Chapter 5
Ava
I startled awake, as if Death himself had called to me. Something was very wrong. My eyes darted across the dark hotel room, not seeing anything, but my other senses were in overdrive.
I could feel his anger and sense of betrayal still pulsing through the room, like the aftermath of a lightning strike. The sensation slid over me, raising every damned hair on my body.
Grayson had been here.
Gods, I could still smell him.
He’d been here. And he was livid.
I jumped from my bed, screaming for Owen as I darted out the door. The passage was empty. He was gone. I ran down the hall, wanting to go after him, but a hand clamped around my shoulder, stopping me.
“What… Jesus, Ava,” Owen breathed as he spun me around, his eyes wide as they swept over my face.
“What is it?” The panic started to push up my throat as he stared at me, horrified. I touched my face and felt something wet coat my fingers.
Blood.
“Is that yours? Ava! Is that yours?” Owen shouted after me as I pushed past him, back to my room.
I flicked on the lights and found the bathroom mirror.
There was blood everywhere. Just like Anderson’s building. My face, my hair, my neck, dripping down my body. My white nightgown was stained crimson.
“Ava…” Owen reached for me.
“Get it off,” I whispered, barely audible.
His hands stilled.
“Get it off,” I said again, trying to swipe the blood from my face.
“Get it off, get it off, get it off!” I cried, frantically clawing at myself.
Owen caught my hands, restraining them from scratching my skin off.
“Okay, okay,” he whispered as he forced me away from the mirror and into the shower.
“Okay. You’re okay.” He opened the water, pushing me underneath it, stepping into the shower with me.
He desperately wiped at the blood on my face with his hands, as I cried uncontrollably, shaking incessantly.
“You’re okay,” he repeated again and again as he rubbed the blood from my hair and my dress, until the water ran clear.
I kept my eyes on his, as the panic consumed me, and ate away at me. His eyes were the only things tethering me to reality, keeping me from falling into horrible places in my mind.
He sat with me on the bathroom floor until I stopped crying. Until I could breathe again. When I was ready, he fetched me clean clothes and waited for me in the bedroom, talking through the door, so I would know I wasn’t alone.
When I opened the bathroom door, I wanted to immediately slam it shut again. My room looked like a murder scene. The bed was covered in blood and… feathers?
I came closer, swallowing down the vomit. On the nightstand was a nightingale bird, stabbed through the heart, the knife imbedded into the wood underneath. Next to it was a piece of paper with Grayson’s angry handwriting.
You want to play, nightingale?
Let’s fucking play.
Gods, he was a monster. How could he do this to me?
Looking at the gruesome scene before me, I could almost feel my heart turn into stone as bitter anger burned in my belly.
But there was also fear tightening my chest. This message was anything but secret or subtle.
He was screaming in vivid red blood his wrath.
I had never expected to fear Grayson again.
Yes, I’d always known that he was a dangerous man, but had an unshakable trust that he would never hurt me.
At least not physically. Even after the message he’d left me in his torture room.
Now that trust flickered like a candle flame caught in a hurricane.
The devil’s eyes were fixed on me once again, and by the looks of it, this time would be different. There would be no sweet kisses and soft touches luring me down hell’s road. No, it would be a bloody war.
But so be it. It was a war I was willing to lose my humanity for.
He had drawn the lines, and I was on the other side of it.
No longer his princess. But an enemy. And if all the blood was any indication, he wasn’t playing around.
But neither was I, because fuck him. Only one of us would survive this or none at all.
And he might be smarter, more cunning than me, but I had nothing left to lose.
I would walk into hellfire with a smile if it meant I get to drag him down with me.