just had to steady himself.
He missed over and over before growling and forcing his hands to be still. Then he tried again.
Two numbers. Three. Backspace. Start over.
Did that for at least an hour. Then the line rang.
He held the phone to his ear and listened to his own breath and the rush of his pulse.
Ring.
He swallowed.
Ring.
Click.
“Yo?”
His best friend’s voice was laden with sleep and distorted by the fuzz of cheap cell service, but he knew it was him.
“Roz,” he said, damn near breaking. “It’s me.”
Silence blared on the other end before his friend whispered his name as if it was a forbidden secret.
“Gage?”