Riding The Edge - Elise Faber Page 0,25
in pitch-black darkness with a foggy brain and a throbbing skull.
Carefully, I flexed my fingers, slowly getting the feeling back, then worked on my toes.
“You okay?” Ava whispered.
I froze, mid-toe flex. “I’m fine. You?”
“Dan,” she warned, her voice shaking slightly. “Where are you injured?”
The shake did me in, made my heart squeeze tight, made me immediately want to repeat I was fine. But empty sentiments wouldn’t reassure her, so I forced himself to focus, to take a breath, to cautiously move my arms and legs then sit up. “Nowhere,” I said. “Besides a splitting headache, I’m good.”
“Don’t shit me.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“About five feet to your left,” she said. “Careful, the ceiling is low.”
Reaching overhead, I felt the roof of wherever the fuck we were, and found it was indeed low, and covered with or hewn out of rough stone. I made my way over to her slowly, feeling for any openings or weak points.
There were none.
And before I knew it, I’d gotten to Ava.
I found her by bumping into her, and her hiss of pain sliced through me. “Ava, I’m not the one injured. Where are you hurt?”
“Knife wound in my abdomen. Didn’t hit anything major, just I’ve lost a bit of blood.” Her voice was quiet. Serious. “Patched it with the kit,” she said, referring to the emergency supplies we all had stored in the tongue of our boots. “And the bleeding is under control. I took a bullet to my arm, only a glancing shot, so nothing to worry about there.”
“But?” I asked, hearing the unspoken word.
“But,” she said, “my ankle is broken.”
Fuck. “How?”
“I went down wrong, caught my boot on the carpet.”
I found her fingers in the dark. “How bad is the break?”
“Not good.”
Shit.
“We’ll figure it out.” A squeeze. “Any idea where we are?”
“My uncle’s special cell.”
My heart seized. Her tone was dry and falsely calm because I could sense the note of terror beneath the surface. “Ava.”
“Fate’s laughing at me,” she muttered. “I promised myself less than twenty-four hours ago that I would never be back here.” She groaned. “And I’m only telling you this because if I freeze up, I might need you to kick my ass.”
My lungs seized, but my tone was deliberately even. “Why would you freeze up?”
“Because this was where they would put me when I refused to do what they wanted, where I would sit in the dark and try my best to count the hours and sometimes the days before I heard another person’s voice.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t be telling you any of this,” she said. “It’s the past, shouldn’t have any bearing on the now.”
“Except it does.” She sucked in a breath. “So, what did they want you to do?”
Silence.
A long, quiet silence. “I can’t talk about it. Not now. Maybe not ever.”
“It’s okay,” I said, touching the back of her hand. “You don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to.”
She shifted slightly, and I wished I could see her face, but it was dark, too dark to make out anything more than the barest outline of her body.
“I wasn’t like them,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“How?” she asked. “How could you possibly know?”
“Because I’ve spent these last years on this team with you, Ava. I know how well you shoot and that your rifle’s name is Luna. I know you prefer the aisle seat on a plane. I know you don’t have a sweet tooth, but you’ll never turn down a bag of Fritos.” I squeezed her fingers. “I’ve seen how you are with the kids we come across. They always turn to you. Because you’re good inside.”
She laughed, and it was a broken sound. “I’m not good inside. I’m broken and ruined and I’ve done things . . .” She cut herself off. “I’ve hurt people and killed. I’m not good.”
“We’ve all killed,” I said. “We’ve all done bad things.”
“Dan.” She sighed. “I’ve done more than bad things. I—”
“You fought them.” I sucked in a breath and risked touching her cheek. “You wouldn’t have ended up in this cell if you hadn’t fought them.”
A beat. “That doesn’t make the rest of it okay.”
“No,” I said, filing that information away to process later, knowing that I wouldn’t change her mind in this moment, and understanding that sometimes it didn’t matter what anyone said.
The guilt never went away.
“How did you recognize where we are?”
“I was awake when they brought us down.”
“Any idea of an exit route?”
“I have it mapped in my head.”
“Good.” I shifted so that