Cutter’s eyes were wide and desperate, the fear obvious across his features. I think it was worse because I’d trusted him.
Worse, because he’d been a part of something that was mine, something he was supposed toprotect.
And he’d betrayed it all.
“Phoenix, wait. Wait, I didn’t—” He cut off in a scream when I slammed my booted foot against his ankle and heard the sharp sound of it cracking. The pain on his face was secondary to the look of shock as I used my free hand to yank the chain off his neck, leaving behind a gash deep enough that his blood sluiced across my wrist.
“You don’t deserve this.”
“Phoenix—”
“You aren’t one of us.”
He stared at me in wide-eyed horror as I dragged him to the edge of the drop-off. I could hear the infected below us, snarling like they could sense fresh meat dangling just above their heads. There were at least a dozen of them down there, roaming around, waiting.
There were at least a dozen more in the distance, and I turned my eyes back to Cutter to see that he hadn’t even bothered to look at them.
He was still staring at me like he thought somehow he could save himself.
He didn’t know me at all.
“Goodbye, Cutter.” I flung him back, andthe feel of his nails digging into my arms as he tried to stop himself from falling was a secondary sensation to the clench in my gut when I watched him hit the ground. He tried to get to his feet, but the impact and broken ankle weren’t doing him any favors.
He turned his head up to look at me one more time, but all I could see was the smirk on his face when he was talking to the Order asshole.
All I could think of was the way Aubrey had looked while he told me about what they’d done to him when he’d been held in captivity.
I turned from Cutter without looking back, and the sound of his screams chased me as I walked away. They could haunt me later. For now, I had to get to Aubrey.
At least Cutter had donesomethinguseful before I’d left him to die. He told me where Aubrey was going.
The hotel, or the train station. I’d start at the hotel.
I was halfway there when the sound of crackling branches caught me off guard, and the flash of metal made me freeze.
It wasn’t Aubrey’s gun—it was something bigger. Something that looked like it could probably blow a hole through my chest. I might have tested the theory if there wasn’t another… and another.
Three men in Order-issued jackets stepped forward, then a fourth spilled from the bushes behind me and pressed a gun to the back of my head.
“Look at this, boys. We caught ourselves a little firebird to go along with the carrier freak.”
Carrier freak. Did they have him already?
My eyes narrowed, but I dropped my hands to my side. If they had Aubrey… fuck, if they had Aubrey, I needed to know where they’d taken him. He didn’t get to run off and get captured before I had a chance to figure out what the fuck he meant leaving behind his collar. He didn’t get to get captured before I had a chance to tell him that I didn’t know how the fuck I felt, but he was going to figure it out with me.
He didn’t get toget captured.
If they had Aubrey, I was going to kill them all.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
AUBREY
Maybe it was stupid,wanting to bury the skull with his tags, but I couldn’t think of a better way to finally tell Bishop goodbye. I’d put it in a bag and carefully stored it in the hotel room we’d been staying in when we first got here, like it was something delicate, something precious that needed to be hidden away.
I could have said that I was running from Phoenix—that I was going to make the trek to the train station alone because I needed to do this where Bishop had died if I was actually going todo this.
