Bishop saving me.
If I found Phoenix the same way I’d been found…
There wasn’t enough honor in the world to stop me from killing the monster that had haunted my dreams… and there weren’t enough screams in Hell to feed the roaring void that was splitting wide in my chest.
And I could hear it—low angry grunts. A snarling growl that I recognized.
“Fuck you, you piece of shit.”
Phoenix.
I took off at a run and half flung myself into the room. Phoenix was on a table, but one of his hands was free. His shirt was ripped open, his chest bloody.
And on top of him was a demon I’d thought dead, living and breathing with a knife tomyraider’s throat.
“Get the fuck off him.” The low, deadly sound of my threat made both of their heads turn, though Phoenix used the distraction to fling Morris to the ground.The man scrambled, rising to his feet, and my eyes were instantly drawn to the scars that littered half his body.
He’d gone up in the building… and somehow he’d survived.
Fuck.
We should have killed him that night.
We should have…
“Are you okay?” Phoenix’s voice came out in a low rumble, and my eyes widened in shock.
He was asking me ifIwas okay? He was the one strapped to a table.
He was the one bleeding.
And I…
I felt the same way I did when it rained, but there wasn’t a fucking cloud in the sky to give me an excuse.
It wasn’t the rain.
It was the way Phoenix was tied down.
It was the way Morris had kneeled over him.
It was the identical cut that ran down his chest. The same scar I had on my back mirrored along his front.
It was everything—it was the rain, it was Phoenix. It was Bishop and Morris and the entire fucking world around us.
It was the fact that I had to admit—that I finally had to admit I hadn’t been someone else the entire time I’d been with Phoenix. I hadn’t been pretending to be something that I wasn’t.
I was the man who’d stood beside him; I was the monster he’d painted me to be.
And I was going to start acting like it.
Morris’s grin filled my vision as I flung myself acrossthe small space, and I ignored the feel of his knife sliding across my side as I wrapped my arms around him and opened my mouth. Phoenix was finally getting his wish, because I tore my teeth into the bastard’s throat and nearly gagged as my mouth filled with a hot wash of copper—meat and blood, flesh and tendons.
I jerked my head back with as much strength as I could and came away with something thick and warm in my mouth as Morris jammed his knife into my thigh and shoved me away with a scream.
My eyes connected with Phoenix’s, and the wide-eyed expression—full of warmth, heat,lust—was nearly too much. I swallowed the meat in my mouth so he could watch, then turned to the man on the ground in front of me.
“You should have just killed me that night, Morris.”
