“Big asshole, lots of tattoos. Paint all over his face.”
Of course it was Phoenix.
“Listen to me. I’m going to give you a chance to not completely fuck your entire life up, Vance.” I used his first name—I wasn’t in the fucking Order anymore.I didn’t have to follow rules or regulations, and right now I was on the verge of shooting off his fucking hand that was holding the gun and feeding the metal to him until he talked. “Where’s Phoenix?”
“He’s with Morris and the other guys.”
That stopped me.
I couldn’t have heard him right.
“Who?”
“Oh, come on. Charlie Morris. I know you know who I’m talking about.”
“What the fuck do you mean, Morris?” I felt cold, and I recognized the symptoms of shock mixing with rage bubbling just beneath my skin.
“Yeah, he told us about you, Aubrey Malcolm.” Hearing that name was like a slap in the face. I hadn’t heard it in eight years. “We found him while we were hunting you down for what you did to Ben. He said he was hunting you too—just got free from a scientist’s base all the way over on the west coast. He told usallabout what you did. Did you think anyone was going to let a carrier freak like you get away with it? Burning down a facility, killing two men in the Order—” His eyes dropped to the tags around my throat. “That’s what you did for those, right?”
My numbness was slowly giving way to rage, fury that poured through me to the point that my fingers were shaking. It was too much to process.
Morris was alive. He’d been alive for the last ten years… alive while Bishop wasdead.
None of it made sense.
None of this made sense.
But I knew one thing. If Morris had Phoenix, if the nightmare from my past was actually here to take away the one thing that made mewanta future, I was done talking. My gun went off without warning, and Vance screamed as blood blossomed at his wrist. I didn’t hesitate when I stepped forward, and he didn’t have the grip strength to stop me when I yanked his gun from his hand and turned it on him, pointing it at his stomach.
“Where’s Phoenix?”
I wanted to ask him how Morris was here—how he was alive—but none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was the man who I’d left sleeping in bed, the one who’d held all my broken pieces and finally made me feel whole.
I wasn’t going to let them take him from me.
“Fuck you, you goddamn traitor. It’s no surprise your other little raider friend betrayed you. Cutter? Who do you think told us where you were, what you were doing? Who you were fucking.” I didn’t have time to process Cutter’s betrayal, but it didn’t really surprise me. “You’re nothing but a filthy carrier who—” The insult cut off in a scream as I dropped the barrel of the gun he’d held and pumped a shot into his leg. Scattershot was the easiest thing for the Order to reproduce, and it did a damn good job of blowing infected into enough pieces that we could get away. I preferred pistols for precision, but most of our squad had carried these.
I knew the damage it could do, and I didn’t jerk back when blood and thicker things splattered onto my legs as Vance fell to the ground.
I moved forward, planting the gun in the center of hischest and stepping on the bloody stump that had been his leg.
“Where. Is. Phoenix?” I leaned in, twisting the heel of my boot against his mangled flesh until he rolled to the side and the acrid scent of vomit filled the air. I didn’t care. Fuck—I didn’tcare. I’d take him apart one piece at a time if I had to.
“Au-Aubrey, please. We didn’t just kill you outright—we paid those raiders to fuck you up at the theater, not kill you.” My eyes narrowed at the confession. “They’ll kill me, they’ll—” I brought the gun up in a quick motion, thrusting it between his lips and down his throat hard enough to make him gag again.
“Do you think I won’t? You have five seconds after I take this out of your mouth to tell me where they took him or I’m pulling the trigger.”
The sound of metal clicking against teeth as he reached up weakly in an attempt to protect himself rattled through my bones, but it didn’t matter. I pulled the gun back just enough to give him room to speak.
Nothing mattered.
Nothing except…
“One.”
“Aubrey, please. I’m sorry. I?—”
“Two.”
