When the elevator dings and the doors slide open, relief hits me fast. Phoenix steps out—tall, tattooed, and way too fucking tempting—and walks toward me like it’s completely normal for him to know I’m here and not, god forbid, somewhere else in the entire city, like a normal human adult with free will.
Dread settles in my stomach as he gets closer.
No. Not dread.
It’s really hot, sick, addictive anticipation.
I hate the effect he has on me and the way my pulse skyrockets when I know it should freeze. It drives me out of my mind. But what I really hate is the part of me that wants this man—that’s missed this man. And he is a man now—a dangerous,obsessive, impossibly beautiful man who could hurt me again without even lifting a finger.
He knocks before pushing the door fully open, and I stare at him like he’s grown a second head.
“You knock now?”
“I’m trying to be polite.”
“Since when?”
He shrugs, stepping inside. “Since now.”
I roll my eyes, flip my screen back on, and pretend to care about the spreadsheet in front of me because it’s easier than looking at him.
Numbers.
Cells.
Projected losses.
Profit margins.
All of it blurs because none of it matters when he’s here, just existing the way he does. He doesn’t say a word, but his energy is off. Something feels wrong. I don’t know what it is, but I feel it everywhere, especially in that stupid buried place that still remembers what it felt like to ache for his nearness.
I lift my gaze, and he’s staring straight through me. He’s looking past me and out the glass window as if I’m not even here.
“What’s happened?”
Fuck me, I still care.
I hate that the concern hits me exactly the same way it used to.
He drops into the chair across from me and exhales like he’s been holding that breath in until he finally feels safe enough to let it go. He leans forward, elbows hitting the desk, fingers dragging through his hair as I watch his usual fight drain out of him.
“I went to visit my mom.”
Chapter 11
Phoenix
“You need to leave him.”
“I can’t, Phoenix. If I could, I would’ve done it when you were a boy.”
I’ve imagined killing my father in forty-two different ways.
Yeah. I counted because hatred like mine needs a number. It keeps me steady. The garden shears were my first fantasy—one clean cut to his hands, the same hands that always turned into fists, then straight through the cold, dead muscle beating in his coward’s chest. Sometimes I imagined smothering him when he passed out drunk, pressing a pillow over his face and waiting for the kicking to stop. Hell, I almost did it once. I was sixteen. My mom walked in and ripped me off him before I got the satisfaction I’d been owed since the day I was born.
My favorite would’ve been taking his tongue so he couldn’t call my mom a whore ever again, and then forcing poison down his throat because that’s what he is—poison in a man’s skin.
The only reason that bastard is still breathing is that she begged menot to kill him.She knew it was coming one day, but I loved her too much to make her watch it happen.
