Ava James and the Ivy Grove (Ava James FBI Mystery Book 1)

  Ava James and the Ivy Grove

  Copyright © 2021 by A.J. Rivers

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Author's Note

  Also by A.J. Rivers

  Six years ago…

  The blue glow of the dancefloor was disorienting. The light was sliced into perfect squares by stark black bars, seeming to surround the undulating bodies around her, making them less tangible. That felt like the entirety of her time in the old city. Everywhere around her, nothing seemed real.

  Ava danced until her throat was parched. The feeling stretched down into her chest. Her skin was damp and stinging with heat. She looked around at the swirling colors, the glowing lights. They were music made visible. Throbbing beats, sweeping scores, words blending and sliding together so she couldn’t understand them. Even when they were in English.

  Every now and then a word would sink in. They were disconnected, but the music was so good it didn’t matter. It wasn’t what they said that meant anything. It was the way those words rode on the sound.

  Molly was there somewhere. She’d seen the glow on her pale skin. She’d seen the ethereal blue haze tinting the tips of her hair.

  She called her name, but the music drowned it out.

  Suddenly, Ava felt a hand wrap around her wrist. It was cold and soft, with droplets of moisture that transferred to her skin like it was seeking out her heat. She turned and saw Molly’s smile. Her best friend leaned close, so her breath was on the side of Ava’s neck and their hands were pinned between their hips.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  “Ready to go back to the hotel?” Ava asked.

  Molly shook her head. “I just want to go somewhere else.”

  Ava nodded and they weaved through the thick crowd toward the door. Molly set down the glass in her hand as she walked past a table, leaving her other hand cold like the first. Ava felt eyes on her as they left, then fingertips as men reached out to her to try to lure her back into the flashing lights and throbbing music.

  She ignored them and the words they purred at her. She didn’t understand them, but she should have understood more of them. As soon as her parents had let her choose the destination for the trip, she’d bought books and downloaded language learning programs. She’d been determined to stroll the streets of Prague with the native language rolling off her tongue.

  But it never sank in. Not enough, anyway. Not enough for her to understand above the music and over the heat and the way her head was starting to swirl. Whatever they were saying, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to keep her there.

  They finally stepped out of the nightclub and the air outside surrounded them like cool gel on their hot skin. Ava’s fingers intertwined with Molly’s as they headed down the street. In the days they’d been in Prague, her feet had become accustomed to the smooth roll of the cobblestones and the unpredictability of the sidewalks. She walked confidently, the click of their heels on stone and rhythm of their breaths regulating replacing the swirling, pulsating music they left behind them.

  She looked up at the moonlight, admiring the way it washed away the dark blue of the sky until it turned pale, like it was telling its secrets. In front of them, an ancient stone arch rose up above the street and came to what must have once been a sharp point but was now weathered by age. The structure caught Ava’s attention. She didn’t know what it was or what it once could have been. Perhaps beautiful and welcoming, perhaps fearsome and threatening.

  It didn’t seem real.

  None of it seemed real.

  This wasn’t the first time she had traveled, but this time was different. This time, she was grown, a newly-minted adult released into the city with Molly at her side. Molly was always at her side. She had been since they were just little girls, too young to even remember the moment they met.

  She was the only one Ava could have ever imagined having here with her.

  “Where are we going?” Molly asked.

  Ava laughed. She didn’t even know why. It was a time in her life when laughter just happened. It didn’t have to come from anything. It just existed within her and sometimes came out of her like breath.

  They continued along the walkways, turning corners, crossing streets, searching out that next jolt. Their time in the country was running low. They needed to make as many memories as they could so they could pack them and bring them home. So weeks and months and years from that night when cool air dissipated sweat and melted ice from their skin and music rained down on them, they could think back on it and feel that jolt again.

  “This way,” Ava said when they got to diverging streets.

  “Are you sure?” Molly asked.

  Ava looked at her best friend, at her blue eyes so pale they were like light, at her intense black eyelashes drawing lines down over them as she blinked and nodded. Then she said the words she would come to wish she never said. Words she would never trust coming from her mouth again.

  “I’m sure.”

  Molly followed her. She intertwined their fingers and walked alongside her. They walked into the shadows and it all shattered.

  Throbbing footsteps on the cobblestones coming toward them.

  Sweeping heat and pain sizzled onto her skin and vibrated along her bones. The prongs hit her and the jolt rushed through.

  Words hissed through gritted teeth, blending with the sound of her own desperate breath and her heart trembling.

  She didn’t understand them.
She tried to. She wanted to. More than at any point in her trip, she wanted to know what was being said. To know why she was suddenly on the ground with men’s hands running across her. To know why Molly was lying beside her with the tips of her icy blond hair tinted with blood.

  Now

  Ava shifted her weight and felt the narrow heel on her shoe slip from the edge of a worn stone at the end of the marina. More modern pavement had been poured over most of the stones, but some still protruded from the ragged edge where the hot pavement flowed and came to a stop. Like they couldn’t bear to completely conceal the stones beneath.

  It caught Ava’s attention as soon as they walked down toward the water. The smooth pavement gave way to the old rock as if it realized it couldn’t go the full distance. It had to trust the stone that had been there for so many years to continue to carry on what it had always done, even when it was being replaced.

  She watched Xavier’s eyes trace along the uneven edge of the pavement and then follow the ripple of the worn stone down to where the edge fell off into the water. One foot extended out toward it, overlapping the place where the two met. He pressed his weight down into it almost as if he were trying to feel the stone beneath the pavement.

  Ava had no doubt that edge meant something different to him than it did to the countless people who walked past it every day. They probably didn’t even notice it was there. Some might even see it as a mistake, as something that wasn’t properly finished. Xavier wouldn’t see that. The tilt of his head and the way his breath changed just the slightest bit said he felt something when he looked at it.

  But he wouldn’t tell her. She didn’t know him that well yet. He might tell Dean or Emma. For now, he would only tell himself.

  Xavier Renton was a new aspect of her life. To say he was one she never expected would be a tremendous understatement. Of course, it struck her that probably nobody expected Xavier.

  She wasn’t sure about being alone with him on this job. She didn’t know what was ahead of them and Xavier’s impulsive, often confounding unpredictability made that all the more daunting. The aspiration to join the FBI had been in her for years before that day. It wasn’t a dream that she carried or a hope that buoyed her through difficult times.

  It was a need embedded in her heart. A silent pain that bled where no one could see it.

  That was where Ava wanted it to be. She didn’t need to show it or let others try to carry it with her. There were those who knew her past and how it still affected her. They tried to lessen the weight. They tried to pick up the burden and carry it for her. But she didn’t want them to. It was hers to carry. She was the only one who really knew what she’d gone through. Even years later, the tendrils of it still grew from the deepest places in her mind where she’d buried the pieces she couldn’t cast aside.

  Not the only one. There was one more who knew what happened that night and in the long hours that dragged out after it. They had known each other’s breaths for as long as either could remember, and they knew them then. They knew the breaths that bubbled out in laughter and the breaths that hitched in fear. They knew the breaths that trembled and the shallow, terrifying breaths that seemed like they were slipping away.

  They were the only ones who knew for each other. Until the moment they no longer did. The moment Ava couldn’t hear Molly’s breath anymore and Molly couldn’t hear Ava’s. When they couldn’t hold hands or try to see light reflecting off each other’s eyes in that cold darkness.

  That was when the need was born. The last time Ava heard Molly breathe, she held onto it, and the last time she heard her scream, she embedded it in her heart. There it became what drove her to what she was now. An agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The product of what shaped her.

  Four years of education. Twenty weeks of training. Seven days of darkness.

  “Remember, when you get to the island, you don’t know anything about us being there. If you hear someone talking about it, if there are rumors, if you think someone noticed, you ignore it. Don’t engage. Don’t try to throw anyone off.”

  “What if someone asks specifically?” Ava asked.

  Intense blue eyes made hard and cold by everything they’d seen and the thoughts in her mind that never let the blonde woman in front of her forget locked on Ava. Emma Griffin was more than another agent in the FBI. She was more than the woman who inspired Ava as she started her training and gave her something to block out the noise of people around her who didn’t believe in her. She was a force.

  It was easy for people at a distance to understand what about her inspired Ava so much. Emma was strong, smart, and defiant, blazing an unapologetic path based on unmatched instinct and skill. She didn’t care what people thought or said about her. It wasn’t that she didn’t know there were plenty who disapproved of her. She’d faced that from the moment she’d applied for the academy.

  It simply didn’t matter.

  Maybe that made it easier to do things her way rather than what was taught and proscribed, even when that meant going against protocol or throwing herself directly into the line of danger. She was willing to push back against pressure rather than letting the tide of convention carry her.

  Many admired her for that.

  Ava certainly did. But it was more than that. Emma joined the FBI because of the darkness in her own past. She walked through fire and came out of it gripping a shield.

  She hadn’t been kind to Ava at first, when Ava had been assigned to shadow her in the first days after completing training. Ava wouldn’t sugarcoat it—and Emma wouldn’t want her to—but in those early days, Emma had been unfairly harsh and demanding to her. The unvarnished reality was that Emma had pushed back against her the same way she pushed back against anything she saw as being in her way.

  And Ava had been in her way.

  Emma didn’t know the way Ava bled.

  Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything if she had. And maybe one day she would tell her.

  “Lie,” Emma told her.

  “What do we tell them?” Ava asked.

  “Whatever you need to. If someone asks you directly about Sam or me, or about there being law enforcement on the island, you have to distance yourself from it without any of them knowing. You can’t seem suspicious, you can’t give any indication you know anything. If you do, none of us are getting off that island,” Emma said.

  “Well, that’s not necessarily true,” Xavier chimed in. Emma looked at him, the slight lift of her eyebrows showing her surprise at Xavier’s uncharacteristic moment of abstract optimism. “It’s entirely possible they would throw our bodies into the ocean. Or chop us up and ship us back to the mainland. Then we would be getting off the island.”

  Emma gave a single nod, her face registering that everything was right back to normal.

  “Thank you, Xavier.” Emma looked at Ava. “Joshua’s cabin is on the far side of the island. I don’t know where the Dragon has set up business since the raid, but I can’t imagine it’s in that area. I need you to make note of everyone who is there as quickly as you can and keep track of them. Point it out as soon as you notice someone has been out of sight for longer than you might expect. Remember, Eric and Dean will be watching the stream as much as humanly possible.”

  “But you won’t know what’s happening,” Ava said.

  It wasn’t a question. It was a statement to keep herself aware. The earring in her left ear had an almost unimaginably tiny camera in it, compliments of Xavier. It would capture everything she saw and send a real-time stream back to the mainland, where Dean and Eric would be watching. Emma’s cousin and close friend respectively would combine forces as a private investigator and a federal agent to be their link to law enforcement when they got to the lush but treacherous space known as Windsor Island.

  “No,” Emma said. “Not all the time. I’ll have my burner phone. Xavier has it saved in his, so you’ll be able to touch base occasionally. If something goes really wrong, call.”

  “W
e shouldn’t be seen standing there together,” Sam said.

  “He’s right,” Emma nodded. “They should be here to pick you up soon. You don’t want them to see you talking to us.” She looked at Ava and Xavier in turn. “We have twenty-four hours. That’s it. After that, we have to get off the island. Do you understand?”

  Ava nodded. “Twenty-four hours.”

  It sounded far too long and yet only a sliver of time.

  Emma looked over at Xavier. “Xavier?”

  He was staring out over the water, but he turned to look at Emma.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “And when that time is up, you have to get off the island. No matter what. You don’t come looking for me. You don’t wait. You get off the island and you go to Dean and Eric,” she said. Xavier stared at her, unblinking. “Xavier. I need you to agree.”

  “I understand,” he repeated.

  “Emma, we need to go,” Sam said.

  “Xavier,” Emma warned, but her fiancé took her hand and guided her away toward the other end of the marina where a small boat waited.

  Xavier’s eyes were like still, quiet storms when they met Ava’s.

  “Twenty-four hours.”

  Ava and Xavier spent the time they waited practicing the personas and relationship they’d conjured up. Moments, details, and emotions tossed back and forth between them became smooth, the ragged edges and hesitation becoming softened and polished as it tumbled through their mouths and the air between them.

  By the time they were sitting behind a harsh suit and reflective sunglasses draped with tenuous importance across an emotionless frame of muscle, it was as ingrained in them as it could possibly be. It couldn’t all be memorized. No matter how much they were able to retain and repeat, there was a certain compulsive element to it that couldn’t be overcome. They had to be able to react to what happened around them—and trust each other, and themselves, enough to know they could carry on the illusion.

  Just the fact that they had gotten this far felt significant. She had only just begun her career. Everything happened so fast it almost felt like she hadn’t begun at all. She left the Academy and was told to shadow Emma, to learn about her and watch how she handled cases. And suddenly she was swept into a world of murder, lies, and betrayal that left her breathless and feeling like she had stumbled at the top of a hill and was sliding down through ice and rock, unable to catch herself.