Crooked Crows by Elena Lawson

I’m notsure what possessed me as I raced from the stage, heading straight for the cash room to smash my bloody fist on the door. Corvus was nowhere to be found, and Grey was right on my heels, barking at the crowd looking to congratulate me to step back.

I pounded harder, faster, until the lock disengaged and I shoved through, knocking the glasses off Jimmy’s face. “Rook? The fuck you—”

“Who’d she bet on?” I asked, as if Jimmy would fucking know. “The girl. The girl with the short dark hair and tight black dress.”

Jimmy’s eyes crinkled with confusion as he righted his glasses.

“Move,” I growled, shoving past him into the counting area, searching through the baskets of envelopes and cash on the table. Money spilled, and I could hear Grey shouting behind me, but I didn’t give a flying fuck. If I didn’t hurry, I wasn’t going to catch her.

I needed to know.

If she got into Sanctum, it meant she’d placed a bet.

She must’ve…

I flicked back to an envelope I’d just passed, yanking it out of the paid basket. It said AJ on the front. Ava Jade. It had to be hers. She bet seven thousand...on me. I opened it, a slow smile turning up one corner of my mouth, straining the cut there.

Christ.My cock twitched in my pants, hardening as I choked on a laugh and shoved back through Jimmy, only pausing when Grey stood in the doorway to block my exit. A snarl tearing from my mouth.

“What the fuck is going on over here?” I heard Diesel roar, and I clenched my teeth, staring down Grey as Diesel tried to shove through the crowd toward the cash room.

“Move, Grey.” I enunciated the words slowly as I leveled my stare on him. The blood dripping into my eyes stained my vision with a crimson tint, and my inner beast perked up like a bull.

Grey’s nostrils flared, but he moved, knowing there would be no stopping me. “Brother,” he said in a hard whisper as I passed, a warning in his voice to match the worried knot between his brows.

“I just want a minute,” I cut back at him. “Stall them.”

His jaw flexed as he looked away, and my neck heated, right eye twitching as I tore myself away from my brother and the cash room, launching myself up the stairs.

“Which way did she go?” I asked in a growl as I passed Diesel’s newest recruit, the bouncer whose name I could never remember.

I shoved through the door and glanced back to see the big oaf pointing down the street to the right. “That way,” he said. “Think she took a left on Churchill.”

I nodded and began to run, my ankle protesting each step from a rough kick by my opponent. The cool air licked at the sweat and blood still clinging to my skin, making the cut on my lip and the gash above my right brow sting.

An odd scent, like rotting limes, permeated the air, and my nose wrinkled as I rushed past it onto Churchill, slowing to a quiet jog. The street was silent as the grave. A few small shops clustered near the main street gave way to a residential area of apartment buildings and a few older homes. Most lights were snuffed out for the night, save for a small handful of oven lights and late-night TV screens.

I stalked down the streets, the damp slap of my bare feet on the rough pavement the only sound aside from my breaths and the thudding of my black heart.

I could feel eyes on me, watching, and pursed my lips to contain a grin.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I called into the dark, licking the blood from my lip. “You forgot something.”

Waving the envelope, I followed my gut, letting that other sense lead me toward the side of one of the more rundown apartments. I glanced down the narrow gap and caught a jerk of movement near the end.

Got you.

I sprinted down the side of the building, cut glass biting into my heel, making me snarl as I rounded the corner and stopped dead, my shoulders expanding and heaving with each slow pant.

Ava Jade waited there, a large black lump of fabric at her feet, her blade raised. Fire in her eyes. The delivery area was devoid of trucks tonight, leaving it wide open save for a bank of trash bins. Only one streetlamp illuminated the lot, and she stood just outside of it. Her blade glinted in the light. A threat that I’d take as a promise.

I licked my lips.

“Where are the others?” she demanded, her gaze jerking to the alley I’d just come from before checking her six.

“Not here,” I shrugged, tapping the cash filled envelope on my palm. “Thought you might want this.”

Her cheekbones flared, giving her away.

“How kind,” she replied, her voice dripping sarcasm.

I stepped forward, and she stepped back.

I cocked my head, stepping in and to the left. She stepped back and to the right.

Smart.

She’d seen what I could do, and clearly she knew she wouldn’t be a match. Judging by the way she was holding that blade, though, she knew how to throw it. I was willing to bet she was a crack shot, too.

“You don’t seem very grateful.”

“You don’t seem like the considerate type,” she lobbied back, still eyeing the alley and glancing down at her blade. Checking the reflection? I shivered.

“You don’t know me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Liar.”

Her face heated, jaw tightening with anger. If it were possible, she looked even more beautiful when she was angry. Almost as good as she looked when she was covered in blood.

I dangled the envelope from my two fingers. “Come on,” I challenged her. “Just come get it.”

She scoffed, giving her head a slight shake, but I could see it, the instant she made the decision. Her eyes snapping to the envelope. She did want it. I could imagine what she might’ve done to get the money in the first place, and now she’d doubled it, betting on me.

It was a lot of cash to kiss goodbye.

“I won’t bite,” I told her, taking another step forward. She didn’t retreat, her gaze jerking from my face to the cash and back again.

“Liar,” she hissed, turning my own word against me.

I smiled, all teeth, giving her a glimpse of my monster.

Conor Jones balked when I let him see, but Ava Jade...her darkness smiled back.

I saw in her what I’d only seen in three other people in my entire life. It made me stop. Take stock. The intense need to know every dark corner of her mind took root in my mind, festering.

Without ceremony, Ava Jade lifted her shoulders and closed the gap between us in eleven long strides, stopping just out of my reach. Her dress was wrinkled, and her wig was slightly askew. She noticed me looking and tugged it off, tossing it on the asphalt as she shook her hair out of the spiral she had it contained in. It swirled around her shoulders in a wild mane of darkest auburn and something in my chest cracked.

Her lips popped open when she noticed the scar on my collarbone. Her eyes narrowed as she followed the line of it down, finding other scars to match it, and different sorts hidden within the ink. I didn’t cover them because I was ashamed, I covered them to avoid this. The look of pity from others. The disgust.

I braced for it, but it didn’t come. Her eyes jerked back up to meet mine and she betrayed no emotion at all except a sort of calm understanding that did things to me I wouldn’t dare speak of.

Ava Jade made a valiant grab for the envelope, but I lifted it out of her reach, catching her wrist with my opposite hand. She had her blade to my throat faster than I could blink. I rolled my hips, soaking in my hunger for her.

“You saw my cards,” I whispered, lowering my head so our faces were only inches apart. “It’s only fair that I see yours.”

Her eyes widened a second before I twisted away from her blade and pulled hard on her wrist, sending her stumbling to catch her footing.

I stuffed the envelope of cash in the front of my shorts, against my slowly building erection. Ava Jade whirled on me, her upper lip curling.

I beckoned her forward with a curl of my fingers.

She rolled my challenge around in her mouth before glancing down at her blade. She gripped it tightly and reeled her arm back for a sniper-like throw. I closed my eyes. Waiting for it to impale somewhere vital, but the thunk of it came and I felt nothing.

When I opened my eyes, her blade was embedded in the pockmarked wood of the streetlamp beam. She attacked while I was turned, and the breath whooshed from my lungs as I went down, my legs swept out from under me. My ribs and temple cracking against the pavement, a ringing forming in my ears.

Damn.

I was up and ready before she could launch her next assault, blocking a throat jab and a knee meant for the family jewels. Ducking from a punch that, if delivered in just the right place, might’ve been my end.

Fucking hell.

She roared her fury as she came at me again and again, and I blocked her, waiting for my opening. She went for a jab at my lower back, and I was too slow to block it. Pain exploded through my abdomen, making me clench my teeth.

When she went in for another hit, misjudging my level of pain, I narrowly dodged it, yanking her arm to get her off balance. She fell, and I was on top of her in a second, using the full force of my body weight to pin her to the pavement.

She struggled, cursing and writhing, trying uselessly to find any opening to get free, but my weight was greater than hers. Her legs were locked down. Her arms pinned. My cock against her belly.

She was trapped.

I saw the moment she realized it, too, her breaths coming faster. Panicked.

No.

Her face went white as a sheet, her body trembling, but it was her eyes that I couldn’t stop staring into.

I knew that look.

Distant. An echo of past trauma lighting her up from within with blind terror.

Without thinking, I fell back, jostling to my feet in my rush to get off. The scent of pure fear putrefying in my lungs. The need to take it back wrestling with my still pounding need to dominate. To destroy.

“Shit,” Grey shouted as the sounds of two sets of footfalls reached me through the ringing still growing in volume in my ears. “What did you do?”

“Fuck,” came Corvus’ grunt, and I let him pull me back another step away from her.

Ava Jade slapped Grey’s hand away as she got to her feet, unable to look at any of us. “Don’t fucking touch me,” she growled, shoving him hard in the chest. Making his eyes narrow.

She stormed away, snatching up the bundle of black fabric and retrieving her blade from the wooden post.

“Wait,” I said before I could stop myself, reaching down the front of my shorts for her winnings, but by the time I looked up, she was already gone. The bramble at the edge of the lot shifting from her ghost.

I lurched forward but was stopped by a firm grip on my shoulder. Corvus. I bared my teeth, feeling too many things I didn’t want to fucking feel.

“Leave it, man,” he said. “Just leave it.”

I shrugged him off and pegged the envelope to his chest, forcing him to take it.

“I need a fucking drink.”