Chapter Fourteen
Edge watched Angela sleep and tried to remember what his life had looked like before she was in it.
Morning light filtered through the blinds, painting stripes across her body where she lay tangled in his sheets. Her hair spread across his pillow. Her hand rested on the space where he'd been, like she'd reached for him even in sleep.
Two weeks. That's all it had been. Two weeks since he'd walked into a flower shop and found a woman fighting back against three men with nothing but pruning shears and fury.
Two weeks, and everything had changed.
Edge pulled on jeans and slipped out of the room, careful not to wake her.
The compound was quiet in that particular way it got after violence—brothers sleeping off adrenaline, prospects catching up on rest they'd missed during the crisis.
The bar was empty except for Ghost, who sat alone with a cup of coffee and a faraway look.
"Sal's stable," Ghost said without turning. "Surgery went well. He'll be laid up for weeks, but he's breathing."
"Good." Edge poured himself coffee from the pot behind the bar. "His staff?"
"Shaken. A few needed stitches. But they're alive because we got there in time." Ghost finally looked at him. "Because you got there in time."
Edge didn't want credit. He wanted Vitale dead and the shore towns safe and Angela back in her flower shop where she belonged.
He wanted a lot of things he'd never let himself want before.
"Carver's death is going to hit Vitale hard," Ghost continued. "That was his logistics brain. His whole operation ran on Carver's systems."
"He'll adapt."
"He'll try." Ghost's smile was cold. "But he's running out of capable people to throw at us. Tony's dead. Carver's dead. Whoever he's got left is going to be thinking hard about whether they want to join them."
Edge nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. On the woman sleeping in his bed. On the future he kept imagining when he should be focused on the present.
He'd never thought about keeping someone before. Not like this. His life was the club, the territory, the endless work of protecting places the rest of the world forgot. There wasn't room in that for a woman who made flower arrangements and worried about weddings.
Except Angela wasn't just any woman.
She'd stood beside him through a firefight. Put pressure on Sal's wound while bullets flew. Climbed onto his bike and held on through a chase that should have broken her. She was stronger than she looked, tougher than she knew, and every day she proved it in ways that made his chest tight.
I could keep her, he thought. Build something with her. Not just protect her—love her.
The word hit him like a fist to the chest.
Love.
He'd told himself this was protection. Attraction. The kind of connection that formed between people who survived danger together. But standing in the empty bar at seven in the morning, thinking about the way she said his name—his real name—in the dark, Edge knew he was lying to himself.
He loved her.
And that changed everything.
"You've got it bad, brother."
Edge turned. Ghost was watching him with something that might have been amusement.
"What?"
"The florist." Ghost raised his coffee cup in a mock salute. "You're standing there staring at nothing with that look on your face. The same look Jackpot gets when Rosa walks into a room. The same look every claimed brother gets when he realizes he's gone from protecting a woman to needing her."
"I don't—"
"Save it." Ghost stood, stretching. "I'm not judging. Just observing. And what I'm observing is a man who needs to figure out what happens after we end Vitale, because that woman isn't going anywhere."
He walked out before Edge could respond.
Edge stayed at the bar for another hour, nursing his coffee, watching the compound come to life around him. Brothers drifted in and out. Prospects started their morning duties. The smell of breakfast drifted from the kitchen where someone was making eggs.
Normal. Domestic. The kind of mundane routine that didn't exist when you were at war.
But they were still at war. Vitale was still out there, bleeding from the losses they'd dealt him but not finished. Men like that didn't stop. They escalated. They got desperate. And desperate men did desperate things.
Edge needed to end this before Vitale found a way to hit back harder.
He found Angela on the dock.
She'd woken at some point, dressed in his clothes—a t-shirt that hung to her thighs, jeans she'd rolled at the ankles—and wandered out to watch the bay. The morning sun caught the highlights in her hair, turned her skin golden, made her look like something from a dream.
Mine, Edge thought. She's mine, and I'm keeping her.
"Couldn't sleep?" He settled beside her on the weathered wood.
"Woke up and you were gone." She glanced at him sideways. "Thought maybe you'd regret what happened."
"On the roof?"
"All of it." Her voice was quieter now. "The roof. Your bed. Whatever this is turning into."
Edge reached for her hand. Laced his fingers through hers.
"I don't regret anything." He watched the sun on the water, the shore town lights fading in the distance. "I spent the last hour trying to remember what my life was like before you walked into it. Couldn't do it."
Angela was quiet for a moment. "Edge..."
"I know this isn't what you planned." He turned to face her, keeping her hand in his. "You wanted a quiet life. A flower shop. Saturday deliveries and Sunday mornings without blood on your hands. I can't give you that."
"I know."
"My life is this." He gestured at the compound behind them, at the marina, at the territory that stretched beyond the water. "Violence and danger and men who want to hurt the people I protect. It's not going to change. Not after Vitale. There's always going to be something."
Angela met his eyes. "Are you trying to talk me into leaving?"
"I'm trying to be honest about what staying means."
"Then let me be honest too." She shifted to face him fully, her hand tightening in his. "I spent four years building a life that looked safe on paper. Alone. Controlled. Everything exactly where I put it. And you know what? I was miserable."
Edge blinked.
"I told myself it was fine. Told myself independence was more important than connection.
But the truth is I was hiding. From people.
From feelings. From anything that could hurt me the way my parents hurt each other.
" Her jaw set. "Then you showed up and broke two men in my flower shop, and suddenly I was feeling more things in one night than I'd felt in four years. "
"Angela—"
"I'm not done." She silenced him with a look. "I'm not stupid. I know this life is dangerous. I know there's no guarantee we survive whatever comes next. But I'd rather have something real with you—even if it's messy and violent and scary—than go back to being safe and alone."
Edge didn't have words. Didn't need them.
He pulled her into his arms and held on like she might disappear if he let go.
"I'm not letting you go," he said against her hair. "You understand that? Whatever happens with Vitale, whatever comes after—I'm keeping you."
"Good." She pulled back enough to meet his eyes. "Because I'm keeping you too."
They sat on the dock as the morning warmed around them, watching boats drift past, listening to the compound wake up behind them. For a few minutes, it almost felt peaceful. Normal. Like they were any couple enjoying a quiet morning instead of two people in the middle of a war.
But they weren't any couple. And the war wasn't over.
"Vitale's going to come at us again," Edge said eventually. "Carver was his logistics. Without him, the distribution network starts falling apart. That's going to make him desperate."
"Desperate how?"
"Sloppy. Aggressive. He'll hit us harder because he can't afford to lose momentum. The longer we let him regroup, the more dangerous he becomes."
Angela's expression shifted. "So we don't let him regroup."
"That's what I'm thinking." Edge looked at her, seeing not the victim he'd rescued two weeks ago but the partner she'd become. "We take the fight to him. Hit him before he can recover. End this thing on our terms."
"Is that possible?"
"Pike's been tracking his operation since this started. We know where his people are, where his product moves, where he runs his business from." Edge's jaw tightened. "We've been playing defense because that's what made sense when we didn't know what we were dealing with. Now we know."
Angela was quiet for a moment. Processing.
"If you go after him—really go after him—people are going to die."
"Yeah." Edge didn't sugarcoat it. "They are."
"Good." Her voice was hard in a way that shouldn't have surprised him anymore but still did. "I want them to."
He looked at her—this woman who arranged flowers for weddings and funerals, who created beauty out of nothing, who had every reason to be gentle and soft—and saw the steel underneath.
"I love you."
The words came out before he could stop them. Raw and honest and more vulnerable than anything he'd ever said.
Angela's breath caught. Her eyes widened.
Then she smiled—not the polite smile she used for customers, but something real and fierce and just for him.
"I love you too." She kissed him, hard and brief. "Now go end this. So we can have whatever comes after."
Edge stood. Pulled her up with him. Kissed her one more time because he could, because she was his, because he might not get another chance before the violence started.
"Stay here," he said. "I need to talk to Jackpot."
"I'm not going anywhere."
He left her on the dock and walked toward the compound, his mind already moving to tactics, resources, the plan that had been forming since he'd watched Dean Carver choke on his own blood.
They'd been reactive for too long. Defending territory instead of claiming it. Letting Vitale set the pace while they scrambled to respond.
That ended now.
Edge was done waiting for the shore towns to burn. It was time to take the fire to Vitale's door and watch his entire operation turn to ash.