Chapter 27 Phoenix
Phoenix
Conrad fucking left me. No. It’s worse than that…Conrad left all of us.
The house tells on him before anyone else has a chance. The chair outside my room is empty, the book he was pretending to read left open face down like he gave up. His mug is washed and drying on the rack. His cologne is a faint ghost in the hallway that gets lost halfway to the stairs.
There are no slammed doors. No rumble of the SUV. Just absence that feels like a missing stair you only notice when the world drops out from under you and you have no idea if you’ll land in six inches or six feet down.
I sit on the bed and stare at the dent my body made in the pillow, waiting for a sentence to form. It doesn’t come. I put on the shirt he left on the floor because it smells like him, and then I walk barefoot down the hall and prepare to be the grenade in my own living room.
They’re there already—Atticus at the end of the dining table with the map, Storm leaning on the doorjamb like it owes him rent, Maverick pacing a slow figure eight that keeps taking him past the coffee pot and back to me.
Spencer’s in the corner chair with his reading glasses on his head, looking like he’s been a father long enough to recognize the sound of a bad morning before anyone says a word.
“Where is he?” Maverick asks first, because of course he does. He’s looking at me like he wants me to say “on the deck” or “in the shower” or “sleeping off a mood,” but he knows that’s not going to happen.
“He left,” I say. My voice holds. Barely. Who am I kidding? I can feel the cracks in it and the tension as it slips into my every movement.
Atticus goes very still, which is as good as a shout from anyone else. Storm’s eyes flick down my body to the shirt and back to my face. Spencer’s eyebrows lift a fraction. Maverick’s hands close on nothing.
“What happened?” Storm asks, calm and knife-edged.
I swallow. I can taste soap and the last of last night. “He told me something, and then he left.”
“What did he tell you?” Atticus asks. There is nothing but calm in his voice. That’s how he carries me when he doesn’t know what he’s lifting yet.
I look at the map because it’s easier to talk to cardboard than to people who will break for me if I cry. “He told me his father said…he told me that I’m a Masterson. That I was his daughter. Conrad’s half sister.”
The room does that thing air does before a storm—pressure drop, silence, a quick gathering of everything that can break. Maverick sits down hard on the edge of a chair he never uses. Storm’s jaw tightens. Atticus blinks once and that’s all; everything else holds.
“Say that one more time,” Maverick says, like repetition might change the shape of the words.
“His father told him I’m his daughter,” I say.
“That doesn’t make sense, right?” I look at them all, and if the look is a little desperate, well, I guess I’m entitled.
“My mother loved my father. She wouldn’t have had an affair with Mr. Masterson, of all people—it just doesn’t make sense… it doesn’t—”
“Jesus,” Spencer mutters, low.
“It tracks with what your mother did for work,” Atticus says, thoughtfulness clicking into place like teeth. He’s not playing lawyer. He’s building a ladder to get me out of a sinkhole. “It does not make it true.”
“I don’t believe it,” I say, too fast. “I don’t. Not from him. He wants control. He’s always wanted to control Conrad. If there was any sort of option to keep him in line, it would be this. Get rid of me and make sure that Conrad questions everything and anything in his life moving forward.”
“Yeah,” Maverick says, voice rough. “That’s his brand.”
“Either way, it’s easy enough to prove,” Atticus adds, already reaching for a pad he’s probably had ready since he woke up this morning.
“We don’t take his word as shit. We prove it or disprove it ourselves.
DNA tests are easy enough now. Hell, we can even confirm it with a chain of custody we can trust. No theatrics needed. No one else sees it until we do.”
“Then we all do it,” Storm says at once, cutting through the table talk. “Not just them. All of us. If we’re going to lay blood on the table, we lay all of it. Then, we can confirm that our family’s dirty secrets are actually ours.”
It makes me cry, Storm’s ferocity. Helpless tears bubble up and brim over, and without another word he comes over and gathers me to his chest.
Maverick snorts once, not quite a laugh. “Only ones possibly in question are Atticus, Conrad, and Phoenix, man. You and I could be our dads’ driver’s license photos.”
Storm gives him the look he gives cameras. Maverick lifts his hands. “Fine. I’ll spit in a tube with you. We’ll start a scrapbook.”
Spencer leans forward, elbows on his knees. “I can get a lab that owes me to prioritize it,” he says. “No names on the paperwork. Samples under initials only. We’ll know fast.” He chuckles. “Thank you, Storm, for not questioning your parentage.”
“Do it,” I choke out. I want the test like I want air. I want it like I want the other result—any result—that gives me back the thing I had just let myself have.
Happiness.
“Phoenix.” Atticus’s voice drops. I look at him. He’s not looking at the pad now. He’s looking at me. “Do you know where he went?”
“He didn’t say,” I answer. “He told me I was his sister after he fucked me, and then he left. I think he didn’t want to be here to watch me process it, or know how my world implodes with his father’s bullshit.” I swallow. “I don’t know if he wanted to be a good man or a coward. Maybe both.”
“He went to the bridge,” Storm says, like a weather report. Atticus doesn’t look surprised. Maverick scrubs his face with both hands.
“I’m going to find him,” Maverick says, already standing.
“No.” The word rips out of me. Everyone freezes. I force breath in and then back out again slowly. “No. He doesn’t need rescue. Not from us. Not from this.”
“You sure?” Storm asks.
“No,” I say honestly. “But chasing him doesn’t help. He’ll be back if he wants to be back. I can’t force him to face me.”
Atticus makes a quick mark on the pad he won’t show me.
Then he tears off the top sheet anyway and hands it to Spencer.
“The information,” he says. Spencer stands, takes the paper, nods once, and disappears with the quiet efficiency of a man who never needed to announce it when he did the right thing.
The room breathes. The house shifts in its bones like a boat finding a calmer patch of water.
Zeus head-butts my knee and leans his weight into me like he understands none of this but recognizes the geometry of grief.
I sink a hand into his neck and close my eyes for a second because the dog doesn’t know how to lie.
“Isn’t it funny,” I say, voice thinner than I want, “that all the Masterson men want to fuck the housekeeper?” The words taste like pennies, copper eating at my tongue and throat. I hate myself for them even as I say them. “First his father. Then his son. At least he didn’t knock up his sister.”
“Don’t,” Atticus says sharply, and the warning isn’t for him. It’s for me. “Conrad only ever wanted you. Not a symbol. Not the uniform for a fling or a good time. You.”
“His father forced me away from him once,” I say, ignoring the mercy in his tone because if I take one more soft thing I will fall apart.
“He told me I wasn’t good enough and never would be until I broke and ran.
Maybe—maybe—he did it because it was the truth.
Or maybe he did it because he likes breaking things he didn’t build.
Maybe he just wanted to break his son and me all at once. ”
“All of that can be true,” Storm says. “Men like him don’t really need a reason.”
I laugh, one sound, ugly. “True.”
Maverick pushes a glass of water across the table to me. I don’t want it but I take it anyway. It’s cold. It makes my teeth hurt. The pain helps, though, because everything else feels like a lie.
Pain? Pain is the only truth in this life.
“If it’s true,” Atticus says, choosing each word with exquisite care, like he’s defusing a bomb, “then we do whatever is necessary to keep you clean and safe and to remove every man who thought this was a lever he could pull. If it’s false, we prove it fast and we use the proof like a blade to help Conrad eliminate his father for good.
Either way, he doesn’t get to run this.”
“What if it’s true,” I whisper, because saying it at full volume might crack the boards under my feet. “What if it’s true, and last night I…what am I, then?”
“You’re Phoenix,” Maverick says simply. It sounds dumb, and it fixes something, anyway. “You’re you. That’s it.”
“And he’s still Conrad,” Storm adds. “Nothing from a man like Masterson Senior gets to define the way you two look at each other.”
“DNA doesn’t change consent,” Atticus says, steady. “It changes the law. It changes choices. It doesn’t rewrite what happened inside a room between two people who loved each other last night. It only tells us what to do next with that information.”
“What to do next,” I repeat, flat.
Storm pushes off the jamb and crosses to the table. He lays out four little plastic-wrapped swab kits Spencer pulled from somewhere waiting because of course he did—white envelopes and everything. “If we’re doing this, let’s do this.”
“Now?” I ask.
“Now,” Maverick says, like the answer should have been obvious. “Before we start inventing new stories to torture ourselves with.”
We do it at the table like we’re signing a lease. Atticus reads the instructions from online out loud because he doesn’t trust any of us to not be idiots when it matters.
Storm times our no-food-no-drink window on his phone, taps the screen when thirty minutes passes, and hands me my packet first like I’m the one who gets to set the tone.
I swab the inside of my cheek with a sterile Q-tip and slide the stick into the tube.
It clicks shut with a tiny sound that feels too cheerful.