Phoenix Legacy

by Corrina Lawson

  “And then you shot your stepfather,” Del whispered.

  He took a deep breath and kept going.

  “No. I froze after I shot your father. I don’t know why.” He’d seen his stepfather level the rifle at him. He’d known that he would die as soon as the trigger was pulled.

  “It was my mother who shot my stepfather. She grabbed the rifle from…from your father’s dead hands and killed her husband.”

  “She waited until then?” Del choked back a sob. Or a laugh. He couldn’t tell. “She should’ve done that years before.”

  Philip nodded.

  “I heard the shots. I ran out of the bathroom. It was too…” She cleared her throat. “It was too late.”

  “It all happened in seconds. Boom, boom, boom. Maybe twenty seconds, maybe less.”

  “I still see them dead like that in dreams,” she said.

  “So do I.”

  They stared at each other for a long time. He heard the hum of the refrigerator in the far corner, where the little kitchen area was stocked with supplies. Del sniffled and wiped away her tears with her fingers.

  His healing was filling him with warmth. Heat lapped at the side of his face. “That’s when the Feds broke in, guns drawn. My mother grabbed the shotgun I had and started yelling not to shoot, she dropped the guns and she screamed not to hurt the children. They grabbed her and shoved her down and they grabbed me and did the same.”

  “I remember the helmeted man who grabbed me,” Del said in a small voice. “I could still see the bodies through the smoke, but he wouldn’t let me run to them. I screamed at you, I yelled. I’d heard the argument, I thought you’d done it all… I called you a killer and murderer, and I spat on you. I said I hated you.”

  “I remember.” He’d never forget. “You should hate me. I killed them.”

  “They were really going to kill me,” she whispered.

  “I thought about that later.” He’d thought about it so many times. “Maybe your mother hadn’t been going to get you. Maybe she wouldn’t have killed you. Maybe she’d have turned on my stepfather, like my mother did. Maybe it was just a ploy to save you.” He looked away. “I never gave either of them a chance to explain. I just killed them.” Like he’d killed so many since.

  “Why did your mother take the blame for the shootings?”

  “I tried to tell the Feds what happened, but my mother started yelling that I was brainwashed, not to trust me, it was she who’d killed the rest, in a suicide pact but she’d turned on them because she couldn’t kill her son.”

  “She protected you,” Del whispered.

  “For the first time in her life, yes.” He closed his eyes, thought of his mother’s face as they’d led her away that day, her hands in chains. Somehow, she had looked freer than she ever had while on the run.

  “Live, son. I’m sorry. But now you can live.”

  Had he lived?

  “How could the Feds not know?” Del asked, her voice steadier.

  He opened his eyes again. “I don’t think they cared. They had what they wanted. Three dead terrorists, one captured.”

  “And you let the lie stand,” Del said flatly.

  “Yeah.” He stared at Del. “I figured she owed me that.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “In prison, I think.” He’d tried hard not to think of her.

  “So what do you owe me, Hawk?” Del stood, the tears drying. “You come back into my life, and all of a sudden I’m carrying a baby created from the fucking Messiah gene.” She scooped up the gun. “What the hell is your game?”

  “I have no game, only truth for the first time in my life.” He used the arm of the couch to stand. The room spun. She’d hurt him bone-deep. Getting up had been a mistake. He was too badly injured and only half healed.

  “You know, I joined the CIA out of college. I joined my stepfather’s enemy. Except they used the same methods as he did.” He closed his eyes, trying to shut out most of his life. “So I spent my adult life being deceptive, being a spy, being violent, living a lie. Just like him.” He hadn’t seen that clearly, not until Lansing had died right in front of him. He was far too much like both his fathers. He’d walked away from the CIA after, but it wasn’t until a few days had passed that he realized he had nothing to run to save Beth.

  “So I should believe you?” Del’s voice trembled.

  “I’ve recently decided to try the truth.” He opened his eyes and focused on the gun. Huh. He didn’t want to die. No, he didn’t want Del to kill him. She’d have to live with it and now he realized he didn’t want that for her. “That doesn’t seem to be working out too well, either.”

  She choked back a sob and set the gun on the coffee table. “What the hell am I doing in the middle of this?”

  He stared at her, watching the lines of her face. As a child, she’d had a round face. Now, she’d lost weight around her cheekbones, making them razor sharp. And she seemed so sad. She’d been such a happy child. She’d laughed all the time. She’d made him laugh.

  “I don’t know.” He let himself slide to the floor again, unable to stay on his feet. He had no balance. “Maybe Lansing did this to get back at me. He hated me.” He cleared his throat and hung his head between his knees. “I haven’t had much luck with fathers.”

  “Oh God.” She crumpled to the floor next to him. “Oh God, what have I done? All these years, I blamed you, Hawk, and it wasn’t…it wasn’t…I’m sorry. Oh God, now I’ve made a mess of you, I hurt you, I’m sorry…I’m sorry…” She reached out and covered his face with her hands.

  He almost moaned, so close to glorious agony from her touch. Come closer, he thought. Closer.

  “You’ve nothing to be sorry about, Del.”

  “I hurt you, look at all this blood…” She pulled off her sweater and wiped the blood away from the side of his face. “This looks bad. I shouldn’t have…I…I don’t know what’s wrong with me… Hell, I think I can see bone…”

  “It’ll heal.” He stroked her face with his fingertips. Yes, she was Lily from years ago. But she was also Del, who’d come back to save his life yesterday. Del, who’d saved them both with her driving, Del who was carrying his son, Del who had flirted and danced with him and who’d been ready to kiss him. Del, who’d heard a crazy story and still trusted him enough to come with him last night.

  Del, who had felt so perfect against him.

  “We have to get you to a doctor, we have—”

  “No.” He gripped her shoulders with his hands. “I’ll heal.”

  She dabbed his face with the sweater again, hands shaking. It hurt. It felt good.

  “I hit you hard. Twice.” Her tears started again. “I could have torn your whole face open. How could I do this?”

  “Delayed post-traumatic stress from childhood.” He pulled her close and put an arm around her shoulders. She curled her head against his chest. He swallowed. His healing was in full force, his face suffused in warmth and his skin sensitive to even the air around him. He closed his eyes and simply held her, letting his power work, wishing he dared do more than hold her.

  “What the hell kind of mother will I make if I can do this?”

  Her voice was muffled against him. He ran his fingers through her long hair. The strands caressed his palm like the finest silk.

  “I could have killed you. I wanted to kill you.”

  “No. You told me what you wanted. The truth. If you’d wanted to kill me, you would have pulled the trigger, not hit me with the gun butt.” He hugged her tighter.

  “I hurt you,” she whispered.

  “I could’ve stopped you. I let you hit me.” He put his fingers under her chin and lifted her head so they were eye to eye. “I wanted you to hurt me.”

  She lifted her face. Her eyes glistened with moisture. “You wanted me to hurt you?”

  “I owed you that.” He cupped her face in his hands. He felt so alive, so aroused, it was all he could do not to push her to the floor. “Look at my
face again.”

  Her fingers reached out and, gently, ever so gently, touched the broken skin from her blows. “It’s…the cut is closing up.”

  He nodded. “The jaw is already better.” He drew her face closer to his. “I taunted you so you’d hit me. It felt good when you hit me.”

  Her eyebrows furrowed and her mouth went slack as she tried to accept what he’d said. She licked her lips. He focused on the tip of her tongue, imagined it tasting his body…

  “Pain felt good to you?” She slid her hands around the back of his neck, putting their faces only an inch apart.

  He nodded. “Pain and pleasure. The same. Makes no difference to me any longer.”

  She kissed the bruise on his jaw, soft, wet lips against his cheek. “Your brain circuits are all miswired. I know why. Oh, Hawk.”

  “Don’t care.” He turned his head and their lips met.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Del thought she’d been lightheaded and dizzy before, overcome with rage, fear, sadness, horror at what she’d done.

  She thought there was room for no more.

  Until Hawk kissed her.

  Her nerve endings exploded, as if she’d jumped out of her skin. She curled a hand into his blood-soaked T-shirt, pulling him tighter against her. When he deepened the kiss, when their tongues touched, warm and wet, her fingers dug into his shoulders. He wrapped his arms around her and they went deeper, until her mind was gone and she was just a quivering lump of raw nerves and lust. Hawk was icy heat and intense darkness, pulling her down with him to the abyss, promising things she’d never heard of…

  His hands slid around her waist. She broke the kiss, letting him pull her shirt over her head, closing her eyes as his rough hands brushed against her bare skin. She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the side.

  He seized her. Their mouths met again. Her hands tugged at his shirt and covered his chest, absorbing his strong muscles and the hard skin touched by wisps of curly hair. They stopped kissing long enough for him to pull off his shirt. He moaned as the cotton scraped against his cheek.

  “Hurt?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he hissed, chest heaving.

  She straddled him and bent to kiss his injured cheek. It had healed even more, the slice she’d made in his skin only a thin line now. Pain and pleasure all confused. Considering how pain had been so much a part of his growing up, she wasn’t surprised. But, this, his healing, it was a miracle, for both of them. She’d wanted to cause him such pain earlier. Now she wanted to make up for it.

  His hands cupped her breasts. She bent back and moaned. They grabbed for each other’s pants. Hawk’s erection was jutting out from his jeans. She exposed it easily and wrapped her fingers around it.

  He groaned. She kissed him again as they blindly helped each other out of the rest of their clothes. She straddled him again, naked against his erection, her own body wet and ready to welcome him.

  He muttered something. She kissed him before he could say anything else, before he could protest. She wanted this. Now. She hurt him, now she wanted to heal him, to feel with him, to be with him. She knew all about pain and pleasure being the same. When it was hard to feel at all, even agony was welcome.

  He made her feel. She wasn’t going to let that go.

  She took him inside. Her spine arched, she threw her head back and felt the place where she’d bitten through her lip with her tongue.

  Hawk’s hands dug into her hips as she rode. She buried her fingers in his shoulders, heedless of anything except their rhythm as they moved together, moved as one, and came as one.

  “Ahhh…” She shivered, out of control. He pulled her close until her face was buried in his shoulder. She smelled the sweat and the blood and remains of the cigarette smoke in his hair. The scents reminded her of the bar she loved.

  “Hawk,” she whispered.

  She wasn’t sure how long they stayed there on the floor, Hawk braced against the couch with her in his lap, with him still inside her. She only knew for the first time since she’d woken up on the floor of her bar, something felt completely right.

  Hawk stroked her back with his thumb. She made a noise of contentment.

  “That sounds like a purr,” he said.

  She lifted her head off his shoulder to face him. “Maybe.” She glanced at her fingers. Blood. His shoulders had scratches all over them.

  “Damn.” She stiffened. “I hurt you again.”

  “Yes.” He seized her hands and kissed them. “Thank you.”

  She smiled. He smiled.

  “We are ridiculous,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “This is insane.”

  “Welcome to my life.”

  He slid his hand down her stomach to rest on the baby bump. She swallowed.

  “Don’t worry about anything. I’m going to keep you safe. I’m going to kill those who want to hurt you,” he said.

  She blinked, remembering her rage. She’d come so close to killing him. She never wanted to feel that murderous again. It would be going backwards.

  “You don’t have to kill for me, Hawk. I don’t want that.”

  “But that’s all I can do for you.”

  “It’s not. What do you call what just happened between us?” She curled up against him, her heart in pieces. He thought killing was all he had to offer. “We’ll figure it out together.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “I wanted to kill you for years. Sometimes I’d fall asleep wishing for you to be dead.”

  He winced. She kissed his lips. “I don’t want to feel like that again. But, you, you took all the pain for me. And then I hurt you for it.”

  “I told you, I wanted you to hurt me.”

  The pain/pleasure mixture she could understand. Hawk feeling he deserved to be beaten, no. She kissed his neck and brushed her cheek against the rough stubble of his face. “Know what I realized the second time I hit you?”

  “That you weren’t a killer? You stopped pointing the gun at me.”

  “Not that.” She glanced over at the gun, sick to her stomach at how close it’d been. “Jury’s out on that one. No, I realized I was angrier that you’d betrayed me than I was grief-stricken over my parents’ deaths.” She shook her head. “Talk about your revelations.”

  Her gut clenched as she spoke, but she knew it was true. Her parents hadn’t hit her but they had ignored her. They’d been indifferent. It had been her and Hawk, against the world, always.

  “And I remember thinking that day, through all my grief, that at least you’d gotten the bastard at last. At least your stepfather was dead like he deserved.”

  “I missed you. All the time. I told myself it was stupid, you were just a little girl and I was a teenager and I had better things to do than worry about a little girl who hated me.” He sighed. “I never could convince myself of it.”

  “You were my best friend.”

  He shook his head. “I’d have killed myself as a child if you hadn’t been part of my life. I’d have used that way to escape him.”

  “I know.” They had a bond back then, not sexual, not like siblings, but a friendship that went deeper than anything she’d had since. It had been hard to trust after that night. She’d liked her foster siblings and her friends, but the bonds had never been close to the trust between her and Hawk.

  And now it was unexpectedly but incredibly sexual, and where that had come from, she didn’t know. But it was obviously mutual. Where they went from here, she didn’t know and didn’t give a damn about right this second.

  It was enough they’d stopped hurting and started healing each other.

  Hawk wrapped his arms around her. She rested against him, listening to him breathe and hearing his heart beat. She should get up, get dressed, do something but she had no desire but to stay like this with Hawk.

  She thought they slept for a while. She knew she must have. When she opened her eyes again, he was stroking her hair. And she was cold.

  S
he moved off his lap. He made no protest. Hawk watched her, naked and unmoving, as she dressed.

  “You’re so beautiful.”

  She tossed his shirt at him. “You’re just saying that because pregnancy made my boobs big. C’mon, put some clothes on. Sooner or later someone’s going to walk in on us.”

  He blinked and looked around the room, considering her words for a minute before he got to his feet. He swayed. She rushed over to steady him. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll be fine. Once the adrenaline wears off, the healing zaps energy. How’s the cheek look?”

  “Bloodstained.” As was the shirt she’d tossed at him. It was soaked with blood. She found her sweater on the floor and tried to wipe the dried blood off his face again. “The cut’s closed up completely.”

  The sweater wasn’t going to work. She led him over to the sink and used paper towels and soap to clean the blood off his face. He said little and kept his eyes closed. “You look better.” She ran a fingertip over his healed skin. He had said she was beautiful. But he was goddam gorgeous. “This is a miracle.” No wonder Cheshire had called her son—Hawk’s son—the Messiah. “But this is nothing new. I bet you could always do this.” Hawk’s ability to survive his stepfather’s rages suddenly made sense.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I remember the beatings, especially the last one where he kicked you into a closet and slammed the door shut on you. I thought you were dead.”

  “You stole the key and curled up with me.”

  “I had to see you. You were barely breathing. You said it hurt to breathe but you healed. You were walking around in a day.”

  He nodded and pulled on the bloody shirt. If no one looked too closely, the stains might just appear to be sweat against the dark color.

  “It was you who kept me alive that day. The healing only works subconsciously if the person really wants to live. With you there, I did.”

  “Alec said Beth was a catalyst that jacked up your psychic power recently.”

  He nodded. “I was badly injured, shot and near death. She ordered me telepathically to live. So I did. Since then, I’ve gained conscious control of the ability.”