Chapter Six
Angela woke to sunlight cutting through blinds she didn't recognize and the smell of coffee she didn't make.
For three heartbeats, she didn't know where she was. Strange ceiling. Strange bed. Strange everything. Then the memories crashed back—the men in her shop, the blood on her cooler doors, the motorcycle ride through dark streets with her arms wrapped around a stranger who didn't feel like a stranger.
Edge.
She sat up too fast, head spinning, and found him standing in the doorway with a mug in each hand.
"You sleep like the dead."
"I—" Angela pushed hair out of her face, suddenly aware that she was still wearing yesterday's clothes, still had mascara probably smeared under her eyes, still looked like exactly what she was: a woman who'd survived the worst night of her life. "What time is it?"
"Almost noon." He crossed the room and handed her a mug. Black coffee, no sugar. She didn't ask how he knew. "You needed it."
The safehouse was small. One bedroom, one bathroom, a living area with a kitchenette tucked into the corner. Beach rental furniture—wicker and pastels and prints of seashells on the walls. The kind of place tourists rented for a week in July and forgot about by August.
Angela wrapped her hands around the warm mug and tried to organize her thoughts into something useful.
"My shop."
"Still standing. Had a brother drive by this morning." Edge leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, taking up space like he owned it. "They didn't burn it. Yet."
"Yet." The word tasted like ash. "That's comforting."
"It's honest."
She took a sip of coffee. Bitter and strong and exactly what she needed. "The Castellano wedding is Saturday. Four hundred roses, twelve centerpieces, a ceremony arch that I've been planning for three months. If I don't—"
"You're not going back to that shop."
"Excuse me?"
Edge's expression didn't change. "Vitale's men are watching it. Probably watching your apartment too. The second you show your face, they'll grab you and finish what they started last night."
"So I'm supposed to just—what? Hide here forever?
Let them win?" Angela set the coffee down harder than she meant to.
"That shop is my life. Four years of eighty-hour weeks and maxed-out credit cards and learning to run a business by failing at it over and over until I stopped failing.
I'm not giving it up because some drug dealer thinks I'm an easy target. "
Something shifted in Edge's face. Not quite softness—she wasn't sure he did soft—but something that looked almost like respect.
"Nobody said anything about giving up."
"Then what are you saying?"
"I'm saying right now, today, you stay here. You stay alive. And we figure out how to make these assholes disappear."
Angela wanted to argue. Wanted to grab her purse and walk out that door and handle this herself like she'd handled everything else in her life.
But she remembered Tony's hand on her throat.
Remembered the way his men had pinned her arms. Remembered how close she'd come to becoming another problem that nobody cared about solving.
"Fine." The word came out grudging. "Today. But I'm not missing that wedding."
Edge almost smiled. Almost. "We'll see."
The hours stretched out like taffy.
Edge moved through the safehouse with a restlessness that seemed at odds with his stillness, checking windows, monitoring his phone, stepping outside every hour to scan the street. Angela watched him from the small kitchen table, cataloging details she shouldn't have noticed.
The way his shoulders filled out his jacket. The scar across his knuckles, faded but still visible. The way he held himself like a man who expected violence and wasn't afraid of it.
Dangerous. That was the word for him. Dangerous and controlled and watching her with an intensity that made her skin prickle.
"Stop staring." He said it without looking up from his phone.
"I wasn't—"
"You were." Now he looked up, and the heat in his gaze made her breath catch. "Not complaining. Just noticed."
Angela felt her face warm. Redirected. "Tell me about them. The men who want my shop."
Edge set his phone down and pulled out the chair across from her. The table was small enough that his knees brushed hers when he sat. He didn't move away.
"Marco Vitale. Used to sell pills the legal way—pharmaceutical rep, worked with doctors, knew the system.
Figured out the illegal side paid better.
" Edge's voice was flat, factual. "He's been building a distribution network through the shore towns.
Using legitimate businesses as cover to move product into wealthy neighborhoods. "
"And he wanted Shore Blooms because—"
"Because you deliver to every upscale home in Margate and Longport. Because nobody looks twice at a florist van. Because you're a woman alone, and men like Vitale think that means easy."
Angela's jaw tightened. "He thought wrong."
"Yeah." That almost-smile again. "He did."
They sat in silence for a moment. The afternoon light shifted through the blinds, casting stripes across the table. Angela could hear the ocean somewhere nearby, the steady rhythm of waves that should have been soothing but only reminded her how far she was from everything she'd built.
"Why do you do this?" The question escaped before she could stop it. "The club. The... whatever this is. Rescuing florists from drug dealers."
Edge was quiet for long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer.
"You know why I was at that flower shop last night?"
"You said something about your grandmother."
"Eleanor Kelly." His voice changed when he said the name. Gentler. More human. "She raised me after my parents died. Lived in the same house in Ventnor for fifty years. Three blocks from the water, close enough to smell the salt every morning."
Angela watched his face, saw the grief he kept locked behind those dark eyes.
"Developers bought her building five years ago. Raised the rent until she couldn't afford to stay. She died six months later in an apartment she never unpacked because she kept thinking she'd find a way back home." Edge's hands curled into fists on the table. "She didn't."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Be angry." He met her eyes, and the intensity there made her stomach flip.
"That's why I do this. Because the shore towns deserve protection from the people who think money means they can take whatever they want.
Because someone has to draw lines, and the Outlaws are the only ones willing to hold them. "
Angela thought about her own grandmother. About the woman who'd taken in a girl nobody wanted and taught her that beautiful things required ugly work. About the only person who'd ever chosen her.
"My grandmother raised me too," she said quietly.
"My parents—they split when I was eight, and neither of them wanted the custody battle to include actually having custody.
So I went to Grandma Rose. She had a garden in her backyard, nothing special, just tomatoes and herbs and whatever flowers were on sale at the hardware store.
But she taught me that growing things was a kind of magic.
That you could take something ugly—dirt and seeds and broken things—and make it beautiful. "
Edge listened. Really listened, in a way that made Angela realize how rarely anyone did.
"Shore Blooms was supposed to be my proof," she continued. "Proof that I wasn't my parents. That I could build something instead of destroy it. That I could be the kind of person who makes beautiful things happen instead of the kind who burns everything down."
"And now Vitale wants to take that from you."
"Now Vitale wants to take everything from me." Angela's voice hardened. "My shop. My reputation. My freedom. He wants to turn four years of sacrifice into a cover for his drug operation, and he thinks I'll just smile and go along with it because I'm a woman alone with no muscle to back me up."
"You've got muscle now."
The words landed heavy between them. Angela looked at Edge—at his scarred hands and his dangerous eyes and his body that filled the small kitchen like a promise of violence—and felt something shift in her chest.
"Why?" She had to ask. "Why help me? You don't know me. I'm just some florist who brought flowers to your grandmother's grave."
Edge reached across the table. His hand covered hers, warm and rough and impossibly gentle for someone who'd broken two men like they were nothing less than twelve hours ago.
"You didn't have to do that," he said. "The flowers. The funeral arrangement you didn't charge me for. You didn't know me either, but you showed up anyway. You gave a dead woman dignity because it was the right thing to do."
Angela's throat tightened. "It's just flowers."
"It's never just flowers." His thumb traced across her knuckles. "You make beautiful things for people on the worst days of their lives. That matters."
She didn't have words. Didn't have breath. Just the weight of his hand on hers and the look in his eyes that said he saw her—really saw her—in a way nobody had in years.
The moment stretched. Pulled. The air between them went thick with something that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with the heat building in Angela's blood.
Edge's phone buzzed.
He pulled back, jaw tight, and checked the screen. His expression went hard in a way that made Angela's stomach drop.
"What?"
"Tony." Edge stood, already moving toward the window. "His crew found the safehouse. They're ten minutes out."
Angela's heart slammed into her ribs. "How—"
"Doesn't matter." He turned back to her, and the man who'd been gentle a moment ago was gone. In his place was something lethal. Something ready. "Get your shoes on. We're leaving."