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“Get over here now. Bring Grey. Either Diesel’s lost his damned mind or there’s a bigger problem.”
“Get out,” I heard Corvus growl, and Tiny began to protest when I heard the Rover door shut and the engine rev.
“Be there in ten minutes,” he snapped a second later, and the line went dead.
Ava Jade stood, her baggy white t-shirt torn to expose part of a breast. Stained red with blood dripping from a shallow cut in her forehead. “Do you want to tell me what the hell is going on?”
“Depends,” I snapped, the fury still making my vision blur with patches of darkness not so easily released this time. “Doyouhave anything you want to tell me?”
A muscle in her jaw clenched.
I ran my hands through my hair and inhaled sharply, trying to get control. Bending forward, I planted my palms on my knees and leaned against the wall until my vision cleared.
“Rook?” Ava Jade hedged and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I shoved the door to her room open, making it bounce loudly against the opposite wall as I stormed out.
What was Diesel thinking?
Ifthis was Diesel…
And if it wasn’t Diesel…
Someone was going to pay for this. We just needed to figure out who.
The tires skiddedas I drove us into the parking lot, not fast enough to cut the wheel before making us knock into a low cement piling. Grey and I both jumped out, slamming the doors behind us. I could inspect the damage to the Rover later. I had a gut wrenching feeling whatever I was about to walk into would put that damage to shame.
Rook rarely sounded like he had on the phone exactly nine minutes ago.
I braced myself for whatever was bad enough to get him that worked up, the muscles in my arms flexing and unflexing with the clenching of my fists as we found our way into Briar Hall through the front door. I’d already called ahead and told security to have the door open.
“She’s okay, right?” Grey asked in a solemn tone as we shoved through the front doors unimpeded and marched up the stairs.
“I don’t know.”
“Was it a trial?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, did Rook say anything about—”
“I don’t fucking know anything,” I growled at him, slicking my hair back as we neared her door.
I hadn’t seen my Sparrow or heard from her since this morning. I didn’t know how I’d handle it if she asked me to leave.
Watching her break this morning opened some long-forgotten wounds deep inside. Ifeltfor the first time in a long time. I felt her pain as acutely as I once felt my own before I learned to block it out.
I’d never wanted so badly to be someone who had the ability to comfort someone else. And that song.Mysong.
I couldn’t get the sound of her voice singing my words out of my head all fucking day. I got why Rook had taken to calling her Ghost. She was haunting me, too.
The door was open when we got to it, and we pushed our way inside with ease, my hand unconsciously going to the butt of the gun tucked neatly into the back of my jeans.
Rook sat, elbow on knees on the couch, his fingers steepled against his lips. Ava Jade and Becca sat on the couch opposite him, and it seemed we’d interrupted some hushed conversation between them. Becca was deathly pale. Her bloodshot eyes strained with the knots in her forehead.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to see her there, and yet I was. Did this have something to do with her?
That’s when I noticed the bruises. In a ring of purpling flesh around Ava Jade’s throat. The crusted blood in her hairline and the shallow cut it’d come from. How pale she was, too.
“AJ,” Grey said on a breath and her eyes snapped to mine for an instant before falling away as Grey approached her, going down on one knee before her on the couch to reach up and gently touch the bruising on her neck.
