It was one more thing about him I needed to know, onemore piece of Aubrey I could keep. Once I knew how to navigate those broken pathways, I could find the road to see what was at his very center—the path to make himstay.
I could see, though, that my questions were doing something to him. For every bit he gave me, he tried to pull away in turn. It wasn’t a physical thing; if anything, we were fucking and fighting more than we ever had. Any chance he had, Aubrey would pull me into a corner and drop to his knees in front of me. His mouth worked in hot, teasing strokes until I picked him up and fucked him against whatever surface I could. He was doing a damn good job of distracting me.
He probably didn’t realize that desperation told me where he didn’t want me to touch the most. If I could pry open that part of him, if I could force it out, maybe he’d see that I wasn’t different.
That I was stillme.
I was only goingsoftbecause I’dlet himhave that space.
I was done.
I needed him. All of him. I needed to show him I hadn’t changed.
The warm expression on his face faded when he noticed the way I was looking at him, and his jaw clenched when I stepped closer.
“Is everyone else coming soon?” I could hear the nerves in his tone. He knew.
He knew what I wanted, and he had to realize that he’d run out of options. This was it.
This was all that was left.
“I want?—”
“This one!” Aubrey’s hand struck out suddenly, and his fingers ran along the length of my jawline, across my throat. It only took me a second to realize that it wasn’t my throat he was actually touching.
It was the scar that spilled from ear to ear.
“What?” My hands that had been reaching for his back stilled as he traced his finger along the poorly stitched line again.
Aubrey looked up at me, and I could see the desperation and fear in his gaze. “It’s only fair. It’s my turn now—I want a piece of you too. How did you get this scar?” I could hear the panic trying to claw its way out of his throat with the question. I didn’t know if he actually gave a damn about the story that came with the place he was touching, but he was clearly willing to care if it meant I would look anywhere other than where I’d been focused.
Soft.
Soft.
Blythe’s accusation warred with the look of desperation on Aubrey’s face, with the echo of his words.
I want a piece of you too.
It was a piece that I’d never given anyone. Not Blythe, not Zero.
No one.
Aubrey acted like he was broken sometimes, but he still had some strange semblance of honor to him. If I told him this, it would mean something. I could tell that about him; as much as he tried to leave who he was in the past, tried to act like he didn’t give a shit, he wasgood.
I shrugged and caught myself nearly grabbing his wristto yank it from my throat. Instead, my fingers worked through the sudden tension running the length of my body, clenching open and shut. “It was a knife. Order issued.” And I could have left it at that, but I remembered the way he told me the full story of the cut on his lip. His father had done it.
I could tell him about my family too, I supposed. Maybe it would show him more than anything why I was never going tochange.
“When I was a baby, my mother left me in the street during the rain. She’d been accepted into the Order, even though the Order doesn’t really take carriers, and they certainly wouldn’t take a pregnant woman.” I brushed my fingers against the tags that read the nameStone. “I guess she found a way to trick them. Then again, so did you. So…”
My eyes dropped to the tags on his chest, the ones with the name Bishop—fuck, that name was another secret. One I’d let him keep after I saw how he’d reacted to me hearing it.
No more. No more secrets. No moreanythingbetween us but the truth.
“I was lucky a woman found me—a raider named Lynna. She raised me, and when I was old enough, she told me that the girl who’d dropped me off had left me wrapped up in an Order jacket and cried when the rain started. Lynna wanted to go after her and slit her throat, but she took me in instead.” I still had the damn jacket, tucked away in a trunk in the back of a bunker I’d secured a while ago. It was a little memento of what I’d been and where I came from. It wasn’t something I ever wanted to forget. I kept it the way I kept the paint on my face—it was the way Lynna had painted hers.
“Phoenix…” Aubrey’s expression was starting to go soft, like he hadn’t realized exactly what kind of story he was asking for when he’d demanded his distraction.
