Chapter 30
CHAPTER
THIRTY
PHOENIX
It turned out there were plenty of things in a train station that were flammable, and this time when we set the building on fire, Aubrey put the last of his bullets into Morris’s face to make sure he was dead before we lit the bitch up.
He quietly linked our fingers and pulled me away from the flames, but he pressed his mouth to mine and demanded those three words from me again.
I love you.
Fuck, I hadn’t known I could say it. I hadn’t known I could mean it. But I was still whispering it into his soft kisses when Blythe and Zero found us fifteen minutes later, both of them covered in blood and a few bullet wounds, but smiling.
Aubrey broke off from me as soon as he parked the car, stepping up to the smoldering remains of the train station two days later. He’d told me more about it when we’d gotten back to Paradise. The way Bishop had been here—died here. The reason he wanted to come back.
To say goodbye.
I hated that a part of him still belonged to a ghost—that a part of him probably always would—but I could give him this.
He pulled his backpack from his shoulder and kneeled in the ashes. I watched a plume of it drift around him as he started to dig, and after a few seconds, I dropped down beside him.
We worked until our fingers were filthy and the hole in the ground was deep enough that he could carefully pull the jacket in his backpack out. He laid the tiger skull inside it, but his fingers trembled when they came to the tags at his throat.
“Aubrey, you don’t have to.”
“I do.” I saw it then, the shine of tears in his eyes—that impossible thing that I’d never seen before. He held them back as he pulled the chain over his head, and one of them slipped free as he dropped it over the skull. When he reached into his bag to pull out the letter, I frowned.
My fingers searched my pockets, and I pulled out the one I’d found. A little crumpled, a little bloodstained now… but…
“What’s this?”
“I found it with the skeletons we buried.”
He opened the letter and read it, and by the time he looked up at me, the tears he’d held back were falling in full .
It turned into a choked sob when I reached to my belt and pulled off his collar, dropping it on top of the pile.
I helped him fold the jacket up, and we both slid our fingers over the ashes, burying everything that had built us beneath the still-warm earth.
When we were finished, our fingers were linked together, and it was Aubrey who crawled across the ground and straddled me.
“I want to leave this place.” He pressed a kiss to the corner of my mouth.
“We’re already packing?—”
“No, I mean this city. This fucking coast. I want to go somewhere else. You said there were scientists out west. Maybe we should burn their building to the ground too.” His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes…
eyes that were still wet and full of tears.
“I just can’t. I can’t be here anymore. I can’t do this anymore. I need something new.”
“Aubrey.” He leaned in as I spoke, brushing salty kisses against my lips. “If you want to burn the entire world to the ground and leave it as nothing but ash, I’ll start the fire. If you want to kill every person who ever hurt you, I’ll be your weapon. Wherever you go, I’m with you.”
The words seemed to run straight through him, spark to life the fire that had burned out around us. He wrapped his arms around my neck and pulled me against him, pressing his mouth to mine. “Right now, I just need you here .”
“You have me.”
He shoved me back, and my shoulders hitting the ground sent another wave of ash into the air around us. It was still warm—the fire had just burned out, and with the way heat was streaking through my body, I wondered if we were going to set it ablaze again.
Instead, I focused on the feel of his lips pressing against mine, the way he rocked and squirmed until his hands were pulling his shirt over his head and scrambling to yank mine free.
It didn’t matter that we were here in the middle of a burned down building, on top of everything in his life that had tried to hurt him—or maybe it did.
Maybe that was why he needed this.
I groaned when he yanked my pants down and grabbed my dick. A few quick strokes had me hard, and he leaned back long enough to pull his own cock free before he took us both in hand. My fingers joined his as we kneeled there on top of everything that made up who we were, who we’d been.
When we started to stroke in tandem, I knew this wasn’t really about sex. It wasn’t about pleasure, or lust. It wasn’t desire.
It was love—our own fucked-up brand of love, and I was going to take every minute of it I could. I dragged him down on top of me and pulled his mouth to mine again while he rutted, grinding our cocks together, chasing pleasure and release.
Freedom.
Chasing the heels of that something new.
“No more collars.” He panted his demand against my mouth while his eyes blazed like foxfire.
“No more weakness. No more past.” He gasped his next words out like they hurt—like pulling them from his chest was pulling some deep-seated thorn free so he could finally breathe. “Just me. Just you. Just us.”
Just us.
He didn’t give me a chance to answer. His mouth found mine again, and he kissed me with lips that trembled and a tongue that tasted salty from tears and bitter from the burned wood in the air.
And it was still the sweetest kiss I’d ever had.
Our bodies worked and surged until the cloud around us was a whipping, whirling thing, until we were both panting and clinging to each other—until the ash painted us both gray from the sweat on our bodies, coating our tongues and sealing our kiss with the memories and demons from Aubrey’s past finally laid to rest.
Finally, I couldn’t hold it back anymore.
I cried out his name as my body clenched.
Orgasm rolled through me like a tidal wave that left me screaming into his kiss, left his fingers clawing across my torso and painting my waist with four ragged stripes—new scars for our new life.
Aubrey came when I ran my fingers up the length of the lacerations like he could feel it too.
A new beginning.
A new world, just for us.
He chased the edges of our pleasure with his hips until we were both trembling, until the air around us was nothing but kicked up ash—memories trapped between our bodies and smeared across our skin.
Finally, he collapsed against my chest. He was panting .
Crying…
Trembling as he held me.
And for the first time, I really felt like Aubrey was mine. No collar, no weakness… no past holding him back.
Just us and the ash on our tongues, sealing the promise of a future where, for the first time, I was his too.