Unmade me.
As though he was nothing, because that’s all he was now. Nothing.
A dead man with a dead man’s dreams of revenge. But my dreams…
Mydream. It was right there.Hewas right there.
He was alive, and he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and hauled me against him, covering my mouth with his own and biting my lower lip as he growled, “Say it again.”
“Fuck.” I raised my hand and slicked it across his chest, across the cut that matched my own. Fuck. I’d almost lost him, and I felt my eyes burning. “I didn’t think I could. I didn’t think I ever would again, but I can’t help it. You made me love you, and now it’s the only thing that matters.”
He dropped his forehead to mine, drifting to run his nose along my jaw, and it felt almost strange when his lips grazed my throat. It was usually covered by my collar… but now…
Now I could feel him everywhere as he lifted his lips and pressed them to my temple.
“I fucking love you too, Aubrey. I wasn’t sure I knew how, but I do. Or I’ll learn… for you.”
Fuck. Phoenix was alive—he was warm in my arms, and his mouth tasted like copper when I pressed my lips to his to drink down his confession, tugging back so I could whisper the words he’d said to me back at him.
“Once we burn this building down, I want you to tell me again.”
His smile was everything wicked, everything vicious that I loved about him—everything that meant he was mine.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
PHOENIX
It turnedout there were plenty of things in a train station that were flammable, and this time when we set the building on fire, Aubrey put the last of his bullets into Morris’s face to make sure he was dead before we lit the bitch up. He quietly linked our fingers and pulled me away from the flames, but he pressed his mouth to mine and demanded those three words from me again.
I love you.
Fuck, I hadn’t known I could say it. I hadn’t known I could mean it. But I was still whispering it into his soft kisses when Blythe and Zero found us fifteen minutes later, both of them covered in blood and a few bullet wounds, but smiling.
Aubrey brokeoff from me as soon as he parked the car, stepping up to the smoldering remains of the train station two days later. He’d told me more about it when we’d gotten back to Paradise. The way Bishop had been here—died here. The reason he wanted to come back.
To say goodbye.
I hated that a part of him still belonged to a ghost—that a part of him probably always would—but I could give him this.
He pulled his backpack from his shoulder and kneeled in the ashes. I watched a plume of it drift around him as he started to dig, and after a few seconds, I dropped down beside him.
We worked until our fingers were filthy and the hole in the ground was deep enough that he could carefully pull the jacket in his backpack out. He laid the tiger skull inside it, but his fingers trembled when they came to the tags at his throat.
“Aubrey, you don’t have to.”
“I do.” I saw it then, the shine of tears in his eyes—that impossible thing that I’d never seen before. He held them back as he pulled the chain over his head, and one of them slipped free as he dropped it over the skull. When he reached into his bag to pull out the letter, I frowned.
My fingers searched my pockets, and I pulled out the one I’d found. A little crumpled, a little bloodstained now… but…
“What’s this?”
“I found it with the skeletons we buried.”
He opened the letter and read it, and by the time he looked up at me, the tears he’d held back were falling in full.
It turned into a choked sob when I reached to my belt and pulled off his collar, dropping it on top of the pile.
