Chapter 33- Phoenix
The Vernon industrial district at midnight is all flat light and empty lots, the kind of place that exists to be invisible, and I walk out of the warehouse with Jade against my side and don't look back.
She's walking, technically, her feet moving when I guide them, but there's a vacancy in her eyes that I recognize from the cabin, that quality of someone whose body is present and whose mind is somewhere else entirely, processing something too large to fit inside a single moment.
I keep one arm around her and match my pace to hers and say nothing because there is nothing to say yet that would help.
Dad is already outside.
He's standing thirty feet from the entrance with four men fanned out behind him, all of them in dark clothing, all of them reading the situation in the practiced way of people who have arrived too late to too many things and learned to assess the damage quickly.
His face when he sees us is controlled in the way his face is always controlled, but I know him well enough to see what's underneath it.
He meets us halfway across the lot.
His eyes move over Jade first, cataloguing the bruise, the dried blood at the corner of her mouth, the raw skin at her wrists. Then they move to me.
"What happened?" His voice is low. "We got here as fast as we could. Dominic had a second team positioned on the east side, it took longer than—"
"I heard the gunfire start and I couldn't wait." I say it flatly, without apology, because I'm not. "I went in alone.”
His jaw tightens. He looks at the warehouse, at the blood on my shirt, at Jade trembling against my side, and when his eyes come back to mine they're hard in a way I haven't seen directed at me since I was seventeen and totaled his car.
"You pulled the earpiece out." It isn't a question.
"I heard the gunfire and I couldn't wait.”
"I told you to hold position. I told you specifically—“
"I know what you told me.”
The silence between us has weight. He looks at me for a long moment, and I look back, and neither of us moves.
“And Dominic—?"
"Dead." I pause. "Jade killed him."
He goes still. His eyes move to Jade, and whatever is in them shifts, the anger not gone but pushed aside by something else, something that looks almost like respect, the kind he reserves for people who have genuinely surprised him.
"Then she did what needed to be done," he says quietly.
Jade doesn't react. She's looking at the ground somewhere to the left of his feet, her breathing shallow.
I pull Dominic's phone from my jacket and hold it out. Nicholas takes it before I can speak and hands it directly to one of his men.
"Every server, every backup, every account," he says, not to me but to the man already walking away. "All of it tonight. Nothing gets missed."
He looks back at me. "I've been doing this a long time, Phoenix.
You're not the only one who knows what needs to happen.
" He holds my gaze, and the anger is still there underneath everything else, banked and waiting.
"We've been running his known accounts since you called from inside.
We have eight of the twelve locations already. We'll have the rest by morning."
The recording has been hanging over everything since the moment Dominic told Jade about it, and for the first time since then I'm finally able to breathe.
“Thank you.”
He glances at the warehouse door, then back at me. "We'll talk about this later."
It's not a threat exactly. It's a promise of a conversation I'm not going to enjoy, delivered in the tone he uses when he's decided to table something rather than let it go.
"Go," he says. "Take her home."
I don't need to be told twice.
The drive back to Malibu takes forty minutes and feels like four hours.
Jade sits in the passenger seat with her hands folded in her lap and her face turned toward the window, watching the city move past without seeing it.
I keep one hand on the wheel and one on hers and don't try to fill the silence.
The freeway lights strobe overhead at regular intervals, painting her face in alternating light and shadow, and I watch her in the periphery of my vision.
She saved my life.
The simplicity of it sits in my chest alongside everything else, the fear and the relief and the cold weight of Torres and the long impossible hours of not knowing. Underneath all of it that is a single clean fact: she saved my life.
At home I run the bath without asking. The bathroom fills with steam and the scent of the salts she keeps on the shelf.
She stands in the middle of the bathroom and doesn't move and I undress her carefully, gently, the way you handle something that has been through too much, and I try not to react visibly to the bruising across her ribs, the deep purple spreading from her left side across her stomach.
I lower her into the bath and sit on the edge and clean the blood from her wrists and her face with a cloth, working slowly. She lets me do it without speaking. The water turns faintly pink. Her eyes stay somewhere in the middle distance, focused on nothing.
When the water cools I wrap her in a towel and put her to bed and get in beside her and pull her back against my chest, my arm across her, and lie in the dark and listen to her breathe.
She falls asleep within minutes. Exhaustion winning over everything else.
But two hours later, she wakes up gasping for air.
The sound of it goes through me like a current, and I have her in my arms before I'm fully awake, my hand in her hair, her name in my mouth.
She fights me for a second, still inside whatever the dream was, and then her hands find my arms and grip them and she comes back, pressing her face into my chest.
"I've got you," I tell her. "You're home. You're safe."
Her breathing slows by degrees. The shaking takes longer.
“It’s going to be okay," she says into my chest, and the way she says it isn't a question exactly. It's the sound of someone turning something over repeatedly.
"You saved us," I confirm.
"I killed someone."
"You survived. There's a difference."
A long pause. "Is there?"
I don't answer. I hold her tighter and press my lips to the top of her head and stay awake long after she drifts back under, staring at the ceiling, turning her question over in the dark.
She wakes screaming again before dawn.
The days that follow have a particular texture, muffled and slow, like moving through water.
Jade gets up and makes coffee and sits with it at the kitchen counter without drinking it.
She opens her laptop and stares at the screen for an hour without typing.
She goes through the motions of eating, of showering, of responding when I speak to her, but the responses come from somewhere slightly removed, like a translation of herself rather than the original.
I don't push. I stay close and stay quiet and let her move through it at whatever pace she needs.
On the fourth day Dad calls. All twelve backup locations found and wiped.
Dominic's cloud accounts closed. The recording is gone, every copy, every server, every trace of it.
He tells me this in the same tone he uses to report quarterly earnings and I thank him and hang up and go find Jade on the back deck watching the ocean.
I stand beside her and tell her it's over. The recording is gone. Dominic's disappearance has already been absorbed into the general noise of a man who had enough enemies that no one is looking too hard.
She nods. Looks back at the water. The waves are large today, gray-green and serious, breaking hard against the base of the bluffs.
"It doesn't feel over," she says.
"I know."
She turns to look at me, and for the first time in four days I see something in her eyes that isn't the vacancy, something that is reaching toward the present rather than trapped in the past. It's brief and fragile and I don't say anything about it because pointing at fragile things tends to break them.
That night she reaches for me in the dark.
Her hand finds my arm first, then my chest, and I go still and let her set the pace because this is hers to lead, whatever she needs it to be.
She moves into me slowly, carefully, like someone learning to trust their own weight again, and I keep my hands gentle and my mouth soft and follow every signal she gives me.
She needs to feel something other than that darkness. I understand that without her saying it. She needs her body to belong to something other than fear, and I intend to give her all of it, for as long as she needs.
I start with my mouth at her throat, feeling her pulse against my lips, fast and alive.
My hands move slowly over her shoulders, down her arms, learning her again the way you relearn something you were afraid you might lose.
She exhales and some of the tension leaves her body, not all of it, but enough.
"You're still here," I murmur against her skin. "You're home. You're mine."
She makes a sound that isn't quite an answer but means yes anyway.
I press my lips to her collarbone, her shoulder, the soft skin below her ear.
She smells like the bath salts and underneath that something warmer, something that is purely her, and I take my time because she needs time.
Tonight is about giving her body back to her, reminding her that it belongs to something other than fear.
My mouth moves lower. She draws in a breath when I find the curve of her breast, her fingers threading into my hair, not directing, just holding on.
I circle slowly, dragging out every sensation, and feel her hips shift beneath me, her body waking up despite everything, responding the way it always responds to me, and something in my chest tightens with a feeling that is bigger than want.
"Phoenix." My name in her mouth, quiet and unsteady.
"I've got you," I tell her. "I'm right here."
Her hands tighten in my hair.
I work my way down her body with patience, my lips against her ribs, careful over the bruising, soft where she's been hurt. She makes a small sound when I press a kiss to the worst of it, and I linger there for a moment.
When I finally give her what she's been arching toward she comes undone quietly, her thighs trembling against my shoulders, one hand pressed over her own mouth like she's trying to hold something in.
I don't let her hold it in. I keep going until she stops trying, until the sound escapes her and her whole body goes taut and then loose.
I settle over her and she wraps around me and when I finally push inside her we both go still for a moment, adjusting to the feeling of it. Her eyes are open and on mine in the dark and I hold her gaze and move slowly.
"You're strong," I tell her. "You're brave." I kiss her cheek, her temple. "You're everything."
She turns her face into my neck and I feel the wetness of tears against my skin. But her hips are moving with mine and her arms are tight around my back. This is both things at once, grief and want, and I hold her through all of it.
I slide one hand between us and feel her gasp against my throat, her whole body tightening, and I keep the pressure steady and the rhythm slow and whisper against her hair that she's mine, that she's safe, that I have her, that I'm never letting go.
When she breaks this time it's completely. Her fingers dig into my back hard enough to leave marks. She shakes against me and says my name over and over. I follow her over the edge with my face buried in her hair.
Afterward she lies against my chest and doesn't speak. Her breathing slows. Her hand rests flat over my heart, and I cover it with mine, and I feel the exact moment she crosses from wakefulness into sleep, the small surrender of it, her body going completely heavy and soft against me.
I kiss the top of her head and close my eyes, and let the future wait until morning.