The waitress approaches, all nerves and wide eyes, until Phoenix gives a slight tilt of his head. Somehow, that’s enough. She straightens, no longer rattled, and without asking, she sets a coffee down in front of me, hazelnut.
I blink. “How’d you know?”
He just lifts his cup in response, as if that explains everything.
The weight of the ceramic warms my palms, helping me take a breath. The scent of hazelnut and burnt sugar curls upward, familiar in a way that startles me.
“I almost didn’t come,” I admit after a moment, the words feeling raw on my tongue. They hang there, delicate and unfinished.
Phoenix doesn’t flinch. “Why?”
I drag my finger around the rim of my cup. “Because everything about you screams power, control, strategy.” I shrug, even though the weight in my chest is anything but casual. “And everything about me... doesn’t.”
He leans in slightly, elbows on the table, gaze steady. “That’s not what I see.”
My eyes narrow. “No?”
“I see someone who didn’t flinch when hell knocked on her door. Someone who looked it in the eye and said, ‘Try me.’”
The lump in my throat rises too fast for me to swallow. My spine stiffens with old reflex, my body remembering what it means to be hunted and underestimated.
“Don’t romanticize it,” I whisper. “I survived. That’s all.”
His voice drops, heavy with respect. “Sometimes, surviving is the revolution.”
That? That undoes something in me. The silence that follows isn’t awkward. It’s earned. I breathe in the scent of roasted beans, old wood, and spring rain lingering on the air. The breeze dances across the back of my neck. My skin prickles.
I trace the rim of the mug again. There’s a beat pulsing beneath my skin, the kind that hums before a song starts.
“I don’t want anything from you,” I say finally, staring down at the swirling cream in my coffee, hoping the words will surface. “Not answers. Or apologies. Not... whatever you think this should be. I’m not here to dig up the past.”
Phoenix exhales, a small shift in his shoulders signaling the tension there eases just a bit. “Then what are you here for?”
I meet his eyes, and it takes everything in me not to look away. “To figure out what it means to have a family that doesn’t turn on you.”
For the first time, something cracks across his face. A flicker of something edged with pain, tucked neatly behind all that polish and poise.
“I don’t have a clue on how to be a brother,” he says quietly. “It seems we both had terrible fathers, and Alice...” He shakes his head.
I offer a half-smile. “Yeah,” I huff, the sound low, dry, but not without understanding.
We sit in it. The strange, heavy truth of shared blood we never asked for. The weight of it settles between us, a pact we never signed but carry anyway.
He clears his throat, business-like now. “I’m expanding into Willowridge, as you know. Quietly. The Outsiders won’t be running the show. Malachi made that clear, but they’ll be the muscle. Amelia’s going to help with the oversight. She knows how to keep things clean.”
“Amelia’s smart,” I say, wrapping my hands tighter around my cup. “And she doesn’t scare easy.”
“Neither do you.”
The words land carrying an unexpected gift. Not flashy. Just true.
“I fake it well,” I murmur.
“Faking it keeps people alive.” He looks at me with eyes that see every bruise I’ve ever had, emotional or otherwise, and doesn’t find a single one shameful. “I don’t expect this to be easy,” he says. “You and me. We’re not built the same.”
I nod. “No. But maybe that’s the point. We’re here. We survived. That has to count for something.”
He raises his cup slightly, the hint of a smile returning to his face. “To moving forward.”
