Chapter 31 Phoenix
Phoenix
Zeus launches like a torpedo, paws knifing the water, teeth snapping up the neon ring before it can sink.
He paddles back with the smug tilt dogs get when they’ve done the obvious and expect a parade.
I whistle, and he hauls himself onto the ledge and shakes a sheet of glittering water all over my legs.
“Show-off,” I tell him, flicking droplets back. He licks my ankle and drops the toy at my toes, already vibrating for the next throw.
The cabana is ridiculous in the way rich things are: gauzy curtains breathing in the salt air, a ceiling fan barely moving, a spread of fruit and pastries we’re not touching.
Two of my guards—Jace and Ortiz—are actually sitting for once, shoes off, ankles crossed, the radio clipped to the table between them.
They’re talking about normal things—Ortiz’s little girl lost her first tooth, Jace’s wife wants chickens—and it feels like I dreamed the container and woke up here.
Spencer leans back on the chaise beside me, a Bloody Mary sweating on the side table. He doesn’t drink it; he just plucks the vegetables out one by one like a rabbit at a lawn party. “These are the only tolerable part,” he says, biting a celery stalk.
“Tragic for the vodka,” I say, winding my hair tighter. The sun warms my shoulders; the cool concrete under my thigh feels like permission to keep breathing. For ten minutes, everything is soft.
The guards go quiet first. It’s a different kind of quiet—pulse-check silence, shoulders straightening without a word. I don’t need to look to know why, but I turn anyway.
Four men stand at the edge of the cabana, dragging the light down with them.
Conrad looks like he’s been carved sharper in the last twenty-four hours—jaw set, shirt open at the throat, eyes flat and furious.
Atticus’s hands are empty but it feels like he’s holding something heavy.
Storm is stillness with a center. Maverick’s mouth is a hard line; his sunglasses hide his eyes and make him look even more dangerous.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Conrad bites out.
I lean back, slow. Flip the ring into the pool. “Relaxing?” I answer, closing my eyes like he’s an inconvenience and not a tectonic plate under my feet. “I just finished talking to the employees and laying out the way things will be, and now I’m giving Zeus his exercise.”
He doesn’t argue. He moves. In two steps he’s at my side, and then I’m up and over his shoulder, the world swinging, his arm an iron bar at the backs of my thighs.
He turns that stare on my bodyguards, and men who would walk into gunfire for me decide to take a beat and put their hands where he can see them.
“Put me down,” I say, palms braced on his back. I slap between his shoulder blades. It’s like striking a door.
Atticus steps close enough that I can smell expensive soap. He doesn’t touch me at first—not until my hands slide like I might shove or punch. Then his fingers close around my wrists—firm, not cruel, a warning and a promise. “Don’t make him drop you,” he says, voice even.
“This is bullshit.”
“I can gag you,” Maverick offers, conversational and filthy. “I’ve got a tie in my pocket.”
“Try it,” I snap.
“Please don’t,” Spencer says dryly from his chaise. “The staff will have to write three reports.”
No one listens to Spencer. Conrad carries me past the pool, past the towel station, through a hall that smells like eucalyptus and money.
Zeus trots beside us happily, oblivious to the war while he shakes water off him.
My guards fall in because of course they do; Jace gives me a look that’s all apology and you’re not actually in danger so I’m not going to do anything.
I flip him the bird and roll my eyes.
The penthouse elevator opens without waiting for a key card.
Atticus has already made the building love him more than the fire code.
Conrad doesn’t set me down until he drops me on the sofa in the main room and plants his hands on either side of my hips, caging me in place.
The sea spreads itself across the windows like it wants to listen.
“We have a lot to talk about,” he says.
“I tried that,” I shoot back. “Somebody ran.”
“I’m here now.”
Atticus takes the chair opposite like a therapist whose treatment plan includes arson.
Storm leans against a column, arms folded, knives hidden and absolutely not.
Maverick settles on the arm of the sofa and eats another cherry tomato. “Since everyone is feeling balanced and reasonable,” he says, voice pleasant, “this is an excellent time for facts.”
“Fine,” I say, chin up.
Atticus lifts his phone, not to read so much as to anchor us. “Final results came in. Full panel. Chain of custody we trust.” He looks at me first. “You are a Masterson by blood.”
My stomach doesn’t drop this time. It already did that yesterday. I nod. “I’m aware.”
He looks at Conrad. “You’re not.”
Conrad’s jaw works. He never takes his gaze off me.
Atticus keeps going because that’s what he does. “Storm’s a Carrow. Maverick’s a Locke. I’m a Vale. The paper matches the faces we’ve been staring at our whole lives.”
“So the part of all this that matters,” Maverick says, cutting through, “is the part we already knew.” He gestures at me, at all of us. “She’s ours.”
“She’s always been one of us,” Conrad says quietly.
He shifts his weight like he’s making room for something he should’ve said sooner.
Then he looks at me, and the fury drains out enough to show something rawer underneath.
“Phoenix,” he says, like it’s a prayer he’s finally allowed to say in daylight.
“I love you. I will always love you. I’ll share you with them.
” He tips his head to the others, the line of his mouth fierce. “But no one else. You are ours.”
It punches the air out of me. Not the claim—God knows they’ve been staking claims since the first time I spilled coffee on one of their shoes. It’s the we wrapped around it. The fact that they said the quiet part together, out loud, where it can’t be taken back.
“Say it back,” Maverick says, too soft for his mouth, rough anyway.
I swallow. The room is big and suddenly not big enough at all. “I choose you,” I say. “All of you. I don’t want a crown. I just want the four of you and a key to the corner office.”
Atticus huffs a laugh; it sounds like relief.
Storm pushes off the column and crosses the room with unhurried purpose.
He stops in front of me and reaches for the knot at my shoulder.
One tug, and my swimsuit strap slips. He draws a small blade from wherever he hides them when the metal detectors are feeling friendly.
The sound of the edge kissing fabric is quiet and obscene at once.
“Storm,” Atticus warns—no heat, just the reminder that I am not porcelain unless I say so.
Storm’s eyes stay on mine. He doesn’t move the blade until I nod. Then he cuts the second strap and the center tie, clean and careful, each snip a question I answer by not stopping him. The suit sighs apart and pools at my waist.
“On your knees,” he says, voice low.
A shiver takes a slow walk down my spine. I lift my chin because rebellion is a reflex and because I want to hear it. “For who?”
He smiles without showing his teeth, the way he does when he’s about to be merciless and kind in the same sentence. “For all of us, Angel.”
Heat slides through me, heavy and certain. My pulse is a drum in my throat. Out of the corner of my eye, Conrad moves like he’s about to lift me; Atticus’s hands flex on the chair arms; Maverick swears softly and kicks the coffee table out of the way with his heel.
I shift forward on the sofa, the torn fabric whispering against my skin, and let my knees touch the thick rug.
“Good girl,” Conrad says, voice rough enough to scrape, and my body answers before my brain can catch it.
“Kitten,” Atticus murmurs. “Tell us what you want.”
I lift my gaze to the four of them, heart in my mouth, and open it to tell them what I want.