Sweet Romance15 min read
The Phoenix Who Cleared My Cart
ButterPicks13 views
I am the only female high god of our scattered world.
"I am the only female high god in the four seas and eight wilds," I told the officer at the precinct.
"Okay, Miss—" He blinked at my tone, then smiled like he was doing a formality. "Officer, could you give us your guardian's phone number?"
Twenty minutes later I sat in the back of a town car and stared at the man beside me, the one who had really bailed me out.
He was all suit and patience.
"You are mad," he said, half amused, half exasperated. "You can't just eat people, Mia."
"I did not eat a person," I said, upright and proud. "I ate a monster."
He looked like he wanted to argue and then remembered the obvious: he couldn't beat me.
"Little sovereign," he tried his coaxing voice, "could we agree—no more eating people in public? Even if they look like monsters?"
"I won't promise anything," I said, tugging at the lace of the new dress I had paid for with his card. "I will say this: I explained it as a magic trick. I can't promise I'll always be able to explain."
"Also," he said, "deleting surveillance is a hassle. If someone posts it—"
"Are you even listening?" I asked, spinning so he could see the tiny butterfly on my collar.
"I am," he lied. "Your dress is very pretty."
The driver snorted in front. "Mr. Oliver, stop being jealous."
"I am not jealous," Cruz Oliver said, tone deadpan, and his face did a thing where I could see he was smitten and resisting. It made me feel like the best kind of trouble.
"Good. Because this is my favorite skirt."
"You are impossible," he muttered.
I pouted, because being impossible is practically my job description.
I am Mia Dell, a phoenix god who has been reborn a hundred and one times, and I woke up in a family shrine. A human boy—well, not a boy when he grew up, but the one who found me—was standing there like he'd been waiting his whole life. According to the memory in my blood, the Qin family had worshiped me. In the shrine, the oldest elder bowed and declared, "This is a blessing." He turned his eyes to the young man at his side and said, "From today, you will serve the god."
Cruz blinked. "Grandfather—are you serious?"
"You have been chosen," the elder said. "Do you accept?"
Cruz, who had spent his whole life on careful paths, mouthed a word I found delicious: "No." Then he swallowed it and said the other one instead. "I will obey."
"Good." I peered at Cruz. "Human, from this day, you are my servant."
He, of course, protested. "I have a career—"
"Will you let the god take your credit card?" I asked. "Excellent."
That is how Cruz and I met properly. He was born into a family that had served me for generations. He was polite, composed, and somehow capable of both fierce tenderness and a business meeting at nine sharp.
He did not know then what would become of him. He did not know that I had a very poor sense of 'public decorum'.
The first time I got taken to the station, I declared loudly that someone's hair hid a blood-sucking demon. Cruz paid in cash to retrieve me. The second time I munched on a dog—"pet dog, actually, possessed"—and Cruz handed over a check to a trembling owner. The third time I ate a person who smelled wrong, and this time the record wouldn't be erased: I had eaten the person.
"That was a monster," I insisted as he scolded me over dinner.
"You always say that," he said, feeding me a piece of steak to shut me up. "Eat your food like a normal—well, as normal as you get."
"Normal is boring."
"You're growing up, Mia," he said.
"Maybe," I admitted. "Maybe I'm taller. Maybe I can burn the rivals now."
"You do not 'burn the rivals' in a city center," Cruz said with an air of patient exasperation. "Whatever happens, we don't need trending hashtags."
"You worry too much," I told him. "You worry because you cannot beat me."
He smiled without permission then, just a small tug at the corner of his mouth. "Fine. But tonight—tell me what you want for dinner."
"If you will wash my wings when they need it," I said, half serious.
He pretended not to hear and ordered more steak.
Cruz had been to the shrine and had seen me in my first morning feathers. He had become my reluctant attendant because his grandfather said so and because he did not have the irritable habit of refusing the impossible. We made rules: I would try not to eat the public; he would try not to tell anyone I was a god.
He did not know how many times I had been killed, how many times I had clawed back out of the ashes. "The last to wake up is the strongest," my blood told me. "The last's hunger is the sharpest."
It is true. Being the last to open your eyes makes you hungry for more—more power, more proof, more life.
So I made mischief. I signed him into things. I went shopping on his card. I pressed my hands to wrong heads in public because the haired people sometimes had the wrong hunger inside them. I burned a chair to ash because someone called me a fraud. I am direct.
Cruz took flak for me. He took the calls, the fines. He called the owners of the things I'd broken and paid. He fixed things with a look when necessary. He was baffling and steady and, when his face betrayed him, utterly tender.
And when the world decided to make trouble, it sent the old rivals to me.
"Blue and Black," I told him once, after a testy scuffle that left my wing ruffled.
"You named them like a boy's toy set," Cruz said.
"The Blue dragon is wood-aligned, he doesn't like me. The Black tortoise is water, and he hates me too," I said. "They think gods should stay in myths, not carry credit cards."
One evening the sky broke. A shadow wrapped the hills around Cruz's villa. I felt the old hunger in the air.
"There they are," I muttered, and pulled Cruz upward, clutching his coat collar and flying. He gripped my sleeve as if that would ward off fate.
"Did you call them?" I teased.
"Me? Call a dragon? No," he said, but the way he stared at me made my plumage prickle. "They cannot be reasoned with."
"They can be eaten," I said, and Cruz made a small noise that could have been a protest or a laugh.
We moved into the city center. Cruz said it was safer, and he was right for once: more people meant less chance of a god-sized incident getting posted by the two hundred cameras of the private villas. He was serious about moving, about security, about being less dramatic. I promised to be less dramatic. I lied.
One night a bulky, muscular man with the smell of river mud and scales—Asher Bowling—grabbed Cruz and tore at his collar like a child giving too hard at a gift. "Where is she?" he roared.
"Get your filthy claws off him," I said, hollow with small fury. "Back away."
"Asher, we could just talk," Cruz murmured when I threw a fireball.
"Asher, don't," said Asher, then ducked the ball with a grin meant to provoke me.
He was reckless. He was loud. I grew with fury and age and my bones hardened. I made myself adult like snapping open a book and finding all the answers inside. My child feathers fell away; my wings widened like a curtain.
"Nice trick," Asher said when I changed. "You grow fast."
"Women do," I shrugged. "We surprise people."
I knocked Asher back, and I thought the fight would end, but then the air shifted. The other one arrived—skin gray with damp hair and eyes like a placid shore. Giles Meier stepped out with water clinging to him. He was not loud; he was a slow shiver down the spine of a calm pond.
"We do not need to fight," Giles said.
"Too late," I sang, and then I had both of them turning and lunging, feather and scale and claw.
Cruz staggered as they forced him into a shadowed room and left me with the choice of saving him or indulging my long-simmering hunger. A string of old memories—names of people I used to love and also devour—pulled at me. I tore through the roof and caught Cruz as they threw him like a ragdoll.
"You okay?" I asked, tucking him against my chest.
"I am fine," he whispered, fingers finding the nape of my neck. "You always come."
"Of course," I said. "You are my person."
He blinked at that and the warmth between us crystallized. Then Asher reappeared and smashed his claws into my back. Feather and flesh met pain, and something hot and terrible and awful and necessary rose. When the dust settled, I had split part of their strength and put them on the ground: bruised, reduced, existing.
They taught me three useful things that night: one, Cruz would walk into fire for me; two, gods can get hurt and still laugh; three, dragons are idiots when they underestimate a phoenix.
I did not devour all of them. I took what I needed. I left them to collect their pride and their shame.
After, Cruz tended my wing and I sulked like a child because several feathers were gone. He touched the place where the feathers rounded into flesh and said, softly, "You'll heal."
"I don't need your coddling," I said.
"Maybe you do sometimes," he replied. "Especially when you pretend not to notice scars."
"That's not pretending." I pushed my face into the crook of his neck. The heat of him made my heart stutter and, for the first time in a long while, I wanted to keep things small. I wanted a dinner untroubled by dragons, a cart emptied by me, a pair of shoulders to collapse on.
Instead, trouble found a man who had been small, who'd grown up next to Cruz like shadow by day—Barrett Hoffmann. Barrett had been our driver for years, polite, bland, whispering compliments I could smell as false. He smiled too wide and knew too many hidden ways into the family's plans. He knew how to get in and out. He said all the right things about Cruz's leadership. He patrolled Cruz's calendar and the family's secrets like a white glove.
He was, in truth, a tiger with thin clothes. He had lived at Cruz's feet for a long time.
He wanted to hurt me for what I was and he wanted Cruz for what he had. He played the long game. He arranged small storms, masked calls, timed cars. He used the family's trust.
I found him because I am not a naive flame. I burned everything light enough to burn and felt the smoke lead me.
"Barrett," I said one night when he thought no one would hear. "Why did you do this? Why threaten Cruz?"
He flexed his fingers, and the grin slipped. "You confuse me," he said. "You confuse the world."
"Did you mean to hurt him?" I asked, quiet now.
"Maybe," he said. "But perhaps I wanted to see whether the man you chose for himself would choose you back."
"You mean to call him an experiment." I circled him like a caged cat.
"Better to know than to keep him as yours by coincidence." His voice was calm, the kind that pretends. "Besides, I am a keeper of advantages. He was always within reach."
I could have eaten him right then. My hunger was not only for power; it was for truth. But I am a planner. I swallowed the flare of my anger into a thin, cold smile.
"Public," I said.
He blinked. "What?"
"We will not settle this in a hotel rooftop anymore," I said. "You want to demonstrate power? We will do it where everyone sees."
He laughed. "You really think you can ruin me?"
"I will not ruin you. I will show you," I said.
On the day I chose to make him pay, the building that housed Cruz's company thrummed with people. It was a shareholder meeting, filled with staff, investors, press, a hundred reflective suits and cameras—perfect for a revelation. Cruz pretended to be calm. I pretended to be bored. Barrett stood by the refreshments, neutral and smug.
"I am here," I began at the podium Cruz allowed me, "to explain why certain trusts were abused."
"Is this a new format for the Q-Group?" an analyst joked.
"Stop talking," Cruz murmured in my ear, and I loved the way he protected me.
I had prepared, in the time I had—evidence, recorded calls, secret camera clips. Barrett had been clever, but he had underestimated the expense of protection and the price of arrogance.
"Barrett Hoffmann," I said, lifting my chin. My voice echoed across polished floors. "You were our driver. You were trusted."
Barrett's smile thinned.
"You were also an agent of theft," I continued. "Not of money only, but of trust, of safety, and of a person's life patterns. You timed kidnappings. You betrayed us all to ensure people you favored would gain positions. You threatened a human to manipulate a god."
He tried to look surprised. He wasn't.
"Here," I said, and a large screen lit up with footage. Barrett's face on loop, interviews where he smiled and-made small moves—text messages to unknown numbers, footage of him slipping into a private hallway at night, a file where he threatened to make Cruz vanish if the god did not comply. The press gasped. The room blurred into a roar.
"Is that Barrett?" the HR director whispered.
"He said he'd never betray us," a woman in the front said, hand covering her mouth.
Barrett went pale, then carnivore-calm. "This is false—" he began.
"False?" I echoed. "Let's listen to your voice, shall we?"
The recording played. He heard himself saying the words that had set us into motion. First he laughed, then tried to deny, then to charm. His voice had warmth; now it was heat without light.
"Barrett," Cruz said, standing. I could feel him through my skin. "Why?"
"Because I thought—" Barrett started.
He had a minute. He tried to pull sympathy, tried to blame corporate stress, tried to say he wanted to 'protect' Cruz by controlling things. He moved through the stages I had learned to watch in monsters: confident, surprised, denial, fury, pleading.
"People," I said to the assembly, "Barrett arranged for Cruz to be taken that night. He wanted to force me into a choice: disappear, or lose him. He blackmailed a man by pretending to be friend. He lied for years."
Now the room was not just listening, it was watching. Phones slid out. Fingers typed words. Social channels birthed lightning.
"This is—" Barrett spluttered. He was still trying to paint himself noble. He began to look smaller, thinner, the way someone looks when the light reveals all seams.
"Do any of you have questions?" Cruz asked.
Hands rose. The questions were sharp and immediate: "How long?" "To what end?" "Did you act alone?" "Who else knew?"
As Barrett tried to respond, the screens rolled footage of him with the other dragons—his meetings, his private smiles. He had thought himself a strategist, but he had been a small man under a marquee. Every camera that had ever watched a company elevator now watched him.
"And there is something else," I said. "Barrett attempted to weaponize our history. He told me once, 'You will lose him if you insist on being a god.' He believed he could trade control for love."
"You cannot sell love," Cruz said softly. "You cannot buy it."
Barrett's face tightened. Sweat glittered on his lip. He began to crumble in public, and it was a delicious, necessary collapse.
At first he denied. "I would never," he began.
Then, as the room closed in with the weight of the evidence, he grew frantic. "I was trying to protect the family!" he blurted. "I was trying to keep the company stable!"
"By lying?" one investor demanded. "By endangering a man?"
Barrett's breath hitched. The camera showed every beat. Reporters stood up, recording. The PR team took notes. Social feeds filled.
"Why?" Cruz asked, though his voice was not harsh. It was a stunned, betrayed thing.
Barrett's answer came out in pieces. "I was jealous," he said finally. "I thought—he has everything I don't. I thought if I created need, I would be indispensable."
"Indispensable isn't a right to endanger," I said. I heard a few gasps. People murmured agreement. Barrett's face was a study: from haughty to hollow, from denial to the pale shine of real fear.
Someone in the back—the security lead, an old friend of Cruz—stood. "You are fired," he said, and everyone laughed once, cruel and relieved.
Barrett collapsed into a chair, then to the floor. He begged. He huddled into himself. Cameras captured his face as he shifted through the stages: arrogance, then shock, then rationalization, then loss of composure, then begging. People around him stepped away. Some recorded. Some simply watched with mouths slightly open.
"This will go to law," the legal counsel said. "But today," Cruz said, and his voice held, "we press charges and we announce a full audit of security and personnel."
Barrett keened, clutching at the hem of the podium. "Please," he said. "Please don't—"
"Please?" a woman investor repeated, eyes cruel. "You put someone's life at risk. You built a pattern of deceit."
He was shunned. People turned their backs. Phones recorded as his colleagues whispered betrayal.
Barrett tried to crawl toward Cruz. Cruz looked at him for a long minute. You could see the calculation—Mercy fuelled by memory. Then Cruz stepped away. "You had my trust, Barrett," he said. "You violated it. That is the end between us."
The crowd's reaction ran the gamut: some cheered, glad the manipulation had been revealed; others hissed with rage at the betrayal; a few recorded and uploaded the whole thing; one old clerk clapped and then wept. Social threads spun: #Betrayal #CompanyTrust trended for hours.
Barrett was hauled away in handcuffs later that day. But the public punishment didn't stop at handcuffs. At Cruz's behest, the company posted the full dossier and the video evidence on their public portal. My friends in the city—merchants and the simple folk who had seen Barrett's small tyrannies—circled to add their stories. The man who had once mock-cherished Rua's lawn and the one who had been shy in the kitchen both told similar tales: a pattern of threadbare cruelty.
Barrett's face fell as one by one, things he'd thought private came to light. He had held himself up as a friend; in the end, people who had never liked him felt vindicated. He exploded in the final stage: disgrace, a sound like a brittle twig snapping.
Outside the building a small crowd had gathered, because the company had advised press presence. People took pictures. A few yelled. Someone spat. Barrett's dignity was stripped and hung on a rope for all to see. He cried in public, humiliation turned to a spectacle.
Later, in a separate, quieter hearing, the legal team arranged for restitution to those he'd endangered. The family settled civilly; criminal processes began. Barrett's old friends stopped calling. He lost face, money, and the network he had so carefully cultivated. He sat in the public's eye, reduced to tears, and the crowd—who had at first been curious—now made a theatre out of his fall.
Barrett's reactions were everything I had been promised: swagger, flinch, denial, pleading, shame. The crowd reacted as I wished: recording, shouting, some hissing, one brave person in the front telling the press "that's justice," a young intern slapping his phone down, unable to watch. People I had never met applauded Cruz's courage. A street vendor snapped a picture and used it as a warning to others. It was complete.
As for me, I stood on the side and let Cruz do his business. When it was over, he walked toward me with the strangest expression—relieved, tired, and oddly like a man who had asked for mercy and received better.
"You were very public," he said, eyes soft. "You didn't have to humiliate him."
"He needed to be seen," I answered. "He needed to feel what it is to be the one everyone watches, when before he watched us."
He kissed my forehead then, brief and exhaling. "Thank you," he said.
I felt the heat of it spread. My chest hummed. "You could have said thanks with a shopping spree," I teased.
"One step at a time," he said.
The years after were kind to us in small measures. I kept my habits within reason, with Cruz's gentle protests and his odd, protective routines. He learned my hunger and chose to stay. I learned to want simple things: a dinner without dragons, the new plate in the sink, the way his hand searched for mine when we walked through crowds.
We healed wings and wounds and we argued like siblings. I emptied his shopping cart and left him little notes that said, "Do not be boring." He'd massage the scar on my wing when the feathers grew back and call me reckless. Little scenes kept happening; little gestures kept threading us together.
There was a night when I refused to eat because he had been childish enough not to bring back the thing I wanted most.
"Then what do you want?" he asked, and the room held its breath like a secret.
"You," I said, absurd and small.
He smiled like he had been waiting. "I am here," he said.
That is the story the others tell, the one with the fight and the reveal and the shameful driver. But there is a quieter part, too: Barrett, muzzled by his own choices, received his public ruin; Asher and Giles learned to be careful; and Cruz and I learned how fragility and ferocity can live in the same hands.
There were countless other scenes: a rooftop fight, a shopping spree that emptied his cart, me learning how to fold into a couch so he could rest his head against my lap, him calling me "my sovereign" when drunk, me copying the press release to make sure they didn't edit my voice.
In time, Barrett's name was hissed like a curse. He was gone from the company. People who had been on the fence decided to choose. Social memory can be cruel, but it can also be sharp and healing. He learned the stages publicly. He had no friends left when the trial started, only a few lawyers and the echo of what he'd done.
After the trials, we had Sunday dinners where the three dragons—reduced, chastened—came by and were fed by my cooking because I had developed a taste for human food. They grumbled but ate. Barrett was not invited.
Cruz and I built tiny rituals. He would rub his thumb across the line where feather met skin and say, "Be careful."
"I will," I said, because I wanted to please him, and because his hands felt warm.
We found joy in small things. One evening, as I catalogued the strange little items I'd bought off his card, Cruz surprised me by cleaning my shopping cart of wishlists.
"You bought all of it?" I asked, incredulous.
"Not all," he said, grinning. "But close."
I leaned into him and thought: maybe this is the life to keep. Maybe this is what I have been rebuilding all along—one forgiveness, one fight, one cleared shopping cart at a time.
And when nights where dragons came still happened, we always met them together. He kept me honest; I kept him alive.
When the story settles, people remember the big things: the fight on the rooftop; Barrett's fall at the shareholder meeting; the clips—so many clips. But they also remember the small, late gift: the scar on my wing and the kiss Cruz pressed to my forehead in the corridor after the board cleared the press. They say it's the way he always looks at me now—like I am both problem and home.
"You are mine," he had once said during a quiet midnight when wings were mended and television had forgotten us. It is truer than he knows.
I tapped his phone one day and set forty-seven items into his cart just to keep my hand busy.
"No," he said when he saw it.
"Fill them," I ordered.
He did.
I am Mia Dell, phoenix god. He is Cruz Oliver, who washed feathers for me and stood up a room full of suits to say the truth. He kissed my forehead and never hid what he thought.
When the day comes and someone tries to pretend they are protectors but are really plots, I will find them. When someone is foolish enough to try and buy a heart with manipulations, I will show them to the light.
And when the week is hard and the world is loud, I will empty his shopping cart—again.
The End
— Thank you for reading —