Chapter Fifty-Four
Phoenix
Wide-eyed and silent, backpack on both shoulders, Lincoln didn’t utter a word as I walked him through the house. Not until we stepped into the music room next to his bedroom.
“Whoa.” Placing a hand on one of the fabric-covered soundproofed walls, he glanced from the drum kit to the upright piano to the other instruments on stands I’d procured—guitar, bass, violin, viola, and an upright bass—anything he could play with his hands.
“If you want other instruments, let me know.”
“No, it’s….” He swallowed hard. “This is really great.”
Fucking thankful to hear excitement in his voice, I suddenly had a flash of that weapons room a decade ago and the choice I was given when all others had been stripped.
Making sure my son knew he could have any tools of his trade that he wanted, I clarified.
“If you’d like different brand pianos, this one or the baby grand in the living room, we can swap them out. ”
“Swap,” he repeated, still looking stunned as he ran a hand over the piano keys.
“I didn’t know you preferred Steinways when I purchased the Yamaha upright or the German-made baby grand.”
“Oh, no, the Sauter is like, awesome. They have a really rich sound and great volume.” He almost smiled. “Not that I’ll, um, play it too loud in the house.”
“You can play as loud as you want.” I caught his gaze. “No restrictions on music here.”
“Um, thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I’m going to grab a shower, then make us a quick dinner. Roam, settle in, decompress. The house is yours. Any food restrictions or anything you don’t like to eat?”
“No, sir.” His hand went to his stomach.
Noting the tell, I ignored the sir. “Great, meet you in the kitchen when you’re ready.”
“Okay.”
I walked out of the music room as he was picking up the guitar.
Two hours later, leaning back in his chair, plate empty, Lincoln yawned. “That steak was really good. Thanks for dinner… and, ah, everything else.”
“You’re welcome. Thank you for trusting me enough to come here.” I grabbed the plates, and he instantly stood.
“I can wash the dishes.”
“We’ll throw them in the dishwasher.”
“Oh. Okay.” He picked up our glasses and followed me into the kitchen. “So, um, can I ask a question?”
“Always.” I loaded the dishwasher.
“Will I, like…. Is this…Are you….” He handed me the glasses, then grabbed the back of his neck with both hands and rushed through his question. “Do I live here permanently now?”
I shut the dishwasher and leaned against the counter. “Yes.”
“And you’re like… my guardian?”
“I’m your father.” I had the paperwork for parental responsibility. I’d been waiting for this conversation to explain, but he was already spilling his anxiety from a situation I could only imagine.
“Because I don’t want to get in trouble, like, be truant.
I know I’m in online school, but they still check.
You have to have scheduled call-ins with the teachers and your parent or guardian, and I didn’t tell Gram and she didn’t ask, and I’ve just been putting it off since—since Mom… .” Grief-stricken, he looked at me.
The hits to my chest kept coming. “Understood, and we’ll handle it. I have the paperwork ready to go to make things legal. Then we can tackle the schooling. Do you want to attend high school in person?”
He exhaled. “Um, not really. I’ve gotten used to online.”
“Then we’ll stick with it. If you change your mind, let me know.”
“Okay.” He didn’t drop his arms.
“What else?”
His gaze landed on his feet. “So, the paperwork, you’re going to like—” He looked up. “—adopt me?”
“We’ve established paternity. I’m already your father. This is a legality for custody or, as they call it, parental responsibility.”
“Oh.” He glanced across the open-plan kitchen toward the glass sliders that led to the backyard and pool area, all lit with architectural lighting. “And, um, that’s what you want to do?”
“Lincoln.”
My son looked back at me.
I held his matching green-eyed gaze. “I want nothing more.”
His whispered response was hoarse and weighted. “Okay.”
I smiled. Closed lips and rusty, but it came naturally. “Go shower. I’ll finish cleaning up.”
“Okay.” He mirrored my smile, albeit more tentatively, then headed toward his room.
My cell vibrated with an incoming text.
Helios: Your girlfriend’s fucking bailing. Pack and all.
Glancing toward the hall, I waited a beat but didn’t hear the shower turn on.
Instead of calling, I texted Helios back.
Me: Stop her.
Helios: I’m not a fucking babysitter. I’m a trigger. You want her dead?
Me: Only if you want to be next.
Helios: I’m already dead, motherfucker.
The shower turned on, and I called the cell I’d given my little intruse via Tauk. It went straight to voicemail.
Me: She in your sights?
Helios: Did you fucking read my texts?
Me: Calling. Hand her the cell.
Helios: Christ.
Walking toward the sliders, I dialed Helio’s number.
“Hang on,” he ground out. “Sennan. Fucking halt. You got a call. Take it.”
Clear but quiet, I heard her lay into Helios. “One, I have a first name. Two, this is a public space. Three, I’m not a dog. Don’t tell me what to do. And four, tell Nix to do his own dirty work.”
Helios came back on the line. “She said fuck off.”
“I heard what she said. Put the call on speaker.”
“She’s fucking walking off. I’m not a goddamn party line.”
I used the one thing I had on him. “I’ll tell Feralyn about the cameras.”
“Fuck you,” he seethed, then, “You’re on speaker. Make it quick.”
“I’m not ignoring you, Isla.”
“Oh my God,” she muttered, then the background noise cut out and her voice came through clearer.
“Did I say you were ignoring me? Did I complain? About anything? No. So keep doing whatever it is you’re doing, and I’m going to do what I do.
” Her tone went up two octaves with fake cheerfulness. “Have a nice life, Nixy.”
“You hang up on me, and I will take it out on that sweet ass of yours.”
She laughed. Well-practiced, air of arrogance—it wasn’t her true laugh. “You wish.”
I said nothing.
“You know that whole silence thing doesn’t work over a phone call, right?”
It worked like a charm. She was still on the line. “I’ll be back soon. Wait for me.”
“Can’t. Places to go.”
“This isn’t the forty-eight hours you promised me, ma petite intruse.”
She made a derisive sound.
Hearing the insecurity behind it, I weaponized honesty. “I missed you today.” I scanned the backyard out of habit. “I’m going to miss you more if you’re not waiting for me.” I was playing with fire, but we had a deal. I wanted at least my forty-eight.
“Why? Can’t find someone else on short notice to have sex with?”
“I want more than sex from you, Isla.”
Silence.
I heard the shower in Lincoln’s room shut off. “I’m asking you to not leave the hotel tonight.”
Her voice came quieter. “And tomorrow?”
“I don’t want you to leave then either.” I watched the reflection of the house in the glass doors.
“You’re not even staying here, Nix.”
“I’d be with you right now if I could.” The hard truth was, I no longer wanted to keep her at a hotel, waiting on me.
The moment I’d plated dinner for me and Lincoln, I thought of her.
When I saw him lean back after we ate, I imagined her with us.
As I looked out at the pool and ocean right now, I was thinking of her here.
I wanted my little intruse with us. Which was fucking convoluted rationale, at best. It was too soon, too much, and wholly unfair to my son and Isla, but that’s where I was at—wanting us together under one roof.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means that I need time.”
“For what?”
To ease her and Lincoln into this. “I’ll be back later. We can talk then.”
She was quiet a beat. Then her voice turned casual, and she asked a question like it wasn’t weighted as hell. “Where are you?”
“You’re testing me. Why?”
“Honesty isn’t selective.”
Omission was. “Is that from one of your journal entries?”
“It’s from my own experience, and don’t patronize me.”
“I wasn’t.” I wanted to read that damn journal as much as I wanted to hear Lincoln play each instrument.
The only difference was, I didn’t want to rip the pages from Lincoln’s music books.
But every entry made by a man in my little intruse’s journal?
Those I wanted to fucking decimate. “It’s safer if I don’t say where I am. ”
“Safer for who?”
My son. “You.” All of us. “This.”
“I don’t believe you.” She sighed. “Fine, I believe you, or believe you believe it. But I know it’s not the whole story, and I don’t even know what this is.”
Obsession. Me trying to reclaim a life I never had. “Trust me?”
She laughed. It was real. “No.”
I revised. “Do you trust me right this minute?”
She hesitated. “Fine. Yes.”
“Put Helios on the phone for a second.”
“Here,” she said to the former Delta operator. “Your boss wants to speak with you.”
“I don’t have a fucking boss,” he retorted to my intruse before aiming at me. “You’re trying my fucking patience, Nix.”
“Talk to management.” I gave him a name.
“Tell him to cut the lights around the main hotel pool, then let her take a swim.” I remembered her face when she’s asked if I liked to swim at midnight.
I knew the penthouse suite’s pool was small and overheated.
The hotel’s main pool wasn’t. It also closed at sundown.
I couldn’t be with my intruse right now, but I could give her this gesture.
“Oh, fuck off,” Helios retorted.
“I don’t care if it’s for only five or ten minutes. Make it happen.” I glanced at my watch. “Time it for zero hundred hours. You’ve got thirty-seven minutes.”
“Is your hearing going? Do I need to repeat myself?”
“No. Put her back on.”
“Christ,” he muttered before I heard him address her. “My phone, my rules. Stay. I gotta go handle something, so park your ass and be right goddamn there when I come back.”
Her voice came through the line. “You do realize he’s an asshole, right?”
He’d stopped her from leaving. I didn’t care what he was. “He’s an acquired taste.”
“One of your many lies. Which, incidentally, is why I don’t trust you.”
“Tell me one lie I’ve told you.”
“Where’s my barrette?”
“Now you’re asking?” A month ago, she’d demanded it back while soaking wet in nothing more than a towel. The moment had imprinted on my brain. The sight of a wet and angry Isla Sennan had been a provocative combination that’d turned into a provocative memory.
Ill-timed and inconvenient, my cock stirred.
Then a little intruse doused the fantasy she’d ignited. “Nix ‘Phoenix’ Eriksen, where is my barrette right now, right this minute?”
Technically, it was in my pocket. I’d been carrying the damn thing around for the past month.
Except that wasn’t an admission I was going to parcel out while actively aiming to keep her in my sights.
Instead, I gave her a wider geo location that I was fully aware negated every damn thing I’d said about keeping her safe. “Florida.”
“Mm-hm. And where was it earlier today?”
“Virginia.”
“Last night?”
“Florida.”
She went quiet.
I should’ve hated the challenge this woman presented. Except I didn’t. “Are you getting the picture now, intruse?”
I’d been bending toward this little trespasser since I’d first laid eyes on her.
In some ways, Helios had been right when he’d first said it on the Paragon a month ago.
Isla Sennan was a female version of myself.
But in every other way, the woman defied logic.
She’d truncated my existence and inserted herself at the apex.
Then she’d inexplicably become the magnetic force at the center of my gravity when my entire reason was Lincoln.
The two shouldn’t be so fucking intwined, but they were.
From the narrow margins of my professional protocols to the deep crevasse I’d sent any semblance of a personal life, they each filled a void.
Now I didn’t see my three-foot world without either of them.
“Oscar Mike,” Helios clipped in the background. “Hang up the fucking phone. We’re heading back to the penthouse to dump your shit, and you need to change.”
“What? Why?” she asked Helios.
Lincoln came down the hall but halted when he saw I was on the phone.
“Talk to lover boy. Or don’t. I don’t give a shit, but clock’s ticking. Double-time it,” Helios ordered her.
I nodded at Lincoln to enter.
“What did you do?” Isla asked me.
“Enjoy, ma petite intruse. I’ll see you later.” I hoped.
“Nix—”
I ended the call.
“Was that your girlfriend?”
In pajama pants that must’ve been in his backpack and a T-shirt that’d probably been under his sweatshirt, for the first time, my son looked as young as his age.
“I wouldn’t use the term girlfriend.” Obsession, possession, unhinged attachment. “It’s new.”
“Oh. You’re, ah, going to see her? Tonight?”
“I’m not leaving you, Lincoln.”
“I, um, didn’t mean it like that.” He grabbed the back of his neck, and his gaze drifted. “I just meant that I know you, ah, have a life?” His gaze met mine. “Before me?”
Before I knew what to say—or worse, told him the truth—he ambuscaded my fucking heart.
“You can go see her. I can take care of myself. I do it all the time, and I’ve been on my own before. Mom had to leave sometimes for work, like, a night or two.” His voice went low, quiet. “I don’t want to interrupt.”
“You’re not an interruption, Lincoln. You’re the best purpose I’ve ever had.”
Color flushed his cheeks, and his head dropped. “Thanks. And, ah, thanks for coming to get me.”
“You’re welcome. I’m sorry it wasn’t sooner.”
He looked up. Then my son repeated my words to him, the same words I’d been given a decade ago by a standing President. “We’re here now.”
“We are.”
He glanced toward his room. “I’m, ah, gonna go to bed now. See you in the morning?”
“Absolutely. Good night, Lincoln.”
“Night.” He disappeared down the hall.
An hour and a half later, I was standing in the hallway outside his room, watching my son sleep while I engaged in silent warfare with my conscience, when a text came through.
Intruse: Thank you for my midnight swim. Good night. XO
Twenty-seven minutes after I read the text for the third time, a note was on the kitchen counter, Judas was on my couch, and I was pulling out of the driveway.