Chapter 35 – Phoenix
PHOENIX
The opera house is three blocks east of the venue and I know it before Raf does because Raf is freaking out too much to pay attention, but at least he's following me without arguing. The bond threads are pulling me toward the opera house like fish hooks buried in my sternum.
I can't not know where Bells is.
Even without a mark binding us, she lives inside my chest.
We hit the building at a dead sprint.
The front doors are locked. Heavy brass handles, ornamental deadbolts. Old-money security that says we don't want you here.
I don't slow down.
One side service door up against a charging giant alpha drummer who hasn't skipped a meal since Nash died and has been running on adrenaline and pure fucking rage for the last forty minutes.
The door loses.
Raf is on my heels, his boots crunching over the shattered doorframe as I stumble into the hall.
The smell hits me first.
Blood.
It's everywhere. Smeared on the walls. Pooled on the floor. A trail of it leading deeper into the building like someone painted a path in red.
"Holy fuck," Raf breathes.
I follow the trail.
Not because I want to. Because the bond thread attached to Bells is screaming at me from somewhere below, and the blood trail leads the same direction, and I have to believe those two facts are connected in a way that ends with her alive.
We round a corner.
A guard is crumpled against the baseboard.
If I look, I'm going to puke.
This is the work of a feral alpha, or an alpha who's close.
Rex.
Rex did this.
Which means Rex is alive.
Was alive.
Is alive. Present tense.
I'm committing to present tense.
"Stairs," Raf says, pointing.
A metal stairwell descends into amber light. The blood trail goes down.
We follow it.
The stairwell dumps us into a wider corridor with velvet-lined walls. Underground rehearsal level. I've been here once, years ago, when Nash dragged us to some opera fundraiser and Rex refused to get out of the car.
Two more guards on the floor.
One of them is out cold. The other is sitting against the wall, cradling his hand, his index finger pointing sideways at a ninety-degree angle. He sees us coming and scrabbles backward with a yelp, broken finger pointing everywhere.
"Where's my mate?" Raf snarls. "White hair. Combat boots. Can't miss her."
The guard's eyes go wide. "I don't—I wasn't—the other one, the one with the face—"
"Wrong question," I say, stepping past Raf.
I crouch and get eye level with the guard. My voice is calm because someone has to be calm and Raf is vibrating at a frequency that suggests the next person who gives him a bad answer is going to lose teeth.
"Our singer is somewhere in this building. Our singer. Someone took… him. You're going to tell me where sh—he—is, and you're going to tell me right fucking now, or my bassist here is going to do to your other hand what was done to that one."
Raf cracks his knuckles behind me.
Not for show. He's actually cracking his knuckles because his hands are clenched so tight they need the release.
But the timing works.
The guard's face goes gray. "Down… down the corridor. Double doors. There's a rehearsal theater. Hughes—he had a cage set up on the stage. I swear I didn't know what it was for—"
Hughes?
Stephen fucking Hughes?
I'm already running.
Raf overtakes me. I'm taller but he's faster in a sprint, and he tears down the corridor like a guided missile.
Three guards between us and the double doors.
The first one steps out of a side room, sidearm half-drawn, and Raf hits him without breaking stride. It’s a shoulder check that launches the guy into the wall so hard plaster cracks. The sidearm skitters across the concrete. Raf doesn't even look at it.
The second one is smarter.
He's got his weapon up and aimed, stance planted, and he fires.
The round punches through the space where Raf's head was a millisecond ago because Raf dropped into a slide—a fucking baseball slide on concrete, his bass-calloused hands scraping the stone to slow him down—and came up inside the guard's range.
Raf's fist catches the man's wrist from below, torquing the gun skyward.
The second shot goes into the ceiling. Plaster rains down.
My turn.
The third guard comes at me from behind a support column, swinging a baton in a wide arc aimed at my skull.
I catch it.
My palm closes around the shaft six inches from my temple and the impact travels through my arm and into my shoulder and I feel it, but I don't let go. His eyes go wide because catching a baton mid-swing isn't something most people do.
Most people aren't fucking alphas who have spent a decade channeling every ounce of grief and rage into beating drums until their hands are weapons.
I wrench the baton out of his grip and drive the butt end into his solar plexus. He folds. I shove him into the wall, pin him with my forearm across his throat, and lean my full weight in.
"Where is she?" I snarl.
He gurgles.
I ease up. Fractionally.
"Theater," he wheezes. "Stage. The cage."
I drop him.
Behind me, Raf is standing over the second guard, the man's own gun in Raf's hand, ejected magazine in the other. He tosses both in opposite directions.
"Go," Raf says.
I go.
The double doors are fifteen feet ahead. Someone kicked them open already. One door is hanging from a single hinge, the other caved inward with a bloody boot print stamped into the metal.
Rex's boot print.
I'd know it anywhere.
But between us and those doors, the corridor branches. A second hallway shoots off to the right, and there are footsteps coming from it.
More. Fucking. Guards.
"Raf—"
"I hear them." He's already pivoting, planting himself at the junction, his body filling the corridor like a wall. "Get to Bells."
"I'm not leaving you!"
"Phoenix." His dark eyes lock onto mine, devoid of the bravado and cockiness that would usually be there, which scares the shit out of me. "Get to our girl."
The footsteps get louder.
I grab Raf's shoulder. Squeeze once. Hard.
He nods.
I run for the double doors.
Behind me, I hear the first guard round the corner and Raf's voice, low and chuckling darkly.
"Wrong fuckin' hallway, amigo."
The sound of impact.
A body hitting a wall.
I don't look back.