Chapter 21
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
AUbrEY
Somewhere between Phoenix fucking me so hard I could barely breathe and bringing me inside to gently shower me off, he’d managed to pick up our clothes and get us into bed. I knew it, because I could feel the heat of his arm around my aching body.
I knew it, because the cadence of his breath and the soft beat of his heart was something that resonated in my bones. The rain had stopped at some point, and he’d picked me up as though he hadn’t just fucked me into the ground.
He’d brought me inside.
He’d taken care of me.
And now he was holding me as I slowly rose up to survey the damage we’d caused during the storm. I didn’t expect the softness of his face.
His paint was gone, washed away by the rain last night and the shower he’d dragged me into after. There were little traces of black still lingering at the edges of his eyes, trailing along the sharp catch of his jaw, but for the most part, his face was clean.
This was the first time I’d really seen him like this.
Its absence highlighted the scars that bit deep into his skin, bisecting his brow and running across his full lips. One ran across the bridge of his nose, deep enough that it had to have been from a blade glancing across his face.
Even with all the marks, even with proof that the world wasn’t kind and it had been trying to kill him for years, Phoenix looked young.
I hadn’t realized how young he was until just now.
When he slept, without his paint, he looked like a different person from the vicious cannibal he was during the day, putting on a tough face and playing king to his pack.
His presence was so big when he was in command, when he was giving orders, that he seemed closer to my age.
The stark outline of black paint and the fire in his eyes were nothing more than a mask, though.
When he was sleeping, his face was soft. Sweet.
Almost boyish.
The hands that had patched up his injuries didn’t belong to an expert, and I remembered him telling me he was shit at stitches back when we’d first met. How many of these wounds had he taken care of himself?
My eyes dropped to the worst one—the mottled scar that ran across his throat, an obvious attempt at his life that he’d somehow survived. It jerked along his jawline and tore across his tattooed skin. For the first time, I looked at it and wondered how young he’d been when he got it.
He couldn’t have been more than twenty now, and the scar was healed.
It was strange, feeling like I had the upper hand in our dynamic for the first time. Phoenix was so vicious, so strong, that I knew I wouldn’t have been able to fight him one on one without risking my life, but that wasn’t really why.
It was his personality, his presence, the darkness in him that seemed to demand the broken parts of me that were tired of being Aubrey come to life—the parts of me that had always craved someone who could take the weight of the world off my shoulders and just…
Just tell me what to do. Just tell me that I could be good .
Fuck.
Almost of their own volition, my fingers stretched out and traced featherlight across the scar on his throat.
My eyes jerked up, watching his face cautiously to make sure I wasn’t disturbing him.
Watching him left me caught up in how thick his black lashes were, how his messy dark hair couldn’t completely hide the scar that ran across his forehead.
So… soft.
When he didn’t move, my fingers went back to their gentle ministrations.
Now that I was touching all the places the world had tried to break him, I couldn’t seem to stop.
Somehow he’d turned these scars into strength, while every broken part on my body felt like a weight trying to drag me into fathomless depths of an ocean so deep I’d never resurface if I let myself sink .
How could he stay afloat when he had even more scars than I did?
The pad of my thumb trailed slowly along the curve of his full lips, brushing over the shallow cut I’d left when we were fighting and catching at the edge of the white line that ran raggedly through them. A claw, maybe? Some animal turned rabid?
I’d never asked him about any of them, though he’d nearly killed us both wanting to learn about mine. Wanting to know me.
I didn’t have a reason, though, did I?
It was easy to tell myself I didn’t when I shifted my touch and traced the sharp line of his jaw. It was easier to pretend that the strange, confusing way Phoenix taking me to the ground and fucking the ache out of me yesterday was proof that he was nothing more than an animal.
That I’d only responded the way I had because of the rain.
It was easier to think… and it was getting harder and harder to believe my own bullshit.
I needed to move.
I needed to stop touching Phoenix.
I needed…
A startled gasp escaped my throat—I’d been idly chasing the scars and tattoos along the length of his torso while my mind wandered. I hadn’t even noticed the cadence of his breathing change, because I was too enamored with the stretch of his skin and the confusion trying to drown me.
The color of his eyes was softer without the sharp lines of black to make the blue stand out. In that moment, they were staring at me with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. Beneath that was a soft bit of wonder and curiosity that nearly made me panic.
I could take another round of him dragging me into the rain and fucking me. Hell, I could take a beating. What I couldn’t stand was the way Phoenix looked at me like he wanted to see right through me, as if he could reach inside me and touch my heart.
I didn’t know why he was looking at me like he wanted to make it beat again.
I started to pull away when his hand came out, catching my wrist. There was so much strength in something as simple as his hold, enough to break me. Phoenix tilted his head and brought my hand back to the center of his chest, flattening my palm over the beat of his heart.
It was steady, thundering just a little faster than usual.
Was he nervous?
How long had it been since someone had seen him without his paint?
Things with Phoenix were a dizzying kind of strange I couldn’t keep up with, and the man looking up at me wasn’t the raider I’d grown used to. I wasn’t sure I could do this.
He kept the paint that he wore like a mask tucked in his pants, and I’d watched him apply it enough times—touch up the edges and carefully draw the patterns—that I knew all the lines.
Since the first time I’d seen him do it, he’d wake up every morning and touch up his paint, then settle me between his legs so he could put mine on.
It was like a ritual to him, and I would have been lying to myself if I said I didn’t relax beneath the feel of his fingers transforming me into a different person.
Now, without the barrier of that paint between us, I felt oddly raw and exposed.
I leaned over, grabbing his pants off the floor so I could rifle through the pockets and rise back up with the tin in my hand.
He just watched me with that same calm, patient expression, though he refused to let go of my wrist.
Phoenix didn’t need to know I was doing this because I couldn’t stand to look at him without his paint.
Without that mask to hide his youth and the soft curves of his face, the beauty beneath the roughness, I could see the man he might have been if the world were different.
As much as I kept my past a secret from him, he hadn’t told me much about why he’d chosen the life he had.
There were obviously people who did it because they were just brutal.
There were people who looked at the world and how fucked up it was and they embraced that cruelty with both hands.
But for all the ways he was fucked up—the people he’d killed, the fact that he was a god damn cannibal… Phoenix didn’t strike me as someone who’d taken up the role of a raider just because he wanted to. He had a pack. A family.
He was different.
I had no idea what had turned him into the killing machine that he was, what had caused his scars, but without the paint, I could see something else.
I could see Phoenix leading one of the little camps that the Order so often “secured” supplies from, protecting them in the face of guns and soldiers because you didn’t turn on your own people .
Phoenix standing strong and tall, pledging to the Order because he was young, and he thought maybe he could make a difference.
Phoenix, standing at my side when I’d joined up, the tags around his neck his own, seeing me when I was at my most broken and holding me together instead of Ben.
That final image burned violently behind my lids. I’d lost the last of my hope when Ben had turned on me so easily, the last bit of trust I might have had in the world. But something told me Phoenix…
Fuck, Phoenix wouldn’t have turned on me if he’d learned I’d never earned my tags the same way he had—he would have realized I’d earned them through pain, through loss.
And I could see it play behind my eyes—a fucking painful, impossible what- if.
I didn’t want that.
I couldn’t want that.
I couldn’t see him as anything other than the monster I needed him to be.
Wanting and what-ifs would drive me insane.
I uncapped the paint and dipped my finger inside. I was forced to do it all one-handed, because Phoenix refused to release my wrist. The warmth of his fingers encircling mine felt like an anchor that kept me from flying apart, from trying to run.
I craved the strength of that grip, and I hated the way I did. I had to bite the inside of my cheek until it bled to stop myself from speaking, from telling him to let me go.
To stop .
To never stop.
I wasn’t sure anymore.
I focused on my task instead. I had to lean across his broad chest to trace the marks he meticulously painted on his features—marks I finally understood. He wouldn’t be half as intimidating if everyone could see what I saw now.