Chapter 24
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
PHOENIX
“You’re going soft.” Blythe’s voice was a tease in my ear, but she didn’t sound angry about it.
Aubrey and I were packing shit up to move back to the house in the center of the island.
We’d found another block of rooms just across the bridge for everyone else to stay in.
It wasn’t exactly perfect, but I wanted to stay at the house. It was good.
Good for us.
And it was flooded with the memory of the way Aubrey had looked at me like he could actually see me.
“What?”
She shoved against my shoulder. “It’s not a bad thing. I was wondering when you were going to find someone who could match your energy. But still…” Blythe smiled. “You’re going soft .”
I’d left Aubrey back at the island, so at least he wasn’t here to listen to this conversation. I wasn’t sure what he’d do if he realized I was changing because of him.
I couldn’t change because of him.
I’d learned from the time I was young that you didn’t change for people; you changed the world to fit you. You changed the people in your world to fit around you, or you found people who already did.
“I’m not ,” I hissed, and she grinned.
“Sure you aren’t. It’s okay, Phoenix. He’s good for you.”
Good for you.
The words pounded in my ears, and I flicked my gaze to Zero, who quickly jerked his eyes down with a grin. To Cutter, who was staring at me like his entire world was on fire. Cora and Flynt were already at the new hotels getting things cleaned and checking on the solar panels.
It was just them, and they were all looking at me and confirming what Blythe said.
Soft.
“I’m not changing for anyone. You’re wrong.”
Even as I said it, I knew words weren’t going to be enough. I had to prove it.
Maybe to myself more than them, because some small part of me could feel it—the way I wanted to change for Aubrey.
The way I might have done it, if it meant he’d really be mine.
But Aubrey didn’t want soft. He didn’t want changed .
He wanted a monster, a raider—someone who could break him and have the strength to put him back together.
If he saw that I was going soft , he’d walk away.
I couldn’t let that happen.
His back was turned to me when I stalked into the house. He was wearing a tank top again, old and shredded. I could see the line along his back—the one he’d kept from me this entire time. Over the week since we’d cleared the island house, I’d gotten more stories from him.
Maybe he gave them freely because the scars that I’d picked so far came with memories he didn’t mind telling—his father had cut his face, burned his leg, broken his fingers.
He talked about the man with a cold and calculated dispassion that told me he was so far removed from the situation that nothing he could say about it would actually hurt him.
I didn’t tell him that every time he told me about the drunk bastard who’d starved and beaten him, a part of me raged on the inside, wanted to climb through some portal to the past so I could take the asshole apart slowly.
I was mapping out every place that he’d hurt Aubrey, and I would happily have returned the favor tenfold.
But I couldn’t do that, and I wasn’t going to tell Aubrey that I wanted to.
He was a little more standoffish when I picked one of the scars that were bright pink instead of the faded criss-crossing of white.
He told me, dully, that he’d been attacked by the Order once they realized he wasn’t actually one of them.
They’d sent Ben after him, and that was apparently when I’d first seen him.
How fucked was it that the people he’d tried to find a family with had tried to have him killed?
It was one more thing about him I needed to know, one more piece of Aubrey I could keep. Once I knew how to navigate those broken pathways, I could find the road to see what was at his very center—the path to make him stay .
I could see, though, that my questions were doing something to him.
For every bit he gave me, he tried to pull away in turn.
It wasn’t a physical thing; if anything, we were fucking and fighting more than we ever had.
Any chance he had, Aubrey would pull me into a corner and drop to his knees in front of me.
His mouth worked in hot, teasing strokes until I picked him up and fucked him against whatever surface I could.
He was doing a damn good job of distracting me.
He probably didn’t realize that desperation told me where he didn’t want me to touch the most. If I could pry open that part of him, if I could force it out, maybe he’d see that I wasn’t different.
That I was still me.
I was only going soft because I’d let him have that space.
I was done.
I needed him. All of him. I needed to show him I hadn’t changed.
The warm expression on his face faded when he noticed the way I was looking at him, and his jaw clenched when I stepped closer.
“Is everyone else coming soon?” I could hear the nerves in his tone. He knew.
He knew what I wanted, and he had to realize that he’d run out of options. This was it.
This was all that was left.
“I want?— ”
“This one!” Aubrey’s hand struck out suddenly, and his fingers ran along the length of my jawline, across my throat. It only took me a second to realize that it wasn’t my throat he was actually touching.
It was the scar that spilled from ear to ear.
“What?” My hands that had been reaching for his back stilled as he traced his finger along the poorly stitched line again.
Aubrey looked up at me, and I could see the desperation and fear in his gaze.
“It’s only fair. It’s my turn now—I want a piece of you too.
How did you get this scar?” I could hear the panic trying to claw its way out of his throat with the question.
I didn’t know if he actually gave a damn about the story that came with the place he was touching, but he was clearly willing to care if it meant I would look anywhere other than where I’d been focused.
Soft.
Soft.
Blythe’s accusation warred with the look of desperation on Aubrey’s face, with the echo of his words.
I want a piece of you too.
It was a piece that I’d never given anyone. Not Blythe, not Zero.
No one.
Aubrey acted like he was broken sometimes, but he still had some strange semblance of honor to him. If I told him this, it would mean something. I could tell that about him; as much as he tried to leave who he was in the past, tried to act like he didn’t give a shit, he was good.
I shrugged and caught myself nearly grabbing his wrist to yank it from my throat.
Instead, my fingers worked through the sudden tension running the length of my body, clenching open and shut.
“It was a knife. Order issued.” And I could have left it at that, but I remembered the way he told me the full story of the cut on his lip. His father had done it.
I could tell him about my family too, I supposed. Maybe it would show him more than anything why I was never going to change.
“When I was a baby, my mother left me in the street during the rain. She’d been accepted into the Order, even though the Order doesn’t really take carriers, and they certainly wouldn’t take a pregnant woman.
” I brushed my fingers against the tags that read the name Stone .
“I guess she found a way to trick them. Then again, so did you. So…”
My eyes dropped to the tags on his chest, the ones with the name Bishop—fuck, that name was another secret. One I’d let him keep after I saw how he’d reacted to me hearing it.
No more. No more secrets. No more anything between us but the truth.
“I was lucky a woman found me—a raider named Lynna. She raised me, and when I was old enough, she told me that the girl who’d dropped me off had left me wrapped up in an Order jacket and cried when the rain started.
Lynna wanted to go after her and slit her throat, but she took me in instead.
” I still had the damn jacket, tucked away in a trunk in the back of a bunker I’d secured a while ago.
It was a little memento of what I’d been and where I came from.
It wasn’t something I ever wanted to forget.
I kept it the way I kept the paint on my face—it was the way Lynna had painted hers.
“Phoenix…” Aubrey’s expression was starting to go soft, li ke he hadn’t realized exactly what kind of story he was asking for when he’d demanded his distraction.
It was too late now. I’d started, and for some reason I couldn’t stop. The words came out of their own volition, drawn from my chest and fed straight into his hands.
“It took me years, but I tracked her down. She was running her own squad by then. I was seventeen when I finally found them.” I smiled, but it felt raw, vicious.
More a baring of teeth than anything joyful.
“I took her entire group out one by one. I took my time, picking them off in the rain, tearing them apart while the rest of them hid from the storm. By the time it had cleared, she was the only one left.” I lifted my gaze, half expecting to see horror. Maybe anger. But no.
Aubrey’s eyes were full of pity. Sorrow.
Something chasing behind those two emotions that I’d seen when he’d looked at me the day I’d woken without paint on my face.
He was looking at me like he could see something more than who I was, maybe who I could have been if I hadn’t been left there on that street.
I shook away the sensation that pulsed through me at that expression. I didn’t do vulnerable. I wasn’t going to be different . I needed to tell him this so he could see the sum of what made me whole—the kind of man I was.
The kind who was a monster that could fuck away his pain.
“I thought about killing her outright, but it wasn’t enough for what she’d done. I found her holed up in an old gas station, surrounded by rabids. They were ripping the entire place to shreds— she was getting ripped to shreds. ”