Chapter 33 Phoenix
Phoenix
I kneel at the end of the bed, where Conrad told me to, with my hands behind my back, spine long, knees pressed into the rug until the pressure climbs up my thighs like heat.
I don’t move.
The Titans are off doing whatever it takes to fix my fuck-up, and they’ve left me alone with the only job I deserve right now—sitting here and thinking about what I did and why.
I can pretend I kept quiet to spare them more stress, that I planned to slip away before it became a problem. That’s not the truth. Not really.
I stayed silent because I was afraid it would be the last straw—the one that made them decide I wasn’t worth the trouble.
Ever since they all had me, it’s felt like Con and I—especially—are two gunmen at high noon, hands hovering over our holsters, waiting to see who blinks first. Blink, as in walk. Leave.
He doesn’t believe I’ll stay. I don’t believe he’ll keep me.
And then I learned about their new “bet.” That sealed it. If they’re wagering on my affection and my trust, how am I supposed to trust the way they try to earn it? How do I know any of it is real when the game is built on me? When they want me to choose one of them over the others.
But I can’t tell them any of this. Not right now. The simple truth is that I should have been honest with them. I withheld critical information, and doing so jeopardized everything.
I deserve to be punished for that.
I need to be punished for that.
We have to re-set, and this is the only way I know how to do that for them.
The suite is quiet in that not-quiet way: air vents humming, the city traffic below a distant shiver through glass, my breath too loud in my own ears. They leave me here for almost an hour, and the anticipation is killing me.
Finally, the door opens, and the air shifts. I don’t look up until I feel Conrad in front of me. He tips my chin up with two fingers.
“Color,” he says.
“Green,” I whisper, surprised my voice doesn’t crack.
Atticus comes alongside my left, all shadow and sharp angles and disappointment.
“Tell me the rules, Kitten,” he says, like I haven’t memorized them. “You can stop this at any time.”
“Red or Titans stops,” I say. “Yellow pauses to check. Green means go.”
Maverick steps behind me and I can feel his heat before he touches me. But he doesn’t say a word. Instead, I’m pierced by the intensity in his gaze until it’s almost too much.
Storm drifts to my right, flipping his knife open and shut with that soft, terrible click—then sets it on the dresser, deliberately out of reach.
He’s making a point. He’s showing that he knows I don’t trust him. I want to cry, to scream that I do trust him. That I just fucked up.
Storm won’t believe me. Too many people have lied to him. I need to show him to earn his trust again.
But how can I, when I don’t trust them. None of their pretty words mean anything if I know they’re going to get rid of me when the game is over.
Conrad slides a finger along the line of my jaw and lower, to the hollow at my throat.
“You hid something from us,” he says. “You made choices without us, Princess. There’s a price for that betrayal, princess.”
I swallow. “I know.”
“Good.” His touch disappears. “Give me your hands.”
I lift them above me.
Atticus binds my wrists with a satin rope. The tie is snug but not cruel. The rope kisses my pulses, but doesn’t cut off circulation. There is something calming about the rope binding me. It’s like the choices are being taken. If they are not my choices to make, then I can’t make the wrong one.
My gaze flicks up from Atticus’s hand on the rope to where Conrad watches the knot slide into place with the intent stare of a man taking measure. Not of the rope, though—of me. He’s watching where I breathe. Where I flinch. How quickly trust returns.
That’s when I realize—this is not just a punishment for what I did. This is his test. It’s a line he’s pushing me over, proving that I’ll run.
I take a deep breath, struggling not to cry with the truth of it.
I guess maybe Conrad feels the same truth as I do.
I’m led out of Conrad’s bedroom into the living room. The low wooden coffee table has been cleared and the sofa’s been pushed to the outer edges of the room.
Conrad stops me in front of the table and lets the rope drop from his fingers before pointing to the ground, silently telling me to kneel.
As I lower, Atticus steps to my side, his hands pulling my hair into a tight high ponytail.
“I’m disappointed,” Atticus says, matter-of-fact, like a diagnosis. “You kept information I could’ve used two days ago. That video changes everything. I could have trapped our ghost sooner. You wasted valuable time and invited incalculable risk.”
“I was scared,” I say.
“Next time,” he says, “be scared with us. Don’t make me fight battles blindfolded.”
He tips my head, inspecting my face the way he inspects a long line of code. Not unkind, but not forgiving. Then he presses his mouth to my ear. “Breathe, Kitten.”
I do.
In and out, slow deep breaths that come out shaky at first. My shoulders drop a little as I relax.
Maverick’s hands settle on my shoulders from behind, warm and heavy, and then slide down my arms, slow enough to make me feel owned and safe and seen.
When he speaks, his voice is quiet, and a little broken.
“You didn’t trust me,” he says. “After last night, after everything between us, Firebird. We talked for hours, and I thought we were past this. You’re making me doubt that.”
He lets the words hang in the air, cutting deep before adding in a hushed, wounded whisper, “You hurt me.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it with every fiber of my being.
“Don’t say sorry yet,” he murmurs. “Earn the apology you’re going to make.”
Storm crouches to my right so we’re eye to eye. He doesn’t smile. There’s something raw and steady in his gaze.
“When you kept that secret, you made everything complicated,” he says. “You put yourself in the middle of a target and then tried to body-block the bullets by yourself.”
He shakes his head once, slow.
“You don’t carry monsters alone anymore. That’s not being part of us, being a part of this team. That’s suicide. I won’t let you go, angel. Don’t leave me. I will follow.”
His words land like a weight lifted, and a weight added, both at once. I nod as a sob breaks free, and my eyes sting.
Conrad stands, and the air shifts again. “Good,” he says, like he accepts nothing and everything. “Now we begin.”
Atticus pulls me to my feet, then with one hand on my waist and the other on my shoulder he has me bend forward, keeping my ass high in the air with my hands planted flat on the table.
I brace for the hiss of a belt, but it’s not the belt that comes. It’s his hand, bare and hot, landing with a crack that rocks me forward. Fingers lock at my hips, steadying me before I can fall.
The next strike blooms with heat over heat; my breath stutters but I hold it, eyes open, jaw set. Tears track anyway, not because I’m breaking, but because the sting is loosening something I knotted tight.
The rhythm finds me and I let it—counting in my head, exhale on four—until the shame unspools with the breath.
“She’s warm,” Atticus says, breath clipped. The edge of his shoe nudges my feet farther apart. Cold air ghosts between my thighs. I can feel their attention as a second kind of temperature.
“Color?” he asks.
“Green.”
The next smack lands lower, a lightning-bolt jolt I ride rather than run from. He doesn’t lift away—his touch shifts, deliberate, coaxing, the kind of measured pressure that says he could do this for hours and never lose count. I arch into his pace and refuse the sound clawing up my throat.
Atticus brings me to the edge and steals the building orgasm, then trades that sensation for another and builds again.
It’s maddening and precise—like he’s debugging me, line by line.
When he finally pushes deeper, he doesn’t lose the count.
I’m shaking before I realize it, sweat slicking my spine, the line between release and ache narrowing to a wire.
“Yellow,” I grit—clear, not panicked.
Everything stops. His hands lift.
“Good girl,” he murmurs against my temple, pressing a bottle to my lips. “That’s a sliver of trust. Drink.”
I do. The water is cold enough to sting. I breathe and feel the tremor ease.
Maverick steps in behind the quiet. His palm skims my cheek, not soft, but present. He guides me on my knees to the couch and sits, waiting until I’m settled, until my breathing is his breathing.
“You scared me,” he says into the shell of my ear. There’s no accusation in it. It’s him, pressing the truth like a bruise touched once to prove it’s there. “Don’t go dark on me again.”
“I know.” The words are low, level. “I won’t.”
“Show me.”
I move to give him what he asks but he stops me with a curl of fingers in my hair and turns me—back to his chest, knees spread over his thighs.
The chill from the vent raises gooseflesh.
He kisses my shoulder once and drags his knuckles down my stomach, lower, where I’m already too aware.
He edges me the way he edges fear—patiently, relentlessly—until my apology lives in how I hold still for him, how I take each small denial without begging to skip to the end.
“Say it,” he breathes.
So I do, quiet and direct.
“I’m afraid you’ll decide I’m not worth the risk. I should have trusted you.” No sobbing, no scrambling—just the sharp, necessary truth.
His answer is a kiss to the hinge of my jaw and a low, wrecked, “There you are.” He lifts me off his lap and helps me back to my knees, tipping the bottle to my mouth again.
Storm doesn’t hurry. He gathers me up like I weigh nothing, lays me along the coffee table, and stays at my eye line. There’s no performance in him, only intent. His thumb anchors at my sternum when I start to float.
“Stay,” he says, voice a dark ribbon. “Your head runs when it’s calm. Fight that. Stay with us.”
I hold his gaze and feel the feral thing in me bristle, then settle. The magnitude of what I hid hits hard—what it would’ve done to him. My bound hands loop around his neck. I keep him close because I need the gravity.
“Say it,” he prompts, forehead to mine.
“I’ll stay. I won’t hide again.” It shakes out of me, but it stands.
He takes the promise like a man receiving a weapon he intends to use carefully, then helps me back to the floor.
Conrad is last. He sets me kneeling on the table again and circles once, twice—cataloging. Not taunting—assessing. I feel the question humming under his footfalls: will she stay if I press?
“This is strike two,” he says, almost conversational. The old scar in me flares, but I don’t flinch from it.
“What does that mean?”
He crouches and tilts my chin, his eyes cool and exacting. “It means I should know better than to believe you’ll be honest with me.”
A dozen retorts crowd my tongue—the bet, the way they shut me out—but none of them are an excuse. I choose the only thing that means anything. “You want accountability. So do I.”
“Then stop doing things in the dark,” he replies. “You’re with us, or not at all.”
“Understood.”
“Prove it.”
He moves behind me. The first pinch is sharp but the stroke after it soothes.
He works me methodically, and every time I climb too fast he drags me back—by my hair, by my breath, by a low order I can’t ignore.
He makes me name what I did, why I did it, how I will do it differently—specifics, not pretty vows.
When I try to hide behind remorse, he makes me pick one concrete thing I’ll do next. The edge of humiliation is the point. I take it because I deserve it—and because they’ve earned the right to demand better of me.
I don’t plead. I choose.
Every time I could run, I stay.
Every time I could grab for the finish, I accept the hold.
Somewhere in the long blur of restraint and heat, his touch shifts—not gentler, just surer, like a verdict he’s reached.
They trade off without speaking. Atticus counts me back from the cliff with numbers I can grip. Maverick’s palm finds the small of my back and steadies. Storm’s mouth brushes my temple—“with us,” he says, and my body listens. Conrad’s gaze takes my last half-truth and strips it until it can’t hide.
The safe word sits steady in my chest. My way to show trust and control. That steadiness is what gives me the strength not to use it.
They hold me on the wire until the song inside my skin changes key. When they finally let me fall, it doesn’t feel like losing control—it feels like throwing myself over and being caught.
Time thins until I feel the passing of every millisecond. There’s heat, and breath, and my name said like a vow. Then there’s only the quiet after, the kind that feels earned.
Atticus unties my wrists as if he’s disarming a bomb, fingertips checking for marks, murmuring something about circulation.
Maverick brings water and holds the glass while I drink, tilting it when my hands shake.
Storm wraps a throw around my shoulders and tucks it in with a fussiness that would get him mocked by anyone who hasn’t seen him in a dark alley.
Conrad sits on the edge of the bed and puts his hand over my heartbeat, pressing just enough to ground me to the room.
There are no speeches. No moralizing. Just the hush of a house that decided not to break.
His palm is steady, but the test still runs behind his eyes: stay or go, stay or go. When my pulse steadies beneath his hand, so does something in him.
No one speaks for a long time. It’s a good silence, an earned silence, the kind that makes me feel at peace.
Finally, Conrad leans down and kisses my forehead.
It feels like absolution, conditional but real. “Strike two,” he says again, softer. “Don’t ask me for a third.”
“I won’t,” I whisper, meaning every word.
“You won’t need to,” Maverick says, trying for light, landing on fierce. “We’re done with the tests.” He looks up at Con. “Right?”
Con looks at me, gaze troubled. “We’ll see.”