Chapter 29
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
AUbrEY
Cora and Flynt stayed behind, though I knew they were packing their shit to leave. I couldn’t blame them—taking on an unknown number of Order soldiers wasn’t for the faint of heart, and I’d never seen them that close to Phoenix and the others to begin with.
We didn’t need them. We found one of the trucks the Order issued to their soldiers parked at the front gates, solar powered and sitting in the sun. It probably belonged to the assholes Blythe had gutted, but it was going to save us time.
I didn’t have time to waste. I needed to get to Phoenix before Morris touched him.
I needed to get to him before anything happened.
I needed…
“Look, I don’t know how to drive, but if you don’t calm down, I’m going to think I can do a better job than you. Phoenix will be fine.” Blythe’s hand on my arm was soothing, but I could see the worry in her eyes.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell him anything,” I finally said, the emotion in my chest almost too much for me to speak around.
“Then let’s go kill the fuckers who took him so you can.”
She was right.
Of course she was right.
Before I was finished, every asshole who’d even thought about touching him was going to be dead in the ground.
I left Blythe and Zero on the other side of the train station. From what we could tell, it wasn’t the entire Order coming down on our heads. It made sense—usually when we had a deserter, they’d send out a squad to hunt them down and bring them back so justice could be served.
Fuck, what did they really know about justice? Nothing.
Nothing about justice or loyalty. I proved that when I cornered one of them as Blythe and Zero went after the few who’d started running when they saw us coming. A knife to his stomach had him screaming about exactly where Morris had taken Phoenix.
The blade across his throat made him stop altogether. I rifled through his pockets for a second and found what I was looking for.
A firestarter.
Before I was through here, this entire fucking place was going up in flames .
For now, though, I had to find Phoenix. I wasn’t about to set it ablaze with him still inside.
The dead man at my feet said Morris had dragged him to the station and taken him into a storage room in the back.
It sounded like him—he liked to fuck with people where he couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be caught.
I couldn’t ignore the sensation crawling along my spine—fear tingling the tips of my fingers, mixed with a fury I couldn’t quite wrap my head around.
This had happened before, hadn’t it? Only it had been Bishop coming after me.
Bishop saving me.
If I found Phoenix the same way I’d been found…
There wasn’t enough honor in the world to stop me from killing the monster that had haunted my dreams… and there weren’t enough screams in Hell to feed the roaring void that was splitting wide in my chest.
And I could hear it—low angry grunts. A snarling growl that I recognized.
“Fuck you, you piece of shit.”
Phoenix.
I took off at a run and half flung myself into the room. Phoenix was on a table, but one of his hands was free. His shirt was ripped open, his chest bloody.
And on top of him was a demon I’d thought dead, living and breathing with a knife to my raider’s throat.
“Get the fuck off him.” The low, deadly sound of my threat made both of their heads turn, though Phoenix used the distraction to fling Morris to the ground. The man scrambled, rising to his feet, and my eyes were instantly drawn to the scars that littered half his body.
He’d gone up in the building… and somehow he’d survived.
Fuck.
We should have killed him that night.
We should have…
“Are you okay?” Phoenix’s voice came out in a low rumble, and my eyes widened in shock.
He was asking me if I was okay? He was the one strapped to a table.
He was the one bleeding.
And I…
I felt the same way I did when it rained, but there wasn’t a fucking cloud in the sky to give me an excuse.
It wasn’t the rain.
It was the way Phoenix was tied down.
It was the way Morris had kneeled over him.
It was the identical cut that ran down his chest. The same scar I had on my back mirrored along his front.
It was everything—it was the rain, it was Phoenix. It was Bishop and Morris and the entire fucking world around us.
It was the fact that I had to admit—that I finally had to admit I hadn’t been someone else the entire time I’d been with Phoenix. I hadn’t been pretending to be something that I wasn’t.
I was the man who’d stood beside him; I was the monster he’d painted me to be.
And I was going to start acting like it.
Morris’s grin filled my vision as I flung myself across the small space, and I ignored the feel of his knife sliding across my side as I wrapped my arms around him and opened my mouth.
Phoenix was finally getting his wish, because I tore my teeth into the bastard’s throat and nearly gagged as my mouth filled with a hot wash of copper—meat and blood, flesh and tendons.
I jerked my head back with as much strength as I could and came away with something thick and warm in my mouth as Morris jammed his knife into my thigh and shoved me away with a scream.
My eyes connected with Phoenix’s, and the wide-eyed expression—full of warmth, heat, lust— was nearly too much. I swallowed the meat in my mouth so he could watch, then turned to the man on the ground in front of me.
“You should have just killed me that night, Morris.”
The sound of rope snapping told me Phoenix had gotten loose from the last of his restraints.
Fuck, Morris really was a goddamn idiot. You didn’t tie up a raider like Phoenix. You killed him. You chained him.
He was a predator.
We both were.
Outside, I could still hear yelling… guns being fired in the distance. I knew Blythe and Zero were close, but not close enough to be here for this.
That was all right, though. We didn’t need them for this fight. Morris was bleeding all over the front of his shirt. He looked weak.
He looked afraid.
He looked like he was seeing a ghost.
“You’re not wrong,” he snapped, but his fingers were shaking when he reached for his gun. “I can fix that mistake. You and Bishop are exactly the same. You think you can’t die, but I can?—”
Phoenix surged forward without warning, and the loud sound of a wrist snapping when he stomped one booted foot down on Morris’s hand sent a thrill of violent excitement through me.
I didn’t realize how much I’d needed to know that he was dead. He was part of the past I needed buried.
He was part of the pain that had been so determined to hold me back for so long.
I needed this over.
I needed…
“Let me do it.” The words came out hushed, and Phoenix turned his eyes up to me.
“I can do it for you.” Even as he offered, he yanked the man up by his bad arm, ignoring the scream that tore through him when he twisted his hands behind his back so he couldn’t lash out.
It was strange. I’d spent so long building Morris up in my head like a demon, but beside Phoenix, he seemed so…
Small.
Everything that had haunted me my entire life came down to a narrowed point in front of me.
It came down to Morris, bleeding out in the arms of a raider. And Phoenix, looking at me with those fucking ocean eyes as I bent down to pick up the knife Morris had used to cut him.
“Phoenix…”
My nightmare was in his arms, and all I could think about was the fact that he was here—that he was breathing and whole. That he was okay. That he was strong enough to survive, that I could keep him .
I could have him .
“I’m going to fucking kill you, Aubrey, I’ll—” I thrust the knife forward, digging it into Morris’s chest and twisting up.
It cut his words off in a scream that choked to gurgles as blood filled his lungs, and I did the only thing I could.
I used my forward momentum and came up on my tiptoes, leaning over his shoulder to press my lips to Phoenix’s in a kiss that tasted like blood. Like death.
Like that first kiss he’d said we could have had. And I knew…
“I love you,” I gasped as I pulled away and stared at his crimson painted lips.
Fuck. It made sense.
Where else would I have confessed, other than over a dead body, covered in blood?
Where else could I have confessed?
Phoenix’s eyes widened, and he reached around, ripping the knife out of Morris’s stomach and dragging it across his throat in a deep, vicious motion that soaked my front with blood.
He threw the lifeless body to the ground as though Morris hadn’t been such a huge black spot in my nightmares—as though he hadn’t changed me.
Unmade me.
As though he was nothing, because that’s all he was now. Nothing.
A dead man with a dead man’s dreams of revenge. But my dreams …
My dream . It was right there. He was right there.
He was alive, and he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and hauled me against him, covering my mouth with his own and biting my lower lip as he growled, “Say it again.”
“Fuck.” I raised my hand and slicked it across his chest, across the cut that matched my own. Fuck. I’d almost lost him, and I felt my eyes burning. “I didn’t think I could. I didn’t think I ever would again, but I can’t help it. You made me love you, and now it’s the only thing that matters.”
He dropped his forehead to mine, drifting to run his nose along my jaw, and it felt almost strange when his lips grazed my throat. It was usually covered by my collar… but now…
Now I could feel him everywhere as he lifted his lips and pressed them to my temple.
“I fucking love you too, Aubrey. I wasn’t sure I knew how, but I do. Or I’ll learn… for you.”
Fuck. Phoenix was alive—he was warm in my arms, and his mouth tasted like copper when I pressed my lips to his to drink down his confession, tugging back so I could whisper the words he’d said to me back at him.
“Once we burn this building down, I want you to tell me again.”
His smile was everything wicked, everything vicious that I loved about him—everything that meant he was mine.