The burn made him roar to life, and his hands found my throat and squeezed.
I didn’t try to fight him off. If he killed me now, there wasn’t a damn thing I would do about it—could do about it. Shit, I was pretty sure I deserved it.
While I sat there and felt my pulse, thick and thrumming, protest beneath his grip, recognition slowly bled into Phoenix’s gaze. His fingers loosened, and he fell back against the sheets with a low groan. I thought he’d fainted from the pain, but when I wiped his chest clean and frowned at the new wash of blood welling from the wounds, I glanced up at his face to see him staring at me through his lashes.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
I just started to carefully pick the broken metal and splintered wood from his skin with fingers that were far more gentle than they would have been if he’d come after me and this hadn’t happened.
I only had to stop once when my hands started to shake. Still, those narrowed eyes never left my face as I worked, and he stayed silent as I double-checked that everything was clear.
Honestly, he was lucky. It could have been worse. I’d seen these same explosives used on crowds of rabid—they could take off limbs. He’d been hit with the very edge of the blowback. There were twisted pieces of metal as big as my fist back in the theater that could have lodged into his chest and…
I swallowed hard, my fingers clenching the sheets beside him to hide my nerves. I wasn’t sure if I needed to scold him for following me when I’d made it clear I didn’t want him to, or if I needed to thank him for saving me.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I wasn’tworthsaving. He shouldn’t have been hurt because of me… and I…
His fingers were shaking when they lifted. I hissed softly as the pads trailed along the wide cut on my shoulder. “This.” Phoenix’s voice was the softest murmur when he spoke. He knew I healed fast, and I wasn’t the one lying on my back in bed.
I frowned and bit back a scathing remark. “It’s fine. I’ll rinse it out once I’m finished with you.” I attempted to bat his hand away, but he knocked my wrist to the side and trailed his fingers over the length of it again until I shivered from the mixture of pain and the undercurrent of stinging, confusing joy that he could stilltouch me. The image of him lying prone on the ground tried to play behind my eyes again, and I chased it away with the feel of his warm skin as I flattened my palm against his chest and felt the beat of his heart. He wasfine.He wasalive.
But his fingers ran across the injury on my shoulder again, and when I lifted my gaze and found him staring intently at me, I realized.
Let me go get some new ones.
When Phoenix murmuredthisagain, I sighed.
“When I came in guns blazing, I did take them by surprise. I managed to get through the lobby, but one of the assholes came at me with a fucking sword.” I turned my attention back to his injuries while I spoke—I was going to have to sanitize them one more time before I bandaged them, and hopefully he wouldn’t try to strangle me again when I did. “I shot him, but he managed to swing at mebefore I did. Because who comes at someone with a sword, right?”
He snorted in amusement, and my eyes flickered to the axe that I’d laid carefully on the dresser beside us. I didn’t look at his face again, though I could feel his attention focused on me as I double-checked my work and sat back on my heels.
“I need to clean this out one more time and stitch you up. Are you going to try to kill me again?” I finally forced myself to look at his face when I asked.
Phoenix’s eyes were tired. Honestly, the fact that he was still awake after he’d nearly been blown up was proof of exactly how strong he was, but he didn’t have to be strong for me right now. He’d already done that by surviving. He’d already done that bystaying.
He took in a slow breath, and the corner of his mouth twitched in amusement. “Not tonight.”
“Not tonight.” I repeated his words and couldn’t stop the laugh that followed—it ached in my chest, feeling wrong after the way my entire world had nearly burned down earlier. I ignored the pain and settled into the feeling of warmth that the sound tried to evoke. It was easier.
And it was better than the low groan that pooled from Phoenix’s chest when I poured the alcohol into his wounds again and watched blood soak into the sheets beneath him.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
PHOENIX
Aubrey was quiet.Maybe more quiet than he’d been since I’d met him. I might have had something to say about it, if it weren’t for the fact that I kept slipping in and out of consciousness. I’d known jumping in front of him like that would get me hurt—I’d known running into the theater after him when it was just the two of us was dangerous. Even lying on the bed with the cover pulled up over my freshly stitched and bandaged chest, I couldn’t reconcile what had made me do it with the man I usually was.
Maybe it was just that the only person allowed to kill Aubrey was me? I’d claimed him—he was mine. He wasn’t going to get out of it by running off on some suicidal mission in an attempt to escape me. I could blame it on that stubbornness, and it would have been easy enough to write off, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to lie to myself.
I’d never wanted to lie to myself before, unless it came tothe emotions that had flooded my chest when I’d met my mother.
But…
I pushed those thoughts aside and attempted to shove myself into a sitting position. It instantly felt like fire ripping through my chest—the tight pull of stitches burned, and the dull ache along my ribs told me I’d bruised a few things. The low groan that poured from my throat caught Aubrey’s attention.
“Phoenix?” His voice was careful when he said my name, and I watched his green eyes flicker up to my face—there was a brief moment of relief there, and then they instantly fell back to the door.
