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I’d kill whoever shot her.
It didn’t matter who it was.
“Rook,” someone said, but their voice was so distant I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just in my head.
“Rook!”
I found Corvus’ blue eyes and flinched as he clutched my arms, shaking me. “Hey. Stay with us here, okay. She’s okay. She’s alive. She escaped.”
“She passed the trial,” Grey added, using his teeth to rip open a packet of gauze and jam it into the wound.
Ava Jade coughed, squirming as Grey packed her injury with the gauze, her storm-cloud eyes going wide. “Fuck,” she croaked, just barely holding onto consciousness.
Her fingers curled into my leather jacket over her stomach, pulling it tighter to her.
“Sparrow?” Corvus shouted, going around the other side of the bar to assess her. He lifted his phone flashlight high and pulled down her eyelids, checking dilation.
She weakly batted him away, her face screwing up in a sour frown. “S-stop,” she stammered, her teeth beginning to chatter.
“What happened, AJ?” Grey asked, winding a clean bandage around her wound.
She blinked, her eyes coming more into focus, and focusing on me.
I went to her, and when she reached for my hand, I let her take it, holding her clammy fingers tight until some color returned to her cheeks.
“I j-jumped,” she said, and Corvus and I shared a look.
“Hold on,” Grey muttered, running to the couch at the other end of our small private bar area and the arsenal of guns locked up against the wall. He tore down the woven Saints banner hanging from the wall there and brought it back over, draping it over my jacket and her whole body. She shivered, giving him a grateful look.
“You jumped from where?” Corvus asked, his gaze lethally steady as he waited for her to reply.
“The c-c-cliffs. A mile from here.”
“You swam a mile injured?” Grey asked, incredulous.
“A mile…” Corvus trailed off, the realization I’d just come to dawning on his face. Diesel had taken her to the same place he’d taken Foley. The Deadwood. Where we’d been burying traitors and enemies for years. Which meant…
“That’s a seventy-five-foot drop. At least.”
“What the hell were you thinking, Sparrow? You could have died.”
Her eyes flashed with malice. “I would have died if Ididn’tj-jump.”
Heat rushed up my spine and warmed my face. This had gone too far.
The trials were meant to be a challenge and more than a few had died before they could earn a space on our crew, but the trials were always fair. A challenge, made to push the one taking them to the limits of what they could survive, butfair. There had been five Saints with Diesel. Six in total, against one.
Even with the head start I was certain he’d have given her, where was the fairness in that?
“Who shot you?” The question passed my lips without conscious thought. “I want a name.”
“Rook,” Grey warned, and I gave a look that dared him to challenge me again.
Ghost smirked, a tiny laugh stopped by her closed mouth that turned into a cough. “The stag,” she said and my brows furrowed in confusion. “But don’t worry, I took one of his eyes.”
It was my turn to smile now, and I gave her hands a squeeze. “Of course you did.”
“D-did you guys really think I wasn’t going to make it?” She coughed again, her whole body racking. “Glad to know you have s-so much faith in me.”
