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Rook leaned back and wrapped an arm around my Sparrow, smiling down at her in a way that made my teeth clench. She leaned into him, wiping away a tear from the force of her laughter. “Fuck,” she said on a breath. “That was fun.”
“Our little misfit here just passed her first trial,” Rook said with a lopsided grin, and I frowned.
“What the fuck did you just say?”
“Diesel was busy,” Rook explained with a shrug. “He said I should devise something for her first trial until he could get around to having something set up.”
His words were like a punch to the gut.
Diesel had askedRookfor help with her trials, but he didn’t eventellme. He always told me.
He never kept me in the dark.
He wouldn’t—
He would, I realized, the knots in my stomach tightening for an entirely different reason now.
Damn.
Diesel asked Rookspecificallyto facilitate her first trial because he thought Rook would scare her off. He’d be the most likely to. And the least likely of the three of us to care what happened to her.
Except Diesel was wrong.
About Rook.
About Ava Jade.
He was wrong about a lot of things.
He didn’t know that Billy the Butcher’s blood was on her hands. Grey had filled us in on the footage he found on her phone. Footage he’d erased from the drive for good. She’d been there, watching us, and not only had she done nothing to try to stop us from giving Billy his warning, she’d decided that wasn’t good enough.
She’d not only hidden quietly as we tortured him, but also finished him off after we left. EvenIstill didn’t know what to make of that. My controlling nature told me she should be punished for her insubordination. We had a system. A way of doing things, and she was upsetting that. Fucking it up beyond repair.
And my inquisitiveness had me begging the question of whether it was the first time she’d killed. I didn’t think it was. She wasn’t haunted by it. I’d seen her the very next day, and she’d looked rested. Happy, even.
Like Rook after a kill. As though something inside of her had been sated.
She’d surprised us in every possible way. Shecontinuedto surprise us. She would continue to surprise Diesel, too, until she would win him over. I was sure of it. So long as she lived long enough.
“We should dump the phones,” Sparrow said, licking around the base of the ice cream cone to clean up the drips of vanilla in a way that drove me absolutely mad.
I shook my head, the situation coming back into focus as Grey drove over a deep hole in the terrain and I bounced in my seat, hitting my head on the roof with a curse.
“Phones?”
“We took their phones,” Sparrow explained. “We should dump them before we get too far away so they can’t trace our route.”
I narrowed my gaze on Rook, who shrugged.
“You held up the diner?” I asked redundantly. “Withher?”
“You should’ve seen her, man.” He bit his lip ring as he gazed down at her eating her ice cream, happier than a pig in shit. “She didn’t know shit, but when I put the gun to her head, she played them all like fiddles. Could’ve had a career as an actress. I’d watch that movie on repeat.”
She let out a little giggle, still high from the job, her pupils wide and dark.
“You put a fucking gun to her head?” Grey demanded, making Sparrow squint at the back of his head in the front seat while Rook began picking cell phones out of a bag of cash and tossing them out the rear window, unperturbed.
“She’s still alive, isn’t she?” Rook asked with a raised brow and Grey shook his head, his jaw flexing from what I could see of his side profile.
