The Raven Game by Jessica Sorensen
Jax
I’m trying to remain calm on the outside but, on the inside, I’m about to crawl out of my skin. I’ve spent years trying to perfect being in control and, within moments, I threw it all away … all so I could touch her.
Ravenlee, the girl who flew away from me all those years ago.
Only to return.
And when she did, she brought everything with her—the memories, the connection, the feeling of not being empty. The problem is, we’re older now, and those feelings of friendship have altered into desire.
I had so much desire coursing through me when I touched her that I damn near lost it. Me. The guy who’s known for being so in control that people think my heart is made of ice. It’s how I survived all these years after spending so much of my life being controlled. That was when I made a vow, when I realized how messed up my life was, that I’d do whatever it takes to make sure no one controlled me again.
Right now, though, I feel like my surfacing emotions are controlling me, and I’m about to lose my shit. I manage not to and hurry out of the house.
Darkness has consumed the sky, which seems fitting for what awaits us at the end of the night. Beneath the darkness, and in the driveway, a limo is parked. The back door is open, and I’m assuming Zay is inside.
I walk toward the limo, noting I can’t see the driver due to the tinted windows, which makes me uneasy. I try not to think about that, about who my father sent, but worry still plagues me. I don’t like the unknown and, right now, that’s all I can see.
Feeling like I’m going to crack apart, I focus on something else—on walking, one foot in front of the other—as I make my way down the path and toward the driveway. Each step sends a burning sensation through my sides.
When I was touching Raven, she had dug her fingernails so deeply into my flesh that the skin had split open. The pain is new to me and, in a twisted way, I like it. It makes me want to let her drag her fingernails all over me. Again, this isn’t something I’m used to, and I don’t fucking know what to do with it, other than drown it out for now. So, when I climb into the limo, the first thing I do is grab a bottle of whiskey and a cup that’s on a tray, pouring myself a glass and downing it in one gulp.
Zay is sitting in the opposite seat from me, restlessly tapping his foot up and down against the floor. He tears his attention from dazing off to focus on me. “What’s your problem?” he asks.
I set the empty glass down on the tray. “I could ask you the same thing.”
He rubs his hand across his mouth as he continues to bounce his knee. “My fucking problem is Hunter.”
That wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. “Why?”
He stares down at the floor. “Because he keeps insinuating that I want to be with Raven.”
“Don’t you?” I question as I casually recline back in the seat.
He snaps his gaze up to me, his nostrils flaring. “What is wrong with you two? It’s like you’re trying to push me toward the edge.”
“That’s not what we’re doing at all.” I slant forward, resting my hands on my knees. While I can tell he’s amped-up, that might be a good thing for the situation we’re about to go in. Plus … “And you’re completely avoiding the question. Normally, I’m fine with just letting shit slide, but we’re about to go into what I’m assuming is a battle of survival, if this game is anything like the last one. And if we want to win, we’re all going to have to have clear heads, so whatever we need to do to make that happen, let’s make it happen.”
“And what’s your solution?” Irritation is flowing off of him. “For me to down a glass of whiskey?”
I elevate a brow. “Is that an accusation, brother?”
His gaze sears into mine. “You tell me. You’re the one who came out here, looking like you were about to lose your shit.”
“Maybe I was,” I reply, stretching my legs out in front of me. “But at least I took a step to calm myself down. You look like you’re about to bash someone’s face in.”
He cracks his knuckles. “Maybe that’s exactly what I need to do.”
“And I don’t care if you do it. I just need to make sure you’re not going to break down and start cutting again.”
He winces at my bluntness, but I need to be blunt. Zay’s a cutter and, while he’s been doing okay lately, this situation is the type of shit that might make him revert.
“I’ll be fine,” he mumbles, cracking his knuckles against the sides of his legs.
“You sure about that?”
Before he can answer, Raven ducks her head into the cab and starts to climb in.
Zay’s gaze instantly drifts to her, and I can see in his eyes that he wants her. Zay probably has no idea how to act on that, though. Unlike Hunter and I, he has gone another route when it comes to dealing with his issues. He’s closed off from almost everyone to the point where he hardly touches anyone except for when he’s bashing his fists into some poor bastard’s face.
Raven hesitates, sweeping her gaze across the limo’s interior and skimming over Zay then me. Our gazes lock, but she quickly looks away and climbs inside. Then she looks around warily as if searching for a place to sit.
I could help her out, but I’m more curious to see what she does on her own—if she’ll sit at the back by herself or take a seat by either Zay or me.
Her face reveals her apprehension about that decision as she inches farther into the limo, ducked down to avoid bumping the roof. Strands of her wild hair hang in her face.
She’s gorgeous—dark eyes, full lips I want to bite, and the longest legs … legs that I’ve touched. Legs that I want to lick. I want to feel and lick her everywhere. Continue what I started in the hallway. I can still smell her on my skin.
She suddenly pulls a strange face, squares her shoulders, and heads down the aisle between Zay and me. Then she plops down in the seat beside Zay.
Her choice throws me off. I thought she’d sit at the back. I think Zay believed so, too, since he stiffens. Then, to add to my perplexity, she sucks in a deep breath, slants toward Zay, and whispers something in his ear.
Hunter enters the car then and smiles faintly at the exchange, leaving me to wonder if he knows what’s going on and if maybe he asked Raven to do it.
I look back at Zay right as he swallows hard and gives a subtle nod. Raven then reclines in the seat while Hunter sits beside her, leaving the three of them wedged across the seat from mine and leaving me sitting alone. I do not know what to make of that and don’t like that I’m making anything of it.
As restlessness starts to build inside me, I reach for my glass and the bottle of whiskey to pour myself another drink.
Raven tracks the movement as I fill up the glass and take a long sip. Then, biting her bottom lip, she slants forward and says, “If we’re drinking, I want to get in on that.”
I lower my glass from my lips and hand it to her. I could pour her, her own, but I want to watch her drink from my glass.
Puzzlement creases her features, but she still takes the glass and downs a sip. Then her face scrunches up in disgust.
Hunter has told her many times that she’s adorable, and I think he might be right. But I’m not the kind of guy who says that sort of shit aloud. Or even thinks it, for that matter.
“I’m not normally a whiskey sort of girl,” she admits to no one in particular as she licks droplets of whiskey from her lips.
“What sort of girl are you, then?” Hunter slides his arm along the back of the seat behind her and plays with strands of her hair. “No, wait. Let me guess.” He assesses her with a smile, his real one.
Not many people can tell the difference when his smile is fake as opposed to real—he’s gotten so good at faking it. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen his natural smile.
While I’m glad he’s happy, it has me concerned. These little transitions in all of us are stemming from the return of our fourth. And that’d be fine, if we weren’t the reason behind the cause of why our fourth was severed from us. It’s something she’s not aware of—the reason she left our lives. I wasn’t even aware of it until just barely, when my memories started resurfacing. All of ours have, but Raven’s still slightly in the dark. What happens when she does remember everything? The choice we made? How we sacrificed her?
When we lost our souls?
“Beer?” Hunter points a finger at her, the corners of his lips threatening to turn upward.
“You think I’m a beer-drinking sort of girl?” Raven says flatly.
Zay glances at Hunter with his brows furrowed. “I’m going to second that, man. Beer would’ve been my last guess.”
Clearly, neither of them realizes he’s messing with her.
Hunter looks at Zay, biting back a smile. “What’s your guess, then?”
Zay surprises me when he plays along and considers the question while assessing Raven. “Vodka.”
Raven tilts her head to the side as she turns toward him. “How did you know?”
Zay lifts a shoulder. “I don’t know. Maybe I can just read your mind.”
“Is that the start to another one of your nursery rhymes?” she teases him.
Usually, if someone teases or challenges Zay, they end up getting their asses dragged out to the bridge, just like we did to Raven a few days ago. All Zay does now, though, is roll his eyes and tells her, “You know, I only told you that nursery rhyme to try to scare you.”
“Clearly, it didn’t work. Although, it did make it painfully obvious that I’ve been to Honeyton before.” Her shoulders slump, and some of the brightness dims from her eyes. “You guys said you’d explain some stuff to me when we got into the car.” She scans the three of us but ultimately lands on me.
I like that it does. It’s fucked up, I know, but I love that she looks to me as the leader.
Again, I have control issues.
I extend my hand toward her, take the glass, finish off the whiskey, and then set the glass aside. “What do you want to know?”
She contemplates, tapping her finger against her lips. “Well, for starters, I want to know exactly what’s going to happen when we get to this ceremony. What will happen there? And, what are the rules of the game?”
“Honestly?” I say, and she nods. “I’m not sure. I know some of the rules of the first game we played, but I’m unsure if this game will be the same. As for the starting ceremony, we’ll be meeting the rest of the teams.”
“Oh.” Her lips tug downward. “Well, what were the rules to the first game?”
I trade a look with Zay and Hunter. Zay has a worried line between his brows, while Hunter swallows nervously. They don’t want me to tell her, and part of me doesn’t either. The other part of me knows she needs to fully grasp the danger we’re about to be tossed into.
“From what I can remember,” I start, “the shadow feeders that broke into our house chased us around in a forest, and the main goal was to not get killed by them. But we also fought against the other teams and tried to take them out.”
Her eyes widen. “By killing them?”
I shake my head. “No, but we had to hurt them pretty badly.”
She swallows audibly. “How do the shadow feeders kill us? Just by clawing?”
We haven’t told her that poison killed her. I’m not sure if we should.
“They poison you to death.” Apparently, Zay decides to take matters into his own hands as he picks at a loose thread on his pants.
Realization crosses her features. “Wait … Then …” She drops her gaze to where the monster clawed her earlier then snaps back up and skates across Zay, Hunter, and me. “Why am I not dead, then?” She directs her question to Zay, who’s looking at me. “I mean, I know you said you cured me with an antidote, but you never said I was dead.”
Since I’m the one who decided to save her, I guess Zay assumes I’ll want to tell her the entire story without skipping over the more intense details. But the idea of telling her the complete truth makes me feel exposed, like I’m losing control. I’ll have to admit that I did the thing I loathe the most—that I made a deal with my father to save her, that we would play the games if she lived. It’ll show I care about her more than I want to admit to myself.
When I make no effort to explain, Hunter lets out a quiet sigh. Then, sitting up straight, he cups the side of Raven’s face and turns her attention to him. “After you were poisoned, Jax called up his father and made a bargain. In exchange for the antidote, we have to play the game.”
Her lips form an O. “So, I’m the reason we’re in this mess?”
He rapidly shakes his head and places his other palm to her cheek. “No, baby, not at all.” He skims his finger along her cheekbone. “We’re the reason you were poisoned. We should’ve been paying more attention, but we were distracted.”
She leans into his touch, and the weirdest sensation simmers in my chest. I think it might be jealousy. I’m jealous that she trusts Hunter already.
And I don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t get jealous. Ever. Even when we were kids, I never did. But, when we were kids, things were different. I was different. I knew pain. I knew death. I knew the darkness that fed off the shadows of the world. What I didn’t know was what it felt like to take one of the only lights in my life and smother it out with my bare hands.
“Maybe you should’ve just let me die, then,” she utters softly.
Hunter’s eyes widen, and then he parts his lips, but Zay beats him to the punch.
“Why the fuck would you say something like that?” Zay’s voice is quivering with anger as he places his hands on her shoulders and spins her toward him. “You act like your life isn’t valuable or something … Jumping off that damn bridge and just letting yourself sink.”
“I already told you I couldn’t swim,” Raven bites out, her chest rising and crashing. “And you’re the one who made me jump, in case you can’t remember.”
“I didn’t make you jump.” Zay slants in only inches from her face.
Hunter goes rigid and starts to reach for her to pull her back, nervous Zay will lose his temper, but I catch Hunter’s gaze and shake my head. He presses me with a firm look, and I shake my head more firmly.
I want to see how this plays out. I don’t think for one second Zay will hurt her. If I did, I’d stop it. He won’t. I can see it in his eyes now and have seen it over the last few days. It was instinctive the way he ran to that river the moment she jumped. We didn’t even know she wasn’t going to come up yet. He just saw her fall and ran. I’ve wondered since then if perhaps a small part of him thought she was the girl from our past. Maybe tucked away in his dormant memories, her name triggered a recollection he hadn’t yet realized. Looking back, I may have felt something, too, when I saw her eyes and hair. Hair the color of raven feathers, and eyes haunted with the pain of a thousand broken souls.
The pain of her own broken soul.
She hollowly laughs in his face. “You know what? You’re right; you didn’t. You were kind enough to give me the choice of being your sex servant or jumping.”
He raises his brows. “I never fucking said sex servant.”
“You’re right. You actually said whore. You told me that it was either do that or jump. And you said that all the women you dragged out there always chose to be your whore,” Raven seethes.
Zay opens his mouth in protest, but she holds up her hand to silence him. He curls his fingers into fists, but Raven doesn’t even so much as flinch.
“And you said I was an anomaly because I didn’t want to let all of you screw me after you grabbed me from school, dragged me out to your car, and forced me inside. It makes me wonder just how many times you guys did that to people with how easy it was for you to get me out of the school.” She shakes her head in irritation. “I mean, how many women have been in my place right now? Sure, you say that I’m the only one you’ve ever brought into your group and that this situation is completely out of the ordinary, and yet you told me by the bridge that a ton of women chose to be your … your … sex servant or … whores or whatever. And now, here I am, letting Hunter kiss me and allowing Jax to stick his finger inside me …” She’s all wound up, breathing profusely, her eyes wild with panic.
Honestly, I don’t think she’s even that upset by everything she just said. I think she’s veering toward a panic attack because of the severity of the situation.
Zay darts his gaze to me. “You did what?”
I keep my mask of indifference on. “I think she was pretty clear about what I did.”
Zay stares at me in shock. He didn’t expect that from me. Again, I’m about control. I don’t just go around, getting so caught up in some woman that I end up slipping my fingers inside her in a hallway, especially when she’s already been kissing my friend. I’m not the sort of guy to share. And yet, I didn’t think about any of that when I touched Raven. I just thought about how soft her skin was, how amazing she smelled.
“I’m your whore. I really am,” Raven mumbles as she slumps back in the seat. “I’m just like every other woman.”
I trade a look with Hunter and Zay, silently asking if we should tell her the truth.
While I’m not the official leader, I usually make the important decisions, mainly because Hunter and Zay tend to argue with each other whenever we need to agree on something.
Zay nods, and Hunter blows out this relieved exhale, as if he was waiting for us to arrive at this conclusion finally.
“No, you’re not,” I tell Raven. “You’re not even close to being like everyone else, because there has been no one else.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, her arms crossed over her chest.
I recline in the seat and stretch my arms across the back of it, portraying that I’m more collected than I am. The truth is that I’m about to divulge a huge secret to her, which means I’m putting a lot of trust in her at the moment. She could use this bit of information against us in the games, if she wanted to. Maybe she will, too. Perhaps she’ll discover what we did to her all those years ago and try to destroy us. Perhaps she’ll succeed.
What I do know for sure is that we deserve it.
“I mean, we’ve never brought another woman into our group. We’ve never even taken a woman up to that bridge until you.” I prop my boot-clad foot on my knee. “We have dragged a few guys out there when they’ve tried to make attacks on our reputation, but they always just took off running when we told them to go over to the bridge and jump. We’d pretend to chase them for a bit, just to scare them, but we never really gave a shit if we caught them or not. All of it, it’s always been for show … until you made that show a reality by jumping.”
Her attention wanders amongst the three of us as she processes what I’m saying. “So, that huge speech you gave me”—she fixes her focus on Zay—“about you bringing so many women up there and them choosing to fuck … to have sex with you was all a lie?”
Hunter rubs his hand across his mouth, concealing a smile. “It’s so fucking cute that she’s still too embarrassed to say fuck,” he mumbles, eliciting a dirty from Raven. He tugs on a strand of her hair. “Like I said, cute.”
He’s right, but I’m not about to say that aloud.
Throwing Hunter one more nasty look, Raven turns back to Zay. “So, you just lied to me, then?”
He shrugs, but tension is pouring off his body. “We lie to keep up our reputation, which protects us from members of other families trying to start wars with us. If everyone fears us, then no one will mess with us.” He chews on his bottom lip. “But then you came along and tried to defy me in front of the entire class. No one has ever done that before, so we needed to try to teach you a lesson so you wouldn’t do it again.”
“I didn’t defy you. I just sat in a seat in class and refused to move when you demanded that I do.” She goes to poke him in the chest, but he snags a hold of her hand.
Hunter stiffens. “Zay …” A warning rings in his tone.
I don’t think he believes Zay will hurt her, but Zay’s also been clawing at the ledge of self-destruction for the last few days and might not be thinking clearly.
I’m about to intervene and try to get everyone to focus on forming a plan for the games, but Zay speaks first.
“I’m not going to hurt her,” he tells Hunter with his gaze fixed on Raven. “I wouldn’t ever do that again.”
He scoots closer to her and lowers his voice, his hand still wrapped around her finger. “No, there haven’t been any other women. That was all bullshit. Almost everything I said and how I acted up by that bridge was bullshit, but it’s how I needed to act. We wear masks to protect ourselves. But behind that cold mask I was wearing that day, I didn’t really expect you to jump. Had I known you were going to do it, I wouldn’t have pushed you so hard. That was never the plan.”
She raises a brow. “Then, what was the plan?”
He gives a half-shrug. “To scare you. We thought you’d run like the other guys did.”
“Clearly, we underestimated your stubbornness,” Hunter chimes in.
“Is it stubbornness?” He searches Raven’s eyes. “You just jumped into a river without knowing how to swim, and now you’re saying we should’ve just let the poison kill you.” A beat of silence skips by. “And then there’s these …” He slips his fingers underneath the leather band on her wrist.
She jerks away from him. “Fuck you.” Panic flashes through her eyes as she frantically looks around, as if searching for an exit. The limo is moving, though, so she can’t really go anywhere. Then again, this is the woman who jumped off that bridge and fought those shadow feeders without so much as even trying to run away …
Ravenlee Wilowwynter, the girl made of metal and steel … yet also of warmth and sunshine …
She moves, standing up, and all three of us reach for her. Then, when her gaze lands on the window behind me, she freezes.
“Holy shit,” she breathes out, her eyes wide.
I rotate around in the seat, and shock whips through me, as well.
Now that my memories have been returning in sharp fragments, I can recall enough about the previous game that I was aware of the town’s state while the games were taking place. But my memories didn’t do it justice.
Not a single car lines the roads as we weave through the town and the hills, and barrels filled with fire have replaced them, along with barbed wire. More fires burn in the distance, bright flames in the shadows of the trees. Most of the houses are boarded up, as if a hurricane is about to blow through. Metaphorically, it might, I guess.
What I’d really like to know, though, is how in the hell my father managed to make this all happen? How do outsiders not become alarmed when it’s declared there’s a contagious illness plaguing the town? How does he convince everyone to keep quiet? Does he just pay them off? I’m not sure, but I want to find out. I want to find out a lot of things about my father and this game. Not only so the Raven Four can survive, but so I can figure out a way to take the families down once and for all … so we can finally be free.
