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“Touché,” she replied, the smallest smirk on her lips. “I’m always hungry.”
“Just like Grey.”
“Why is that?” she asked as I closed the distance between us and handed her a plate.
“You’ll have to ask him. It’s not my story to tell.”
“Whatisyour story then?” she pushed as I went to sit on the armchair across the coffee table from her. My back muscles tight and head heating as the hideous memories flooded my skull.
A small grumbling sound escaped my throat as I fought them back and my Sparrow frowned, dropping her head to her plate. “Sorry, not my business.”
“No, it’s not.”
Fuck.There I went again, but I couldn’t help it.
Appetite thoroughly ruined, I set my plate down on the coffee table and leaned back in the chair to watch the movie, attempting to clear the poison seeping in.
Thepop popof gunfire. The feel of their blood, hot at first, and then later, sticky and cold and stinking. The gore of it all. The numbness. The darkness. The whispers…
Not even Rook and Grey knew what led me to be brought in by the state, left with not a single blood relative to care for me. The only one who did was Diesel. I had a different name, then. Diesel wanted us to keep our surnames when he adopted us. Until we were adults, old enough to make the decision for ourselves. The St. Crow name was a dangerous one to call your own. He wanted us to be certain we wanted to wear it.
We all planned to take the name after graduation, becoming the Crows we’ve always been in practice on paper.
James wasn’t my last name, though. It was my middle name. I’d never own to my true surname. Not ever. I couldn’tfuckingwait to change it. I begged Diesel when I was younger, but he told me it was important to remember where I came from. That I didn’t have to use the name, but I had to bear it until I came of age.
I came of age last year and Grey suggested we all wait until graduation to make it official. What was another year after being forced to carry it for over ten?
I switched to watching my Sparrow when the movie did little to help distract me. Already over halfway through her meal, she closed her eyes briefly with every bite she took, unable to hide how much she enjoyed it.
Her cutting blue-gray eyes caught me staring and she pulled the fork from between her lips with a small blush. “Where did you learn to cook?”
“Diesel taught me some things,” I replied, and she lowered her brows as though she hadn’t been expecting that response.
“What? Does it surprise you that a gang leader would be a good cook?”
“Well, kind of,yeah.”
I bit out a short laugh. “Well, he only got me started. Showed me some of the recipes his wife used to make before she passed. The rest I taught myself. I like food that tastes good.”
“What happened to her?”
I resisted the urge to bark at her. The second-hand pain of her loss I’d had to feel from my surrogate father since the day he adopted me swelling in my chest.
“She died,” I said simply, realizing how my fingers were curling into the armrest of the chair. I loosened them and coughed to clear my throat, lifting my plate again to try to force myself to eat. If I wasn’t going to fucking sleep, I knew I needed to at least eat well.
“I gathered that,” Sparrow murmured, but she didn’t press the question.
I only knew the gist of it anyway, heard from the other Saints, but never from Diesel himself. He’d been injured in a shootout, hospitalized, and on the brink of death.
His wife, strongest woman I’d ever heard of, led the attack on the offending gang. She’d planned it expertly. Not a single Saint lost their life that night, but there was a reason you never heard the nameViperanywhere in Cali after that. She wiped them from the face of the earth. Vengeance for her lover.
All the Vipers dead except for one.
The leader’s son, hiding like a coward from the fight. It was his bullet that ended her once the fighting was through.
The Saints held him until Diesel was ready to deal with him himself. I shuddered to think what was done to him, but I know that if it were me, he’d have suffered for days before I allowed him to die. Weeks even.
I watched Ava Jade finish her meal and set the plate down, leaning back to drop a hand onto her belly. What would I do if someone took her from me?
