Page 9 of Edge (Redline Kings MC #4)

“Tell me what’s actually spinning in that pretty head,” I pressed, softer at the edges now.

Not because I was changing my mind but because I didn’t need to scare her to get what I wanted.

“You worried I’ll get bored? That the club’s going to decide you’re a distraction and pack you off to the other side of town?

Scared I’m going to wake up and remember I don’t do relationships? ”

Her gaze cut, because I’d plucked a few strings that hummed. She chewed her lower lip, that pink bow I’d ruined last night, then released it. “I…don’t know your rules yet.”

Fair. I’d never been good at sharing the manual.

“Rule one.” I smoothed my palm down the length of her shin, over the curve of her ankle, settling at the warm dip behind her knee. “Don’t guess for me. If I want you gone, I’ll carry you to your door myself and lock it from the outside.”

“That’s”—she swallowed—“graphic.”

“True.” My thumb traced circles that made the muscles in her thigh go soft. “Rule two—if something hits my mood, it’s club or business. It’s not you. If it ever is you, you’ll know because I’ll tell you. And you won’t hear it from anyone else first.”

Her shoulders eased a millimeter, the hitch in her breath smoothing out. I watched it like I watched a tach needle—precise increments, the curve into the redline.

“And rule three,” I went on, my voice lowering, heat threading back in because it never really left. “You don’t talk about overstaying when the only thing I want is more of you in my space.”

“You…do?”

I cut her a look that said I’d just caught her asking if water was wet. “Callie.”

She tucked her chin. “I don’t want to assume. I’ve never—” She stopped herself, but the rest of the sentence left fingerprints. I’ve never been kept.

I slid two fingers under her chin and angled her face back up. Blue eyes, wide open. Brave. My undoing.

“I don’t sell pieces of myself,” I explained, the same way I’d told the voice on the phone I didn’t sell tools.

“I don’t rent them out. I don’t test-drive.

If I build it, I keep it. If I take it, I protect it.

If I say it’s mine, the whole world can burn around it, and it’ll still be standing when the fire’s out. ”

Her throat moved. “You mean that.”

I didn’t bother to answer. I just held her there with my hand and let her see all the parts I usually kept for the mirrors.

The nights my head wouldn’t shut up, obsession, control, a mean streak I used like a scalpel instead of a bat, and a softness I only deployed for my sister-in-law, Savannah, the club’s old ladies, and Kane—on the right day.

Although Callie had created a softness in me that was all her own.

The movie threw a white flash across her skin. She blinked into it, then into me. “What did the caller want?”

“To buy something I don’t sell.” I eased back, gave her legs the space to shift across my lap again, this time guiding one under my arm, the other hooked over my thigh so I could get my hand on her hip.

“Every few months, some outfit thinks money equals access. They try to get in the door sideways. They wave numbers like they’re magic. I shut them down.”

“Because you don’t…sell weapons.”

I hadn’t held any shit back from Callie as we’d gotten to know each other. Unless it was club business.

For the first time in my life, I’d worried about the reaction of someone other than my brother to my life choices. But Callie had taken it all in stride. Especially when I’d explained my policy regarding my specialty.

“Because I build tools,” I confirmed, brushing her hair back, and loving the way it slid through my fingers. “And I only build them for blood. The club’s blood. My brother’s blood. And yours.”

Her eyes softened. The weight of that landed exactly where I wanted it to. “Is it dangerous to refuse?”

“Everything’s dangerous if you do it wrong.” I shrugged. “This one felt like a boy in his dad’s suit. If he puts on boots and learns to walk, I’ll let my brother know. Until then, it’s just noise.”

“Kane.” She tested the name the way you test a knife’s balance. She’d heard enough about him from me, and from the town, to understand the gravity without needing the details.

“Yeah.”

“Does he worry about you?”

“He worries about everything he can’t nail down, then grins like he’s not worried at all. I handle the things that require fewer witnesses.” I let my mouth tilt. “Division of labor.”

She smiled back, like she couldn’t help it. “You’re close.”

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 they were 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.”