A soft knock came at the door to my bedroom. I knew it was her. Something in the tentative double rap of her knuckles gave her away, and I shrunk into myself, resisting the urge to throw something at the door. Shout at her to fuck off and leave.
It was exactly what I’d been doing for the last two days, but even I knew I couldn’t stay in here much longer. It wasn’t that I wanted to hide from my past. It was the fact that I’d worked so fucking hard my entire life to push back those memories. To pretend what happened never happened.
To rid myself of the nightmares that left me in a tangle of sweaty sheets with bile climbing the back of my throat.
“Corvus,” Ava Jade whispered through the door. “You can tell me to fuck off if you want, but at least take some food and water. Please?”
I sighed heavily, lifting from my core to throw my legs off the edge of the bed and hang my head. “Come in.”
I’d eaten since Tuesday morning. Not much, but enough to keep me sustained. I’d crept downstairs during the early hours of the morning while everyone else in the Nest slept.
The only person I’d spoken to since I’d come home and thrown my door closed had been Diesel. He was the only one who already knew the truth of my heritage. The place and the people I’d come from. I didn’t know who told him about the email, but it didn’t matter. He’d called me right after putting in a vicious call to the principal, threatening to raze the academy to the earth if they didn’t get to the bottom of who had sent the unsanctioned newsletter to the entire student body.
The conversation between my adoptive father and me wasn’t a long one, and I’d said little more than yes or no to all the questions he had. A firm no to his offer to come by the Nest. Another no to his asking whether I knew why the guys and I seemed to be the ones under attack from the Aces.
We couldn’t hide the truth from him for much longer, because the truth was whether we had proof or not, I knew it in my bones that this was Ava Jade’s stalker. The Aces weren’t even capable of these types of attacks. Weren’t smart enough.
Whoever this was, they knew just where to stab us. How hard to twist the knife.
Diesel sent Pinkie and Axel since I’d declined his offer to put us up at Sanctum. Extra muscle packed with a small arsenal to back us up in case of an attack.
But it never came.
Tuesday blurred into Wednesday, and suddenly the sun was dawning on Thursday. Time seemed to have no bearing as I sat here, reliving the worst day of my fucking life.
Ava Jade knocked again.
I cleared my throat. “I said come in,” I called again, trying not to let my frustration creep into my voice.
She pushed into the room, a bowl clutched in one hand and a water bottle under her arm. Steam coiled off the mountain of breakfast hash in the bowl, and my stomach rumbled.
She offered a sheepish smile and came in, tip toeing across the carpet as though she was walking a tightrope.
“I’m not going to bite you,” I growled, accepting the bowl from her, suddenly aware of how terrible I smelled. I needed a fucking shower. Though if she cared, she didn’t show it, settling anxiously into a seat on the bed beside me, her palms pressing into her thighs.
“Could’ve fooled me,” she said with a half-hearted laugh, and I flinched at the reminder of all the angry things I’d shouted through that door over the past two days.
“I…”
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“So, want to tell me what I’ve missed?”
She bit her lip. “Not much. We’ve confirmed the Aces have allied with the Dead Men and are on the move. Looks like further south, but Diesel has people keeping tabs on them for now. We’re planning an attack for the end of the week.”
“Friday?”
Shit, was that tomorrow already?
She shook her head. “No. The guys are throwing Diesel a birthday party tomorrow at his place and then we have the full moon party later in the night. We’ll hash out the plan at Dies’ place and roll out early Sunday morning for the attack.”
I grunted my understanding, able to tell she wanted to ask me about it. She wanted to divert the conversation back to what she’d seen in that email blast, but I wasn’t ready just yet.
“So soon?”
“My idea,” she admitted. “We weren’t ready last time. We need to strike first this time. Strike hard. Put an end to it all.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“Where’s Becca?”
She jerked her head to the door. “In the loft. Still sleeping, I think.”
“Is that everything?”
Now I was just stalling, and I could tell she knew it, but she played along anyway.
“Almost,” she said. “We think we might know who the stalker is.”
I jerked, twisting my hips to face her. “What? Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”
She lifted a brow at me like I was the one being fucking daft. “Pretty sure you threatened to kill anyone who so much as came within two feet of your door.”
“Who is it?”
“We aren’t a hundred percent sure, but we think it’s Aries. That King that was at fight night. You know the one. He was—”
“Yeah, the creepy fucker who was watching you. I remember. Why him?”
“He was watching in the atrium when that email went through. I caught him creeping around the hall, and when I went to confront him, he ran.”
“What do you mean, he ran?”
“I mean he ran,” she said again, exasperated. “And I fucking lost him and now none of the other Kings have seen him since that morning. He hasn’t checked in with Maverick. Nothing. No word. No trace on his cell. He’s just gone.”
“He matched Becca’s description of her ex fuckbuddy, too, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she see him?”
She shook her head. “She was sick, remember? Grey showed her a still image from the security footage from that morning, but there was nothing that caught his face. She said he had the same hair and stature but that was it.”
“So…” My throbbing brain struggled to piece together all the new information. “We think Becca’s guy might also be your stalker? They might be the same person?”
She lifted one shoulder. “Maybe.”
“And that guy may not have ever been an Ace at all, but a King the whole time?”
Seemed a bit fucking far-fetched, but I’d considered all the logical options and none of them were fitting.
She let out a long gush of air. “I don’t know, Corvus. We’re still trying to figure it all out.”
“But if it’s a King, then…”
“The alliance might be a set up,” she finished for me.
“We have to tell Diesel.”
She sagged at my words, and I knew she was thinking it was just one more reason for Diesel to hate her. If we told him she had a stalker that was targeting us, he wouldn’t like it. But she was one of us now. And we protected our own. She would see.
This was the closest we’d come to any sort of lead on this guy, and I cursed my dumb ass for not being the one to figure it all out. Instead, I’d been locked up in here like some kind of depressed hermit, leaving all the work to them.
She held out the bottle of water to me, and I swallowed, accepting it from her. I set the bowl down on the nightstand, and she frowned at me.
“I’ll eat it,” I promised. “But I need to do this first.”
“Do what?”
“Did you read it?”
She blinked, her face flushing pink as she realized what I was talking about, adjusting to the abrupt change in topic. Before I could leave this room and get back to business, this needed taking care of.
“Only the first couple sentences,” she admitted. “Once I knew what it was, I stopped.”
I believed her, but I was almost disappointed. It would make hearing everything I was about to say that much harder. It would make telling her that much harder.
“And Rook? Grey?”
She shook her head. “None of us read it,” she told me. “We wouldn’t invade your privacy like that.”
I nodded to myself.
“Can you get the guys?”
Her nose wrinkled, but she nodded and left.
I drank half the bottle of water while I waited for them all to come back, my stomach both growling and turning at the idea of eating the small breakfast someone had prepared for me.
I would eat it though. It was the least I could do considering I hadn’t slept in well over seventy-two hours. Again.
“Hey, man,” Grey said, a muscle in his jaw jumping as he hovered in the doorway.
I waved him in.
“You good?”
A shaky laugh passed my lips.
“The truth? Not really, man. But what the fuck is new, right?”
His lips pressed in a tight line as he dragged the folding chair from my desk to a spot near the bed, unfolded it and sat down.
Rook and Ava Jade came in a second later. My Sparrow to the bed next to me, her back taut as she sat down. Rook bit his lip ring, crossing his arms over his chest as he toed the door closed behind him and leaned against it.
He nodded.
I nodded back, then blew out a breath, trying to get control of the ache forming behind my eyes. “I only want to tell you once,” I said to them all. “And then I never want to hear about it again.”
“You don’t have to,” my Sparrow was quick to say. “It’s really not our fucking business.”
I looked up, holding her stare, a fist clamping around my lungs at the depth of emotion in her eyes.
“I do, and it is. I know all about you,” I told her. “I know where you come from. I know every black mark on your record. I know about your dad. Your mom.”
She recoiled.
“I know about the older guy you were fucking well before it was legal for him to touch you. Kit, was it? Your friend’s self-defense instructor?”
She pursed her lips. “Well someone did their homework,” she muttered to herself, clearly trying not to be angry with me.
“I did,” I admitted. “And that isn’t even half of it.”
She blanched, and I turned my attention toward Rook and Grey. “And you’ve both always been open with me about where you came from. What made you. I owe it to you.”
Grey shook his head. “That’s not how we see it.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know everything,” Rook put in, but he was wrong. I did. I wished I didn’t. But I’d done my fucking homework on them, too.
I knew all about the fucker at Barrett’s Home for Boys who liked to defile his charges. I knew all about his time at the Sanitorium. The drugs they fed him. How long they kept him in that padded room. And how often they tied him down.
I knew.
They deserved to know about me, too.
“My last name is Adler,” I started, hating how that single word tasted on my tongue. Souring my stomach. “My father was Douglas Adler, the cult leader responsible for the deaths of a combined twelve people. It would’ve been a lot more if the cops hadn’t figured out what was going on and stopped the three other families involved from ascending too.”
“How old were you?” Sparrow asked, folding her hands tightly between her knees.
“Seven.”
I didn’t look up. Couldn’t handle seeing her face.
“I didn’t know much about what my family was caught up in. Only that people came to the house a few times a week and they would all go downstairs, to the basement, and… breathe.”
“Breathe?” Grey asked.
“Yeah. Like, weird, fast breathing. Loud. Rhythmic. And then my dad would talk for a while and they would hum. Always the same tune.”
The tune that had stuck with me, playing in my unconscious mind at all hours of the day and night, keeping me from sleep for the first month after they died. It had taken me years to finally rid myself of it.
“When my father decided it was time for us to ascend, my mother had doubts.”
“She tried to stop it?” Rook asked, his expression darkening, hand closing to fists where they were crossed over his chest. I knew he was picturing ripping my father’s throat out with his bare hands. I pictured the same thing for years.
“She told me to hide. Tucked me under my bed behind some bins and said not to make a sound.”
Ava Jade’s chin quivered, and I swallowed past the burn in my throat, needing to continue before I changed my fucking mind. “She said she was going to get my little brother next, but that was when my father came into the room. He told her Emmanuelle had already ascended and was waiting for them on the other side. I didn’t know what that meant at the time.”
I settled the tremor in my core and sat up straighter, disconnecting myself from the story. A tactic I was cautioned against when the therapist at the hospital told me I may be developing a dissociative disorder.
“She was hysterical,” I went on. “But my father calmed her down, promising her it wouldn’t hurt and that it would be over soon. He asked her to go and get me, but she told him that she’d already sent me away. Told me to run and to keep running and not stop until I got to town.”
“He was angry, but said that I would find my own way to my ascension. That they needed to be strong so that the others would follow their lead into eternal life or some other fucking shit. The memory is all fucked up, but I do remember what happened next very vividly.”
“My uncle came in, and my mom lost it. She was screaming and fighting them. I remember… I remember trying to plug my ears to keep from hearing it. I… I remember the smell of my own fucking piss in my nose. Most of all, I remember feeling completely helpless while they held her still. While she choked. Then it was Uncle’s turn to choke and then my fathers. Through the small passages between the bins, I could see contorted, blurry images of them. Pale. Still. And the red. So much red. Soaking the beige carpet. Streaking their soft white skin.”
“I don’t know how long I stayed there. A long time, I think. But at some point I crawled out. Past their bodies. I remember thinking that they said Emmanuelle had ascended and I didn’t know what that meant but I thought I needed to check on them because my parents weren’t going to. They were never going to again.”
“I found him in his crib.”
Ava Jade choked on a sob, pushing the back of her hand to her mouth to try to keep it in. I tried not to feel it; what I felt when I looked down on my tiny little brother still, bloodless, and lifeless in his crib, surrounded in a puddle of dark crimson. A hollowness to complete that I didn’t think anything would ever fill it again.
But then something did.
Anger.
A toxic rage so complete and so out of control that the state almost sent me away to juvie at eight years old. But Diesel found me. He recognized my anger. Taught me how to use it. To wield it when I needed to, and control it when I didn’t. He was the one who helped me see that the anger was directed at myself, not anyone else.
I was angry because I’d sat there, hiding my face in the carpet, plugging my ears. Crying into my pajamas. Pissing on myself.
I was angry because I did nothing to stop it. Because I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Because I didn’t see it coming.
Diesel told me if I wanted, I never had to feel that way again, and I never had. Until recently. When Sparrow flew into my world and turned it upside down, a fucking faceless wolf on her heels.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Sparrow said. “You know that, right? You know you couldn’t have done anything to stop them? You were just a kid.”
“I know.”
“That’s some twisted shit, man,” Rook said. “Even by my standards.”
I laughed hollowly.
“Doesn’t change how we see you,” Grey interjected. “Not at all. You could’ve told us.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, sniffing, using the pads of my thumb and forefinger to clear the beginning of tears from my ducts before they could show on the rims of my eyes. “Yeah. I know. I just—”
“Wasn’t ready?” Ava Jade supplemented, sighing, and I got the sense she understood more than she was letting on. I wondered if she’d ever share with us her own defining moment. The thing that twisted her beyond repair. Turned her into something powerful. A force of nature.
“I guess.”
Her bright eyes cut away from me, finding a spot on the carpet. “Are you going to be okay? I mean. Do you want to stay home again today?”
I shook my head. “Nah. I don’t give a fuck what any of them think.”
“If anyone so much as looks at you funny, I’ll cut them,” Rook promised.
“Samesies,” Ava Jade echoed, putting on a smile for my benefit. “You should eat. And maybe shower.”
“That bad?” I asked, pinching the front of my shirt to sniff down the collar. Recoiling.
“Kinda,” she replied with a wince, her hand finding my thigh to give it a tight squeeze before she considered her own state of affairs, lifting her fingers to the messy bun deflated against the top of her head. “Want company? My hair’s fucking tragic.”
“On that note,” Grey said, pushing off from his chair. “I’m going to go check in with Dies about their missing King and then get back to trying to trace that email.”
“You could come, too,” Ava Jade offered, and Grey hesitated before his jaw flexed.
I tried not to get my back up at the idea of Ava Jade naked between us, water cascading down her breasts, filtering down her legs. His hands on her wet skin. The idea made my stomach tighten, but it was less repulsive than it had been a few days ago.
“Shower’s too small,” I said.
Grey and I shared a look before he winked at Ava Jade. “Next time, AJ.”
