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It was the third dinner he’d prepared for us all since we came back to the Nest. Three days and we still hadnothing. I was getting restless, and I could tell everyone else was, too. Grey set to shoveling the brown butter potatoes and rare steak into his mouth, but I could tell he wasn’t really tasting it. He had that faraway look in his eyes. The one he’d worn since the morning we woke up after he fucked me until I couldn’t see straight.
He’d gone straight back to work, wrapped in a blanket instead of bothering to get dressed. And even now, as he ate, he was still fucking working. His scholarly mind trying to find an angle he hadn’t already thought of.
Rook stood, elbows leaned on the center island as he pushed his steak and potatoes around on his plate with a scowl on his lips.
“Eat,” Corvus ordered, glaring at both Rook and me as he slid into the last stool, dropping his own plate in front of him. “I didn’t spend an hour mothering those potatoes for them to get fucking cold.”
I sighed, popping one into my mouth. It was incredible, but so was everything he’d ever cooked for us. I couldn’t bring myself to give a compliment tonight, though. We still had another day before our planned heist of female Hitler’s fancy eggs and pearls. Grey needed a specific type of decoder to get past her home security system, which should be arriving tomorrow morning.
And then we’d have to wait a day or two while Diesel secured a black market buyer.
The day after that was the planned meet with the Mexicans, when we’d need to have the cash in hand no matter what happened any of the days before.
Once we had those weapons and ammunition, there was still the teeny tiny problem of not knowing where the fuck Carson was. Or the rest of the Kings for that matter.
While we sat here, eating a gourmet meal surrounded by grouchy sleep-deprived Saints, they could be planning their next move.
At least Corvus was looking and feeling better. And I had to admit the time spent at rest made all the difference for me, even if it wasn’t what I wished I was doing. The burns along my forearm were still gnarly as fuck, but they’d stopped seeping, and in another few days I figured I could remove the bandages for good. The bruises along my stomach had turned a sickly shade of yellow, and would fade completely soon… even if the internal trauma couldn’t be so easily healed.
But the main thing was the complete and utterlackof voices in my head. Aside from some very vivid dreams and night sweats, turned out that nurse was right. I wasn’t crazy. At least, I wasn’thearing voices crazy.I was definitely the other kind.
“Try the horseradish sauce,” Corvus urged, pointing the sharp end of his steak knife toward my plate and the white sauce spilling over the sliced strips of steak.
I let my fork clatter to the plate and sat up, leaning to my right to take Rook’s half-drunk glass of the good bourbon he’d been slowly working his way through this week.
“I can get you your own,” he offered, and I lifted a brow at the hostility in his tone.
“I don’t want my own,” I parried, tossing the rest of it back with a shiver as the burn flushed down my throat to my belly.
He gave me a look before going to get himself a brand new glass from the cupboard.
“Someone’s grouchy,” I muttered to myself, setting the empty glass down.
“How’s the search coming?” Corvus asked Grey, and I caught the way he flinched at the question. It was all anyone wanted to know. The Saints asked him every time he left his room to take a piss. Diesel asked him every time he called. He didn’t need the pressure from us, too.
“Would you leave him alone?” I snapped. “He’s doing everything he can.”
Grey stood suddenly, the legs of his stool scraping over the tile as he wiped his mouth with his napkin and tossed it over his half eaten dinner. “I don’t need you to baby me, AJ. I’m going back to work.”
My nostrils flared as I leveled a murderous stare on Corvus. “And what have you done, hmm? Aren’t you supposed to be the one that thinks of everything?”
His brows lowered over his eyes, making the bright blue darken to a stormy navy under their shadows. The threat of thunder in the hard set of his shoulders and bulging biceps. “You think I haven’t been doing everything I can to find this fucker, too? What is it you think I’m doing in my room all hours of the day and night because it sure as fuck isn’t napping. I’ve exhausted all my resources. It’s like the guy doesn’t fucking exist.”
“Well, he does, and he’s still out there.” I pointed toward the window, to the long road curving away into the trees down to Briar Hall.
The reminder that not only was I likely going to be a dead girl within the week, but I’d also be a deadhigh school dropout, just made me even angrier.
Going back to class was completely out of the question. There were too many opportunities for Carson to get to us there, not to mention the possibility of innocent teens being put in the line of fire. But whether the reasoning was sound or not didn’t fucking matter to me. I’d workedhardto get to where I was with my grades, and it was all for nothing. Christmas break would be starting in two weeks and then it would be an entirely new semester with new classes. No way to make up for lost time or projects from the previous semester.
But who fucking cared, right?
Not like you needed a high school education to handle a weapon.
Dad would be so proud.
“You don’t think I know that?” Corvus growled. “You don’t think it makes me sick knowing he’s out there, walking free,breathing, after what he put you through?Hmm?”
“Then why are you in here ‘mothering your potatoes?’ ”
