Page 18 of Edge
I nodded. “Always have been. Had each other’s backs since I was born.”
“Did he teach you about weapons?”
I shook my head, then let it tip against the back of the couch and watched the ceiling fan turn, slow and steady. “We were born on a stretch of land in Tennessee that felt like its own country. Middle-class, decent neighbors, a dad who pretended to be pissed about everything and a mom who could talk him out of murder like it was a hobby. Kane climbed before he walked and tried to organize the stray dogs into an army. I figured out early that if I pushed the throttle past where it was supposed to go, the world got quiet.”
She curled closer. I could feel every word vibrate in my chest before I gave them to her. My past was not a story I handed out in bars. It was a map for the people I chose.
“We jacked our old man’s Camaro when Kane was fifteen because we wanted to feel the road move under us at night,” I went on. “He caught us, waited for the speech to land, then bought a vintage frame off a buddy with a barn full of junk and told us we could rebuild it. Only rule? Don’t race off-property until we turned sixteen. He set the line. We pushed it up to the edge and learned how to respect it.”
“You both really listened?”
“Mostly.” A grin ghosted across my face. “We learned how to tear an engine down and put it back together with our eyes closed. Kane perfected the look that made men twice our age step aside. And as soon as I had a license, I started finding shadows to race in. Backroads that ate stock suspensions for breakfast. Alleys that didn’t care if you bled. I liked the ones nobody talked about.”
“That terrifies me,” she whispered but tried to smile because she wanted me to know she accepted every part of me.
“It terrified Kane,” I admitted. “He decided if he couldn’t stop me, he’d move the target. Pulled me into the underground that eventually feeds the pros and made sure the tracks I tore up at least had paramedics on them. He took the spotlight, and I kept to the dark, where I liked it.” My gaze drifted past her, to the heavy safe hidden in the wall behind a painting no one ever asked about. “When we built the club, the dark came with me.”
“Your…tools,” she murmured, following the glance without knowing it.
“Obsession,” I corrected. “I didn’t enlist. Didn’t go to school. I learned the way I did everything—manuals, busted hardware, reverse-engineering things that shouldn’t be in civilian hands, and making the ones we are allowed to hold better than theywere when I met them. Every bullet in our cache has been checked twice. Every barrel has been bore-scoped. Every spring has a twin cut and is cataloged in case the first decides to be interesting at the wrong moment.”
“You do it to protect them.”
“Yes. But I do it mostly because control is how I sleep. And because when violence has to be delivered, I prefer it clean, surgical, and final.” I watched the words sink in. Callie didn’t flinch. She understood that I wasn’t glorifying blood. I was telling her the rules of a world she’d stepped into when she walked into my arms. “Which brings us back to your little idea of leaving tonight.”
Her eyes widened again, caught. “I was only trying to?—”
I slid my hand up her thigh and gripped—firm, claiming, enough to make heat flash across her face. “I know exactly what you were trying to do. And I’m telling you to quit it.”
She swallowed. “Bossy.”
“Accurate.” My smile had a sharp edge. “You moved into my space. You put your toothbrush next to mine. You cooked in my kitchen. You fell asleep with your body plastered to mine and your hand on my dog-eared copy of a manual no one would believe I read in bed. You think any of that ends because a phone call knocked my mood sideways for five minutes?”
“I didn’t—” Her voice tightened, vulnerable and honest. “I didn’t know if you still wanted me here.”
I leaned forward, put my mouth an inch from hers, and let the part of me that lived on the edge step all the way out where she could see it. “What didn’t you understand about the words ‘you’re mine’? Thought I was pretty fucking clear that I’m keeping you.”
7
CALLIE
Istared at him, my heart tripping over itself at the fierce promise in his voice.You’re mine.
He said the words like they were carved in stone, not just a heat-of-the-moment claim. My pulse hammered while my brain scrambled to keep up, desperate for reassurance.
“I just thought…” My voice wobbled, and I tried again, softer. “I figured it was the kind of thing that gets said in bed. You know, during sex when you might not really mean them.”
The second the words left my mouth, I wished I could snatch them back. His eyes sharpened, green gone dangerous.
“You think I’m a man who says shit he doesn’t mean?”
Heat flushed through me, a cocktail of nerves and arousal. “No, I just?—”
“Don’t.” His jaw flexed, and he dragged his hand down his beard like he was holding back something darker. “Don’t ever doubt that I mean what I say. Especially when it comes to you.”
I swallowed hard, my chest rising and falling too fast. “Tatum?—”
He cut me off, leaning close until I could feel his breath on my lips. “Say that shit again, baby, and I’ll spank your sexy assuntil you can’t sit tomorrow. Then I’ll spend the rest of the night fucking that idea out of your pretty little head.”
