Chapter Thirty-Two
Phoenix
The room is so small, I could cross it from one wall to the other in three steps. The darkness stings my eyes, forcing them to readjust to the poorly lit space. The only light streams in from the room’s single window, its three other walls unfenestrated and made up of dirty, cheap panels that emit a suffocatingly cheap smell of dust mites.
Not for the first time, I ask myself why I’m even here. I know the answer, but there’s something therapeutic in keeping the question on a loop when the answer is only mildly satisfying.
The reality is, I’m here because my wife wants me here.
And what my wife asks me to do, I do, no questions asked.
That doesn’t mean I’m particularly happy about it.
The woman in question is standing in front of the lone window, bathed in its harsh light, arms crossed as she takes in the scene before her.
I walk up until I’m standing just behind her, the warmth of my body sending a small shiver coursing down the length of her spine.
With difficulty, I rip my gaze away from Six’s nape where I’d been admiring the soft elegance of her neck, and look up, my gaze following hers through the window.
My jaw twitches when I see the boy sitting opposite the two cops.
He’s nowhere near a boy. He’s a fully grown man, his size, obvious attitude, and the reason he’s sitting in that room on the other side of the glass evidence of the fact that there’s nothing childlike about him.
“Look at him, Six.”
Her arms tighten across her chest. It’s not often that she digs her heels in and becomes stubborn as a mule, but clearly this is one of those times.
I bite back a sigh.
I’d rather she stubbornly ask me to buy her a mansion on the Amalfi Coast than take this on.
“I am.”
“ This is who you want to adopt?”
She nods once. Her eyes never once move away from the boy-slash-man in question. She doesn’t look at me and that in it of itself makes me want to bring down the blinds on the one-way window so she can’t look at him any longer.
“Yes. I have a feeling, I can’t explain it. I think he was meant to be in our lives.”
“He’s eighteen years old. He doesn’t need us.”
That makes her turn around.
Finally.
And now I regret the words, regret wanting her to look at me, because she faces me with a look of such dismay and disappointment on her features that I want to rewind time and undo the last thirty seconds.
“What eighteen-year-old doesn’t need their parents? Who’s going to house him, take care of him, push him to succeed?” Quieter, she adds, “Don’t you wish your parents had been there for you?”
I scowl at her. “No, they didn’t deserve to be.”
“Well, he deserves to have parents capable of loving him.” She turns away once more. “It’s never too late to save someone.”
Six faces the window, her eyes back on the boy.
He has no way of knowing there’s anybody on the other side of the window, let alone her, and yet it’s almost as if he senses her gaze. The moment her gaze finds him, his face turns away from the cops and his eyes connect unseeingly with hers through the glass.
He’s undeniably handsome, even with the bruise forming on the right side of his face and the defiant sneer contorting his rather unique features. A straight, stiff jawline, marred by an angry scar that cuts from his ear diagonally down to the middle of his jaw. Eyes that burn so hotly with rage they’re nearly vivid red. A nose that’s been broken a few times. A smattering of beauty marks on his unblemished cheek.
His evident rage makes him striking.
“He’s violent,” I point out. “He’s got issues.”
“He needs to be loved,” she argues.
Earlier in the year, Six had heard about his family’s case through a couple of social workers she works with. Even though she’d already been swamped with her current workload, my wife had been unable to turn her back on someone who so clearly needed her, as was typical for her.
She’d decided to take the case on and had specifically worked with the boy’s parents to try and rehabilitate them.
She’d gotten them jobs and access to resources to get clean. She’d gone above and beyond to help them.
Four months ago, she’d gotten a letter from both of them officially declaring their intent to terminate their parenting rights over the boy. She’d tried to track them down, but they’d disappeared back into the circles of vice they’d originally come from.
Two months later, today, she gets a call from the police department telling her the boy has been arrested for assaulting a homeless man and that her business card was found on him.
And now she wants us to adopt him.
After she almost died giving birth to Astra, I waited years for her to come to me and tell me she was ready to adopt another baby. When she never did, I grew tired of waiting and asked her about it myself.
Every time, the answer was the same.
I’m not ready. I’m happy with what we have.
It’s not like I disagreed. I was happy with it being the three of us for the rest of time, I just wanted her to feel the same.
When it became clear she wasn’t interested in adopting, I stopped asking. To say I was caught off guard when the request finally reemerged this morning after being dormant for eighteen years is an understatement.
Finding out that she wanted to adopt not a baby, not even a kid, but an actual man in the eyes of the law, had been another shock. Learning he needed to be picked up at the police station had been the third and final surprise, the one that had nearly finished me.
Six seems blind to reason, my very numerous and valid arguments falling on deaf ears.
I’m running out of time, so I pull out my final trump card.
If this doesn’t work, nothing will.
And then I’ll have to live with this stranger in my house.
“Do you really want this boy who beats up homeless people for fun to be around Astra?” I growl. “He’ll be her stepbrother.”
She stiffens and slides an angry look at me from between narrowed eyes. I know she’s about to make me pay for that low blow.
“He reminds me a lot of you twenty-four years ago, Nix. Furious at the world, being eaten up from the inside out by your bitterness and resentment. I think we have a loving home to offer and if we don’t open it up to someone so clearly in need, then we’re failing each other. Astra will understand that.” She turns back around to look at the still seething teenager. “And stop referring to him as “the boy” just to keep your distance from him. He has a name. Use it.”
I grumble unhappily, annoyed at the situation, annoyed at the fact that Six is clearly upset with me.
That’s not a position I’m used to being in.
And to get out of it, I know I’m just going to give her what she wants.
“Ares is mine, Nix. I know he is.”
“Careful with the ‘mine’ shit, Six,” I fume. “I’m not above killing an eighteen-year-old if I feel you getting too comfortable.”
Six looks up at me. The harsh lighting does nothing to take away from her beauty. Her eyes shine softly as they look up at me with affection now, her anger never one to linger for too long.
“He’s my son, I mean. I was meant to come into his life. That’s why I think I waited so long — I was waiting for him. Astra will get used to it. She’ll understand that we have to help him.”
She blinks up at me, her hand finding my chest.
“Put those eyes away, wild girl,” I groan. “You don’t need to bring out the heavy artillery to convince me. If you want this, you’ll have it.”
A beaming smile breaks out across her face.
“Really?”
“Really. He can come home with us.”
She claps her hands happily, and suddenly a memory of her flashes through my mind so powerfully that it takes my breath away. Her, eighteen years old, hair blowing in the wind, freckles dancing across her cheeks, clapping just as happily as she is now because I agreed to go sledding down Blind Hill with her.
Making her happy makes me happy.
It always has.
I rap my knuckles on the glass to get the cops’ attention. They stand and the boy, Ares, scowls at the one-way window.
As the cops exit the room to come meet us, I say to Six, “Tell them we’re taking him home with us. I’ll make the charges go away. But I’m telling you wild girl, one wrong move and he’s gone. I won’t have him endanger you or Astra. Do we have an agreement?”
She hesitates, biting her lip. “Three.”
“What?”
“Three strike policy. Come on, Nix, you can’t expect him to adapt so quickly. He’s been abandoned by his parents. He’s angry. He’s bound to lash out. One mistake isn’t fair, it’s setting him up to fail.”
“Not my problem. One.”
She crosses her arms, her lower lip jutting out stubbornly.
“Three.”
I sigh. “Fine. Two, and I’m being generous here.”
“Two and a half.”
“Six…”
“Two and a half,” she repeats.
“How do you even define a half here?”
She lifts a shoulder and shrugs. “It’ll be a discretionary half. If he messes up, we’ll discuss if it’s big enough of an offense to count as a half or full strike.”
I cross my own arms. “Two.”
“Three,” she counters.
I growl at her. “That’s not how bartering works.”
She smiles sweetly in response. “It is in my world.”
“For fuck’s sake, fine . Two and a half, as ridiculous as that is.” Six shrieks happily and throws herself into my arms, her warm body coming to mine as her forearms close around the back of my neck. “Don’t be so happy, wild girl. If he hits two and a half strikes, I’ll kill him.”
“You won’t. And he won’t.” She pecks a quick series of kiss against my lips. “Thank you, baby.”
I grumble a reply as the doors open and the cops walk in.
Releasing her back to the ground, we go about negotiating his release and discussing Ares’s guardianship process.
In a month, Astra, Suki, and Rhodes will begin their first year at Royal Crown College, the private university Rogue and Bellamy opened four years ago. They created it when their oldest son first set foot on the grounds of RCA, in anticipation of his graduation one day and the continuation of his higher education.
Set on the other side of the pond from RCA, nestled in the woods only a few hundred feet from the main campus and now sharing some of the same facilities as the secondary school, the college has already earned a prestigious reputation.
Being accepted and enrolled into the start of this year would be impossible for anyone else, not just because of the timing but because students require a near perfect GPA to even be considered, something I’m sure Ares hasn’t maintained, but I’m not worried.
I know Rogue will have the board make an exception for us.
One thing’s for certain — the page is turning and it’s the beginning of a new chapter for our children.
It’s about to get interesting.
***