I tried to shake my head but couldn’t. I was well aware I was immobile. Nothing was working except for my voice. “I don’t want you anywhere near me.”
“Of course you do. That’s why you’ve turned me down for drinks and meals. You’re a prick tease and I bet it makes you wet saying no, thinking you’ve got me under your thumb. Well, now I’m here and we’re going to make up on all that fun you’ve been missing.”
I inhaled, trying to get rid of some of the fuzziness in my head but nothing would coordinate. He undid the rest of his tie and cast it to the ground and then everything seemed hazier, the only thing I became aware of was the sound of someone crying.
Maybe it was me.
Chapter Eleven
Elijah
July
“Fucking come outside now.”
I didn’t quite have my hand around the beer that Seph was passing me, Max’s heavy hand on my bicep and pulling me to the door.
“What the fuck?” I said as we headed through the usual Friday evening crowd to the door. “Max?”
“Where’s Ava?”
“Checking out something it that hotel with that prick, Jon someone or other.”
Max look pale and tense and I half expected him to hit me with a right hook. Something had pulled his temper tight and it was about to snap.
“She’s not right. Something’s happened.” He turned to the road, looking up and down it.
“What do you mean?”
“She phoned me and she was incoherent. All slurred.” He practically stepped out in front of a cab.
“She messaged me before but I thought it was an accident.” We piled into the taxi.
“Address, Elijah. To the fucking hotel. If that’s where she is. She could be in a fucking alley, dead somewhere.”
I opened the Find my Friends app. We used it fairly frequently as reception in London could be shit and hearing your phone ring when you were in a bar was impossible most of the time. “Dean Street,” I said, reeling off the rest of the address for the driver. “That’s where her phone is,” I told Max.
“Ring her.” His jaw was clenched heavily.
I felt my stomach begin to churn and every fibre within me was possessed by fear and pain. I didn’t trust the fucker she’d met with, I didn’t like the way he looked at her and how demanding he was. I knew she’d pissed him off by not agreeing to what he wanted and he was the type of dick who wouldn’t accept that someone didn’t want to dance to his fucking tune.
Her phone rang out. I tried again and it went straight to voicemail.
“She’s gone off the app,” I said, checking that. “Her phone’s off.”
We were hitting rush hour traffic, cars and trucks snarled up on the roads, the engines an unharmonic lullaby.
“Let’s run from here,” I said to Max. “We’re a mile away. We can do that in eight minutes.”
“Too fucking right,” he said, chucking a twenty at the driver who mentioned something about change, but we’d already slammed the door.
It didn’t matter that neither of us were wearing shoes that were for running in, because at that moment, we’d have run barefoot across burning embers to get to Ava Callaghan. I upped the pace, aware that it was only a mile and I could kill it, but also aware that I couldn’t be fucked when I got there.
“Next left,” I said to Maxwell.
The hotel, still derelict, a saddened building ridden with scaffolding and abandoned crap, stood dark and empty. I headed towards the side door, a fire exit that I knew would be easier to kick down. If she wasn’t fucking there I didn’t give a shit about criminal damage. If she was there, a battered door was doing the be the least of Jon’s fucking worries.
“This it?” Max said. “I can’t hear anything.”
