There was a crunching sound and a scream. A shock of coppery heat washed down my throat as Morris pulled back, and I grinned with bloody lips before spitting the tips of his fingers out on the floor.
“Usually I swallow… but you taste like shit, Morris.”
He snarled when he sprang forward, and the feel of his knife biting into my chest was worth the look of pain on his face, worth the way his fingers on his otherhand were bleeding. He dragged the blade down in an exact mirror of what he’d done to Aubrey.
Fuck, now we had matching scars, didn’t we?
I could bring that back to him too when I brought him Morris’s head.
Was that a good way to confess that you loved someone? With the head of the man who’d torn their world apart? I was pretty sure the fury in my chest, the way I wanted to obliterate the asshole who climbed on top of me with a knife in his hand… that meant I loved Aubrey.
Now I just had to get out of here so I could tell him.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
AUBREY
Cora and Flynt stayed behind,though I knew they were packing their shit to leave. I couldn’t blame them—taking on an unknown number of Order soldiers wasn’t for the faint of heart, and I’d never seen them that close to Phoenix and the others to begin with.
We didn’t need them. We found one of the trucks the Order issued to their soldiers parked at the front gates, solar powered and sitting in the sun. It probably belonged to the assholes Blythe had gutted, but it was going to save us time.
I didn’thavetime to waste. I needed to get to Phoenix before Morris touched him.
I needed to get to him before anything happened.
I needed…
“Look, I don’t know how to drive, but if you don’t calm down, I’m going to think I can do a better job than you.Phoenix will be fine.” Blythe’s hand on my arm was soothing, but I could see the worry in her eyes.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell him anything,” I finally said, the emotion in my chest almost too much for me to speak around.
“Then let’s go kill the fuckers who took him so you can.”
She was right.
Of course she was right.
Before I was finished, every asshole who’d even thought about touching him was going to be dead in the ground.
I leftBlythe and Zero on the other side of the train station. From what we could tell, it wasn’t the entire Order coming down on our heads. It made sense—usually when we had a deserter, they’d send out a squad to hunt them down and bring them back sojusticecould be served.
Fuck, what did they really know about justice? Nothing.
Nothing about justice or loyalty. I proved that when I cornered one of them as Blythe and Zero went after the few who’d started running when they saw us coming. A knife to his stomach had him screaming about exactly where Morris had taken Phoenix.
The blade across his throat made him stop altogether. I rifled through his pockets for a second and found what I was looking for.
A firestarter.
Before I was through here, this entire fucking place was going up in flames.
For now, though, I had to find Phoenix. I wasn’t about to set it ablaze with him still inside. The dead man at my feet said Morris had dragged him to the station and taken him into a storage room in the back. It sounded like him—he liked to fuck with people where he couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be caught.
I couldn’t ignore the sensation crawling along my spine—fear tingling the tips of my fingers, mixed with a fury I couldn’t quite wrap my head around.
This had happened before, hadn’t it? Only it had been Bishop coming after me.
