Chapter 12 Conrad #2
Phoenix falls asleep in the car, succumbing to exhaustion and the awareness, on some level, that she can finally let her guard down. Tybee is quiet when we carry her in, the only sounds around us the hum of insects and dawn birds and the gentle lap of the ocean in the distance.
The room we fixed for her smells like vanilla and cedar and Zeus, released now from the vet. He gives an excited wag of his tail but seems aware that he shouldn’t jump when we lay her on the bed.
Maverick puts a bottle of water on the nightstand and unscrews the cap a quarter-turn so she won’t have to fight it. Atticus dims the lamp by an inch, not more, so she won’t awaken to a dark room. Storm stands at the door and watches the rise and fall of her chest.
Counting her breaths?
Sometime later the doctor arrives—a woman with steady hands and the right eyes. She looks around the room, at all of us, standing around the bed and leaning against the walls and sitting in the chair…
“Do you…” She glances at Phoenix, who stirs awake enough to offer us sleepy smiles and pull herself up to sit against the headboard. “I need to examine you, ask you a few questions, Phoenix. Would you like these gentlemen to leave us for a few minutes?”
The question is gentle enough that it doesn’t annoy me as much as it would under normal circumstances.
Especially as Phoenix shakes her head firmly. “No. It’s okay. They can stay.”
We all release a collective sigh of relief.
She checks Phoenix for the things that break and the things you can’t see. She speaks in plain language and offers painkillers, but doesn’t insist. Phoenix takes some but not all. She drinks two sips of water, makes a face, and takes the painkillers.
When the doctor asks if she wants a full exam now, Phoenix says not yet and the doctor says okay so simply I could cry.
The SANE nurse enters, leaves a kit sealed on the dresser with a sticky note: that reads when/if. Phoenix looks over, then up at the doctor. “I wasn’t raped.”
Her gaze flashes to each of us. “I didn’t let him touch me. Danner, I mean. I fought him so hard.”
The breath that soughs out of me is damn near a sob. I hear it echoed in Maverick. Storm releases his knife with a thud into the doorframe, prompting a startled, “well,” from the doctor.
“It’s okay,” Phoenix murmurs. “That’s just his thing.”
Atticus utters a small, broken, “Good girl.”
At some point the room gets smaller and the air gets thicker and the men who are my brothers feel like men who take up too much space.
I clear them with a look. Storm takes first hall watch.
Atticus goes to the den to set the trap for whoever let this happen.
Maverick goes to the kitchen to make toast he won’t eat.
I sit on the edge of the bed and reach, but then remember—don’t touch without asking. “Can I hold you?” I say, and I hate that my voice shakes.
She nods and scoots, and I slide behind her, back against the headboard, wrap her in the blanket and my arms. She fits under my chin like every part of the past was mere prologue for this moment. Her breathing hiccups, steadies, and stumbles again. I match it until it stops needing me.
She drops into sleep like a body finally allowed to.
Sleep isn’t peace, though. It’s just a storm with the lightning moved inside the clouds. Twice she whimpers and twitches like she’s running.
“You’re home. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
There’s a version of me that wants to burn the world to ash for what was almost done to her. There’s another version that wants to brand the world with my name so nothing except me will ever touch her again.
Instead, I content myself with counting the beats in her pulse where it rests against my wrist. I memorize the sound her breath makes when it snags and then decides to continue.
How when she startles awake once, but not all the way, she finds my hand and drags it to her sternum like a weight to keep her anchored in the bed.
“Don’t go,” she mumbles, voice small as a closed fist.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say.
She falls again, mouth soft. I hold.
When the doctor steps back in later, I lift my head but don’t move, otherwise.
“There’s one more thing,” I say, and the tone in my voice makes her look up at me instead of the chart in her hand. “There’s a device I need implanted—subcutaneous, a sort of passive GPS. You have it in your bag because I bought it ahead of time.”
Her eyebrows move—only a little. “That’s a medical procedure,” she says, neutral. “I need her consent.”
“I have consent,” I say, and it tastes like a lie even though I can argue it ten ways on a boardroom whiteboard. “She gave it before, in principle. She’ll give it again.”
“But she’s asleep,” the doctor says.
“She’s alive,” I say. “And I intend to make sure she stays that way.”
We hold each other’s eyes long enough for the ethics of the procedure to lay their weapons down. She sighs. “Her neck,” she says. “It’ll leave a literal hairline scar and a headache for a day or so.”
I nod.
She preps quickly, cleaning a small on the back of Phoenix’s neck. Phoenix doesn’t stir. I keep my arms around her and feel her tense minutely when the needle goes in. I don’t say anything as I watch the doctor implant the tiny device.
When it’s done, the doctor tapes a square of gauze and writes instructions on a card in looping handwriting that looks like it belongs to a socialite rather than a PhD. “She can be furious with you in the morning,” she says, not unkindly. “But I suppose better furious than missing or dead.”
“I’ll make sure nothing blows back on you.”
Atticus appears in the doorway. He reads the scene in one pass—the gauze, the doctor’s face, my jaw. His mouth tightens.
“She won’t like that,” he says.
“She can’t be angry if she’s not alive,” I answer, eyes on Phoenix. “That’s all that matters.”
He doesn’t argue. He also doesn’t agree. I don’t really care.
Outside, the ocean breathes in and out, and the house holds the four of us like we’ve always needed to be held: together, inevitable, relentless.
Phoenix sleeps. I can’t. I count her breaths and make a list in my head of men who owe me vengeance I plant to collect with interest, and somewhere around number seven, she sighs in her sleep and turns toward me like there’s only one place in the world that makes sense.
“I’ve got you,” I tell her again, and I make it a vow I can’t take back.
She’s warm against me, small breaths damp in my shirt. I fit my forearm under her ribs, palm spread, as if I can keep her in the world with this single handhold.
“Con.” Her voice is rough, sleep-heavy. Hers.
“I’m here,” I say into her hair.
Memory flickers behind her eyes and then breaks when I tighten, not to pin, just to say stay. She presses back, testing me. I don’t push. I let her decide the distance.
“Don’t go,” she mumbles. It’s not a plea. A demand.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She turns under the blanket until she faces me.
In the low glow of the lamp I left burning, I can see every scrape and bruise.
She touches my jaw with slow fingers, feels the stubble I didn’t bother to shave, traces my mouth.
My eyes close on their own, the touch landing like salve and punishment at once.
“How bad am I?” she asks.
I don’t want to tell her that when I saw her I didn’t understand how she was conscious…how she was able to get to her feet and walk out of that room on her own two feet. But she did.
“Alive,” I answer. “You’re fucking alive, and that’s everything.”
She huffs a breath that’s almost a laugh. Her hand drifts down my throat, over my chest, catching on cotton and the steady drum under it. I stay still and let her take inventory.
“You came for me.”
“We’ll always come for you.”
Her mouth finds the warm edge of my throat. Her tongue darts out and tastes, curious. Questing. My hand opens on her hip, fingers flexing, and waits.
“You found me. In that big, huge ocean…you found me. I knew you would.”
“We’ll always find you, Princess. We lo—” I stumble over the word, catch myself. “—we’ll always find you.”
She regards me gravely, then smiles, just a tiny hitch of her lips at the corner. “Yeah. I’ll always find you, too.”
She hooks two fingers in my shirt and tugs, a decision.
I sit up enough to strip the shirt off and toss it aside.
She slides with me, blanket slipping to her waist. My eyes stay on her face—watching for doubt, for a flinch, for any version of no.
She gives me the opposite: her palm flat to my sternum, then lower, then she pulls me between her knees like she’s done messing around.
Heat punches through me. “Phoenix.”
“Don’t make me say please,” she says, a bite in it I’ve missed, alive and sharp.
I cup her cheek, thumb brushing the taped scrape. “We stop whenever you want,” I say.
“I don’t want.” That’s pretty clear.
Removal of clothes gets clumsy. I pause at a particularly nasty bruise on her ribcage; she catches my wrist and squeezes. “Keep going.”
“Where are you,” I ask, meaning headspace.
“Right here.” She fists a hand in my hair and drags my mouth to hers. “With you.”
I make a sound that isn’t words and kiss her like I’ve been saving up for it—which I have.
Control doesn’t leave me; it bows to this moment, to this woman.
Her body answers like reality works better than fear—heat blooming, tension turning toward want.
When I slide my hand under the soft waistband of the sweatpants Maverick left on the dresser, she lifts her hips to help.
When I push into her, I do it carefully but not timidly. She’s wet and welcoming, helping me shed any remaining doubts about her readiness, and I pull almost all the way out before driving hard back in.
She makes a sound, a little gasp caught in her throat, and loops her legs around my waist to drag me closer. The first sound she makes is that caught breath released; the second is my name, quiet and torn straight out of the center. I shudder like it hits bone.
“You feel me?” I ask, voice wrecked.
“I feel you. Fuck me harder.” She rolls her hips, rises to meet me and grind her cunt into my pelvis, and sets a lazy, filthy rhythm—half-asleep, fully chosen.
I follow it, mouth at her jaw, shoulder, the corner of her mouth, asking without words, taking only what she gives. When she slows to breathe, I slow. When she wants more, her nails press into my back and I give it—each thrust intentional, nothing like the rough hands she fought.
She holds my eyes when she crests, refuses to close them, lets me see the part of her that didn’t break.
Pleasure rips through her and leaves everything looser, possible.
I follow after, groaning into her cheek, shaking, and she palms the back of my neck and keeps me there like she’s reeling me back into a body I left hours ago.
We breathe. The room breathes.
I don’t move until she does. She shifts only to tuck herself in closer, her thigh over mine, face to my chest like she found an exact coordinate that calms her heart. I run my hand slowly over her spine—up, down—mindless. I kiss her hair.
Her lids slide down. Before sleep takes her, she tips her head and finds my mouth again, one more kiss, lazy and sure. “Stay,” she whispers.
“Always.” I hesitate, trying to be fair. “I expect the others will be in here soon, wanting to wrestle me for time.”
She smiles. “They can join us.”
She drifts. I don’t. When she jolts through another bad dream, my hand is already there at her sternum, gentle pressure, my mouth at her temple, anchoring. She settles immediately, trusting the weight more than the dream.
I hold her until the white-noise hush and the ocean’s steady pull become the only sounds left.
I watch the bruise rise at her ribs and I memorize the way her breath evens, and I file away the truth I already knew: safe before happy, every time.
And this—her choosing me half-asleep, fully awake where it counts—this is what I answer to.