Page 32 of Edge
I couldn’t stop the smile that tugged at my split lip. It hurt, but I welcomed the sting.
“Told you,” I whispered hoarsely. “He’s coming.”
His eyes cut back to me, fury flickering in them.
“Shut up.” He kicked the chair leg again, the wood biting into my calves. “He’s walking into his own grave.”
Chaos erupted in the building like a storm had blown through the walls. Wood shattering and voices shouting. A gunshot cracked, sharp and final. Another followed.
His hand went to the pistol at his waistband. He yanked it free, metal gleaming under the bulb’s yellow glow, and aimed it square at me.
“Guess I’ll give him a corpse instead of a bargaining chip,” he spat.
Terror clawed through me, but I didn’t look away. My heart thundered, every beat echoing in my ears, but I forced my chin high, meeting his gaze with all the defiance I had left. Even with a gun trained on me, I still had faith in Tatum’s ability to rescue me.
The door burst inward, the frame cracking under the impact. Then Tatum was there—filling the doorway like a demon torn straight out of this guy’s nightmares…and my dreams. His eyes glowed with a lethal gleam, green fire locked on the man with his gun aimed at me, his body coiled and dangerous. Blood streaked his arms, his cut spattered like proof he’d fought his way to me.
Edge.
Staring up at him, I understood in a whole new way why they called him that. He looked like a man balanced on the knife’s edge between sanity and madness, one twitch away from cutting the world apart.
He was all mine, and I wouldn’t have him any other way.
13
EDGE
The warehouse’s metal siding sweated dew beneath a jittering floodlamp that did nothing but make the shadows look thicker. We rolled up dark and quiet, engines killed a block out, the pack spreading on instinct. Kane’s arm cut through the air, and six men dissolved into angles and cover like we’d rehearsed this exact building in a past life.
Nitro ghosted to my left, hands unhurried and precise, a coil of line tucked in his back pocket and a flat case under his arm that held toys nobody but him should touch. Axle took rear guard, carbine low, eyes sweeping, his road captain brain calculating routes and exits like a living map. Drift flexed his hands once, the air around him going still—he liked fights up close and personal, but there was nothing sloppy about him. Wrench and Fury fanned wide, long guns ready.
My pulse didn’t spike. It flattened. The same way it always did right before I hit a wall at two hundred and prayed my math had been right. That thin, electric quiet slid over me, and the grin I wore was the wrong kind. The one Kane hated because it meant I wasn’t planning to stop until something broke.
Jax’s voice murmured in my ear, low and clipped. “South and east cams are looping. Thermal inside shows six movers at ground level, two in an office upstairs, two heat signatures toward the back. One’s smaller—could be her.”
“Copy,” Kane rumbled. “We take the outside quiet, breach on Edge’s count.”
I pulled the knife from the reverse sheath on my vest strap and moved.
The first guard leaned against a dented roll-up door, smoke crowning his head, his stance softened from boredom. I stepped into a blind spot, hooked my hand in his collar, and opened his throat so neatly he didn’t realize it until warm slick washed my knuckles. His cigarette tumbled to the ground, the ember kissing concrete, then he followed with a soft thump.
One.
I cut left along the corrugation, boots whispering, breath steady. Even after the first kill, my pulse wasn’t racing. It had slowed to a sniper’s cadence—every beat measured, steady and lethal.
A second guard rounded the corner and actually froze like a cartoon, eyes wide and mouth open. I hit him center mass with a suppressed three-round hiss that folded him back into the wall. Lights out.
Two.
I could hear the muffled rhythm of the other guys handling theirs—bones breaking, breaths ceasing, bodies and meeting steel in ways that meant they wouldn’t stand up again. Nitro drifted past a side door, palm landing at the hinge line, leaving a wafer of shaped surprise no bigger than a cookie. He didn’t look back. He never needed to. He moved on like a surgeon switching instruments.
There was a man at the loading dock with a tire iron—wrong tool, wrong fight. He swung high, too wide. I slipped inside hisarc, took his wrist, and turned until the joint talked to me in wet crunch language, then drove his own elbow into his face hard enough to knock out a row of teeth. He went down gargling. I didn’t have time to wait for him to drown on it, so I ended the confrontation with a blade and a boot.
Seems no one ever told the asshole not to bring a tire iron to a knife fight.
Three.
Through the personnel door, the air changed, becoming damp, stale, and layered with that metallic tang that always followed fear. The internal lights flickered. A radio droned in an office to the right, it buzzed while a song tried to find the station and failed. To the left was a hall, the concrete floor scuffed with the scrawl of shoe rubber from someone being dragged in the wrong direction. My hunch was that someone had carried her in here, so I was willing to bet they used this place for regular meetings.
