Chapter 27
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
AUbrEY
Maybe it was stupid, wanting to bury the skull with his tags, but I couldn’t think of a better way to finally tell Bishop goodbye.
I’d put it in a bag and carefully stored it in the hotel room we’d been staying in when we first got here, like it was something delicate, something precious that needed to be hidden away.
I could have said that I was running from Phoenix—that I was going to make the trek to the train station alone because I needed to do this where Bishop had died if I was actually going to do this.
But I wouldn’t do that to him.
I would, however, give him a few hours to cool off once he found the collar I’d left lying on the table beside him. It wasn’t that I was leaving him, but if I was going to do this, I had to do it as me .
Not as Killer .
Not as pet.
Not as Aubrey Bishop.
I had to be Aubrey Malcolm again.
I wasn’t going to get a chance to do that if Phoenix woke up and instantly strangled me because I’d slipped his leash.
It would be better if I gave him an hour or two to get over being so worked up. I’d told Blythe I wasn’t leaving when I went back for the skull, so once he got around to asking them where I’d gone, he’d figure it out.
I hoped.
It wasn’t just that, though. I needed space—space to figure out how in the fuck I was going to do this. How I was going to open myself up and let myself…
Want.
I still didn’t know how to trust the fact that the world wouldn’t take him from me now that I realized how much I needed to keep him.
Phoenix was the tiger.
He’d always been the fucking tiger, alive and thriving. A predator trapped and waiting for me to come find him. The only difference was, he was free. He was alive.
If there’d ever been anyone in this world strong enough to survive caring about me, maybe it was him.
And like the thought was a goddamn curse, I heard the sound of footsteps in front of me—they weren’t heavy enough to be his, though.
I pulled my pistol before I had time to think, not that it would do me much good.
I barely had any ammo left. I’d run through most of what I stole from the Order clearing out the resort, and the men in the theater had mostly had bullets for the bigger guns .
That and explosives.
I came up short when I found another gun pointed at my face. It wasn’t someone from the pack, and it wasn’t a raider.
I recognized the man.
He’d been part of my squad with Ben. I wasn’t surprised they were here—I’d honestly been expecting someone to come and hunt me down, eventually.
But…
There was something a little too excited about his expression.
“Hey, Aubrey.” He said the name so casually, and his gaze dropped to the tags I still wore at my throat. “That’s your name, right? Not Bishop.”
“No,” I said carefully, my eyes sweeping the area. If there were more Order assholes here, the last thing I needed was them finding the rest of my group—my pack.
Fuck.
My little family, who I’d found and hadn’t realized until this moment that I’d kill to protect.
“Guess the question is, are you going to come quiet like your little raider friend, or do I have to shoot you?”
My little raider friend?
“Who do you have?”
It could have been Cutter—it could have been Flynt or Cora or?—
“Big asshole, lots of tattoos. Paint all over his face.”
Of course it was Phoenix.
“Listen to me. I’m going to give you a chance to not completely fuck your entire life up, Vance.
” I used his first name—I wasn’t in the fucking Order anymore.
I didn’t have to follow rules or regulations, and right now I was on the verge of shooting off his fucking hand that was holding the gun and feeding the metal to him until he talked. “Where’s Phoenix?”
“He’s with Morris and the other guys.”
That stopped me.
I couldn’t have heard him right.
“Who?”
“Oh, come on. Charlie Morris. I know you know who I’m talking about.”
“What the fuck do you mean, Morris?” I felt cold, and I recognized the symptoms of shock mixing with rage bubbling just beneath my skin.
“Yeah, he told us about you, Aubrey Malcolm.” Hearing that name was like a slap in the face.
I hadn’t heard it in eight years. “We found him while we were hunting you down for what you did to Ben. He said he was hunting you too—just got free from a scientist’s base all the way over on the west coast. He told us all about what you did.
Did you think anyone was going to let a carrier freak like you get away with it?
Burning down a facility, killing two men in the Order—” His eyes dropped to the tags around my throat. “That’s what you did for those, right?”
My numbness was slowly giving way to rage, fury that poured through me to the point that my fingers were shaking. It was too much to process.
Morris was alive. He’d been alive for the last ten years… alive while Bishop was dead.
None of it made sense.
None of this made sense .
But I knew one thing. If Morris had Phoenix, if the nightmare from my past was actually here to take away the one thing that made me want a future, I was done talking.
My gun went off without warning, and Vance screamed as blood blossomed at his wrist. I didn’t hesitate when I stepped forward, and he didn’t have the grip strength to stop me when I yanked his gun from his hand and turned it on him, pointing it at his stomach.
“Where’s Phoenix?”
I wanted to ask him how Morris was here—how he was alive—but none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was the man who I’d left sleeping in bed, the one who’d held all my broken pieces and finally made me feel whole.
I wasn’t going to let them take him from me.
“Fuck you, you goddamn traitor. It’s no surprise your other little raider friend betrayed you.
Cutter? Who do you think told us where you were, what you were doing?
Who you were fucking.” I didn’t have time to process Cutter’s betrayal, but it didn’t really surprise me.
“You’re nothing but a filthy carrier who—” The insult cut off in a scream as I dropped the barrel of the gun he’d held and pumped a shot into his leg.
Scattershot was the easiest thing for the Order to reproduce, and it did a damn good job of blowing infected into enough pieces that we could get away.
I preferred pistols for precision, but most of our squad had carried these.
I knew the damage it could do, and I didn’t jerk back when blood and thicker things splattered onto my legs as Vance fell to the ground.
I moved forward, planting the gun in the center of his chest and stepping on the bloody stump that had been his leg.
“Where. Is. Phoenix?” I leaned in, twisting the heel of my boot against his mangled flesh until he rolled to the side and the acrid scent of vomit filled the air. I didn’t care. Fuck—I didn’t care . I’d take him apart one piece at a time if I had to.
“Au-Aubrey, please. We didn’t just kill you outright—we paid those raiders to fuck you up at the theater, not kill you.
” My eyes narrowed at the confession. “They’ll kill me, they’ll—” I brought the gun up in a quick motion, thrusting it between his lips and down his throat hard enough to make him gag again.
“Do you think I won’t? You have five seconds after I take this out of your mouth to tell me where they took him or I’m pulling the trigger.”
The sound of metal clicking against teeth as he reached up weakly in an attempt to protect himself rattled through my bones, but it didn’t matter. I pulled the gun back just enough to give him room to speak.
Nothing mattered.
Nothing except…
“One.”
“Aubrey, please. I’m sorry. I?—”
“Two.”
“I need a doctor.”
“Three.”
“Please don’t…”
“Four.”
His eyes went wide as I shifted the gun up to the center of his face .
“F—”
“The train station!” he screamed before he rolled and gagged again, heaving up more bile in his terror. I couldn’t tell if he’d pissed himself through the blood soaking beneath him, and I didn’t really care.
“The train station?”
“Morris set up a base there. He?—”
“Five.”
The sound of the gun going off again was probably a little premature, but I couldn’t help it. I should have tortured more information out of him, maybe figured out how many people were at the station, how many weapons Morris had. I didn’t know if it was him and a squad or the entire fucking Order.
I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. Morris was taking Phoenix to the fucking train station… to the same place Bishop had died.
It was like some fucked-up destiny that everything always came down to that place. If I fucking got him out, I was burning it to the ground.
I thought about going after them alone, but I knew I couldn’t do it. If it was just me, I would have risked it. If it was my life on the line, I would have happily put it there without dragging anyone else into it.
But it wasn’t just me.
It was Phoenix, and he had a family.
Fuck. They were my family too. By the time I got back to our camp, I was breathless and half expecting them to be swarmed by the Order.
There were two dead men on the ground, and Blythe had already gutted and started processing them like they were nothing more than a cut of meat. For the first time, I didn’t care that she was prepping a person to be cooked.
I knew their faces—I knew their names.
I knew that they’d helped take Phoenix.
“Look at this, Aubrey. We have enough to share. Maybe if we get Phoenix full before you talk he won’t…” She trailed off when she saw me, wiping the knife she’d been using on her pants as she started forward. “What happened?” But I could see it on her face, in her eyes.
She already knew what I was about to say.
“They took Phoenix.”