“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.
“I don’t have the patience,” Rook admitted. “Who wants to sit on some perch half a fucking mile away from the all the fun, waiting for the perfect shot.”
“Not you?” AJ asked, her tone dripping sarcasm.
“No, Ghost. Not me.”
“If we climb up onto the roof of the shed, we should be able to get a good line of sight down the field,” I said, pointing toward the barn and the smashed up Volvo we’d parked up beside it. “I’ll grab a can of paint. We can put a few targets on the high jump.”
“You don’t need us then?” Corvus said, a tick in his upper lip as he read something on his phone.
I frowned.
He indicated the phone in his hand. “Dies. Wants two of us to deal with another client upstairs at Sanctum. He and the others are busy keeping tabs on the Aces.”
“It’s three in the afternoon,” AJ protested.
“What?” I asked. “Is three too early to get laid? I didn’t know a good fuck had time constraints.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Yeah, we’re good,” I told Corv, gaze tracking to Rook, who looked torn between staying and going. Not wanting to leave AJ’s side and needing to vent some of his pent up rage before he exploded. “Go,” I added, jerking my head for Rook to follow Corv. “We’ll be here when you get back.”
He nodded, rolling his shoulders back with a sneer as he left.
“So,” AJ singsonged, the happiest I’d seen her since yesterday morning. “Show me the big gun?”
I laughed. “Let’s paint the targets first, and then I’ll show you the big gun.”
She made a little growly sound that went straight to my cock, biting her lower lip as she brushed past me, heading for the shed. I grabbed my sketchpad from the stump next to me and followed her, tucking the graphite pencil behind my ear.
I’d promised Max I’d come up with a few new merch designs by next week and with everything going on, I hadn’t had the time to even start.
“Just like I showed you,” I whispered, lying next to AJ on the uneven roof of the shed, binoculars pressed to my eyes, watching the three ringed target dripping red a quarter mile downfield. “Don’t hold your breath. Breathe evenly. Fire on the exhale. Slow.”
She hesitated another moment before firing, and I had the satisfaction of watching the bullet crack into the wood of the jump just a few inches outside the widest ring.
AJ grinned, readying another shot, licking her lips.
I said nothing, smirking at her focus face as she leveled her left eye with the sight. It was the best focus face.
She readjusted her position, just slightly, pinkie up to feel the breeze, and fired again.
I was almost too slow to press the binoculars to my eyes, catching only the little burst of wood where her bullet buried itself into the red line of the second inner ring.
“Damn,” I said on a breath, pulling the binoculars down, twisting to face her. “Was that really only your second shot?”
She peered at me over the barrel, a Cheshire smile on her mouth.
I reached over and shoved the gun, messing up her aim.
“Hey!”
“I have to know if it’s beginner’s luck. Start again.”
She groaned wordlessly to herself, but did as I said, finding the correct position all over again, feeling out the wind.
This time her bullet sank into the target just an inch outside of where my bullet went in when I was showing her how to shoot, grazing the inner ring of the target.
I set the binoculars down. “Well. I think we found your weapon, AJ.”
“Secondary,” she whispered, correcting me as she patted the blades on her belt. “It’s okay, babies, I would never replace you.”
I snorted as she lined up for another shot.
“Keep practicing,” I encouraged her, getting off my belly to sit against the short wall behind us where the barn attached to the shed. I checked my phone again, waiting for word from the guys. It would be getting dark soon and they still weren’t back.
Sighing, I lifted a knee, snatching up my sketchpad to try to get some other work done while I could.
She fired, and I watched her readjusting again. The long weapon at home butted against her shoulder. Fuck, she was more than I ever dreamed a woman could be. She was how I imagined Diesel’s wife to have been before she was taken from him.
Before I knew it, I was drawing AJ instead of sketching new merch designs. It happened more often than not.
When she was finally ready for a break more than thirty minutes later, having put a good dent in Diesel’s good quality lead, I was finished.
She fell against the wall next to me, rubbing out a kink in her neck, but she froze when she saw what was lying in my lap, her lips parting.
“Is that me?”
She leaned over me to get a better look.
It wasn’t anything special. Just a series of dark and light lines, but they were unmistakably her lines. The cruel curve of her mouth. The angle of her face. Her delicate ears. Long fingers curled around the trigger of the sniper rifle.
“It’s amazing.”
I tore it off the pad and handed it to her. “Keep it.”
She took it, staring at her likeness like she couldn’t believe it was her.
“Wait, is that me, too?” she asked, tapping the pad in my lap with a black fingernail.
I barked a laugh, seeing what ripping the page off had revealed.
Another drawing of her. This one of her ass.
Specifically, her bare ass, peachy and lifted as she bent over a bank of sinks in the girls washroom at Briar Hall. The mirror over the mountainous peaks of her ass and dripping cunt broken to reflect back a busted up image of me.
She snatched the pad from my hands before I could stop her, flipping quickly through the pages.
There was no point in stopping her.
Besides, maybe she should know. How irrevocably she was burnt into my thoughts.
She flipped past images of herself. Her side profile. Her hands. Her breasts dripping with water in the shower. The arch of her back, artfully covered in a wave of dark hair.
She flipped to the last page and icy dread threaded through my veins at the image on the page. An old drawing. Of another woman.
Older. With short waxen hair and a small face. Her eyes scratched out with heavy black strokes. I could never get my mother’s eyes right. Couldn’t remember what they looked like. Probably because she never looked at me. Not even when I was right in front of her.
My stomach soured.
I took the sketchpad back from AJ and flipped all the leaves back over until it was closed.
“Who is she?” AJ asked.
“My mom.”
She squinted at me. “How long since she…” she trailed off. “I mean, how old were you when…”
“She isn’t dead,” I found myself saying, muscles in my arms and across my upper back tensing. “At least, I don’t think she is.”
AJ squinted at the rough wood roof beneath us, trying to understand. I wondered if she could and a sudden burning urge to come clean seared through me.
“I look her up sometimes,” I admitted. “Type her name into search engines or social media. Just to see…”
She cocked her head, a sadness in her eyes that made my chest ache, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say any more. If I wanted her to know.
“She starved you,” she said, not a question.
“Left me,” I corrected her. “Alone in my dead stepdad’s house. For weeks at a time.”
“So you were taken away from her, then? That’s how you ended up at Barrett’s Home for Boys with Rook?”
I wasn’t surprised she knew about that. I’d have been lying if I said I hadn’t scoured Corvus’ room for her files last month, trying to understand her. Who she was.
“Yeah. My teacher found me. I was almost dead. She never came back.”
“That’s why you look for her,” AJ mused. “Because you want to see if she’s still out there, living her life, free of you. If she forgot about you.”
I cleared my throat, shifting uncomfortably. “It’s pathetic. I know.”
She grabbed my arm, making me look at her as she shook her head. “No,” she said. “No, it’s not. It’s okay to wonder. To care. You can hate her and still care to know. I’d want to know why, too. Why she couldn’t take care of you.”
That was part of it. The itching need to know how she could do it. But there was another reason I couldn’t help myself from typing her name into the search bar. The other part of me, the darker part, wanted her to suffer. Wanted to see what she would look like with her bones showing through her skin. With her eyes jaundiced and teeth falling from her mouth.
I was afraid of what I would do to her if I did find her. As if the precious few good memories of her somehow made all the fucking brutal ones tolerable.
“This doesn’t make you weak,” AJ continued. “You hear me?”
I smirked. “Yeah, AJ. I hear you.”
I lifted a hand to cup the side of her face, her cheek cold against my palm. She pushed into my touch, offering me a small sad smile before she pulled away.
“So, you draw me. Like, a lot. When did that start?”
She rolled her shoulders, the heavy vibe tumbling off. Forgotten.
“Since the first time I saw you.”
Her cheeks pinkened before she scraped to her feet. “The guys should be here soon, and it’s getting late. I’m going to go pack this shit away.”
“I’ll be right behind you.”
I breathed in the sunset, closing my eyes to feel the last of its dying rays warm my face and tint the back of my eyelids brilliant orange.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I tugged it loose. It was about time Corv answered me. For a guy who always expected an immediate response from us, he sure didn’t seem to feel like he needed to abide by the same.
My thoughts cleared at the sight of the message waiting for me when I unlocked my phone. It wasn’t from Corv. Or Dies or Rook. Not even Julia, though it boasted her trademark Unknown tag.
How the fuck…?
I swallowed, my teeth clenching as I reread the message, my stomach twisting.
Unknown: Hello, Grey. How far would you go to protect your brothers?
Another message came through before the first had a chance to settle in my mind.
Unknown: Let’s find out, shall we?
