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“Again,”Corvus ordered, kicking Ava Jade’s feet wider apart. “Stop overthinking it.”
AJ grumbled something unintelligible through her teeth as she stared down the short length of the barrel, aiming at the glass bottles downfield. She fired, and the M9 kicked back into her palm.
“Fuck,” she hissed when the shot went wide again, missing all six glass bottles entirely.
I whistled low, drawing her eye. “I have to say, AJ, I thought you’d be better at this.”
It was meant to be teasing. To bring a smile to her lips, but it only deepened the grooves between her pinched brows. She’d looked like that since yesterday’s email. Up all through the night pacing, opening the fridge just to close it again, standing by the window like at any moment her stalker might appear outside of it and she could end him.
At four in the morning when she gave up and showered for the day, I joined her. Truth be told, I thought she might ask me to get out, but she turned as I stepped in with her, sighing under the stream of insanely hot water.
“I’m not in the mood,” she’d said, exhausted, but that wasn’t why I joined her. AJ let me wash her hair and scrub wide soapy circles over her back. By the time she got out, she couldn’t fall into bed fast enough. We’d only managed two hours of sleep, but it was more than I thought either of us would have after Corvus and I found nothing.
Nothing in the security office at Briar Hall.
The email traced back to an IP location in Lodi. It took a lot of ultimately useless sleuthing to find the exact pin. An alley where a piece of crap old laptop was stuffed in a dumpster, wiped clean of prints.
We had jack shit.
And it was taking its toll on all of us.
Rook chain-smoked as he leaned against a tree several feet away, his gaze unfocused as he watched Ava Jade try to hit a bottle and miss for at least the tenth time since we started.
She dropped her arm, rolling her shoulder, which was no doubt starting to get sore at this point. “This is useless. I’m just as lethal with my blades as you are with a gun. I don’t see the point to—”
“Diesel said—”
“Diesel said,” AJ mocked Corvus before he could finish. “I could’ve killed Diesel five times over by now with my blades, but I didn’t.”
Corvus pinched the bridge of his nose, inhaling long and slow. If we weren’t sleeping much, I knew that he wasn’t sleeping at all. From experience, we all knew that could only go on so long before he got so grouchy none of us would be able to stand to be around him. Or worse, it could get as bad as it used to when Rook and I were first adopted.
When his insomnia was so relentless he’d start hearing voices. Seeing things that weren’t there. His mind playing tricks on him.
If I thought I could get away with it, I’d drug his ass asleep, but I knew neither of my brothers would be chill with that as a tactic here.
“Sparrow,” Corvus warned.
She huffed.
“I have a thought,” I said, squinting into the distance to see the old barn and shed where we kept the rally cars and our backup arsenal. “We still have that sniper out here?”
Corvus looked up, considering where I was going with the question.
“Maybe this,” I said, plucking the handgun from her grasp. “Is not her thing. Maybe we try something else. If she shows promise with a sniper, we work on that and then circle back to close range arms later.”
Corvus bit the inside of his cheek. “Okay. Yeah. We’ll try it.”
AJ perked up at the mention of sniper, her eyes alight. “Are any of you any good with one?”
Rook dropped a cigarette to stomp out on the patchy grass with its friends. “Grey isn’t bad,” he said, speaking for me. “But Axel is our sharpshooter.”
AJ lifted a brow at me. “He’s right. I’m competent, but none of us are much good with one. I feel like you would be though. A lot of the same principles apply as with blade throwing. Distance perception. Wind speed and direction. Timing.”
She pursed her lips, unsure, but clearly excited to give it a shot.
“Then Rook should be decent at it,” she said. “I’ve seen him with a blade, too. He’s good.”
I nodded, but she was forgetting one thing.
