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His flashlight beam caught on me, and I gave him a half a second of time. A single look that had him dropping the beam.
“Oh, fuck. Sorry, Mr. Clayton. I thought it was—”
I was gone before he could finish, up the curving staircase and down the hall, keys out, metal slipping into the lock, It was already open.Fuck.
I walked in and Becca appeared in her doorway, her eyes wide and wild and face pale in the moonlight as she took me in, confused. Her nightgown all twisted.
A loudbangechoed through the apartment and Becca cried out, her attention jerking to Ava Jade’s closed door. Not a gunshot. Something hard knocking into an even harder surface.
I gritted my teeth and clenched my fists, the desire to go straight for that door and mow down whoever was behind it stronger than any urge that’d possessed me in a long ass time.
“AJ,” Becca breathed as the sounds of a struggle came louder through her friend’s door. She made a break across the apartment and I headed her off, catching her around the waist. A bit surprised at her willingness to run into danger for her friend. I’d misjudged her.
“You can’t help her,” I muttered in Becca’s ear, the smell of her essential oil perfume filling my nose.
She struggled to get free and shoved me, making me jerk a step back. “Don’t you have a gun or something?” she blurted, and I sighed, my back muscles going taut as the sound of something else crashing in Ava Jade’s room echoed all around us.
I snatched Becca’s wrist and jerked her back when she made another go for Ava Jade’s door.
“Go back to your room,” I ordered her. “I’ll handle it.”
She frantically looked between me and Ava Jade’s door, her eyes gleaming with frustrated, confused tears. It wasn’t fair for Ghost not to tell her friend.
“She’s taking the trials to become a Saint,” I explained simply. “This is one of them. She’s going to be fine.”
Becca’s brows drew together, but after a beat, her shoulders lowered slightly, and she closed her mouth on a heaving breath. “It doesn’t sound like it.”
Ava Jade cried out and a tremor of wrath flashed up my spine like lightning.
“Just go to your room,” I growled at Becca before turning for Ghost’s door, my vision darkening at the edges. Hot air pushed out from my lungs as I waited outside, listening carefully to the sounds within.
A male grunt.
A hard blow.
A cry of fury that could only be my Ghost’s.
I was inside in an instant, dodging an elbow as Ava Jade tackled the tall masked man to her bed. They rolled off onto the floor, and she gasped for air as they struggled.
She has this.
He’ll back off any second. Tell her she passed.
She managed to get on top of him, and I strode farther into the room, watching her as her fist connected with his jaw, knocking his head violently to the side.
Yes. Come on, Ghost.
I groaned at the violence of it. At the look on her face as she hit him again. A quiet determined fury edged in something sharper.
Wait…
She wasn’t detached like she was that night with Bri at the Docks. She was on edge. Something about this attack spooked her.
I didn’t like that.
Not one fucking bit.
Who was this guy? He was in a mask for the trial, but still, I should’ve recognized him. He was tall. Wide through the shoulders. Crowley? No, maybe Derrik?
