Page 155 of They Break Beauty

He lifted a shoulder, then beamed at her, answering non-committal, “I know a lot about our woman.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

The two of them exchanged a look, then Bree pressed her hand to my pec. “All in good time,” she told me, planting a soft kiss on my cheek.

“Let’s head back inside. Colt needs us,” Lev said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, re-centering myself after all the worry and the shock of what I’d walked in on. “Yeah, he does.”

We headed back in, my hand on the small of Bree’s back, and Levi holding her hand as he played with her hair.

We’d just sat down at the booth as Colt was finishing up another song.

And then he surprised the fuck out of us by snatching up a spare microphone at the edge of the stage and pointing it at Bree. Off her surprise, he chuckled and spoke out into the bar for everyone to hear, “That’s right, cutie, time to debut our duet. Everyone will melt at the sound of your sexy voice.”

She hesitated.

Lev stroked her shoulders, encouraging her, “Being free, remember? This is a great step toward that.”

“Sink into the song, block out the crowds. Just focus on Colt,” I added.

It took a moment as she looked between us, the students packing the place who’d come for Colt’s special show, and the microphone he was still holding out to her, but our words proved to be enough to bolster her when she rose to her feet.

Applause and wolf-whistles of encouragement from the audience sounded, egging her on, and then she was sauntering up to the stage.

Colt wrapped his arm around her and gave her a sweet kiss on the top of her head, then handed her the microphone, as he started off the song.

“I’ve been standing in the shadows/ Willing the blackness to pull me in/ A place where nobody else knows.”

As he sang, Lev snagged my glass of scotch across the booth between us to get my attention, halting it just shy of my lips. “I want to tell her.”

“About our tracking of Lynch?” I whispered back.

He gave me a withering look. “What else, Mason?”

“I don’t know, I was hoping for anything but that.”

“You saw her earlier. She can handle it. I don’t want to keep this secret from her any longer. My plan was always to tell her once she’d come around and accepted the real her and stopped hiding. And she clearly has.”

“These girls she has in place… it poses a danger, not just to what we’re doing, but to her if she gets them and herself involved. After earlier, I can absolutely see that happening, something she’d do in a bid to protect us.”

“Mason—”

“Just wait until we have something concrete, all right? Once you’re able to leverage your recent infiltration of Royce Humphrey’s security network toward finding Lynch.”

I could see his resistance, his need to share this with her.

But he surprised me when he took the cautious and careful route and gave a nod. “Okay, yeah. It will be best for her if there’s something concrete when I reveal that Lynch didn’t actually perish six years ago.”

“After what he did to her, I have no doubt. Knowing he’s out there with no current way or strategy to take him down… it will torment her.”

“Yeah,” he murmured, a dark look flitting across his face, as he obviously started to recall that time.

Fortunately, the sound of Bree starting her verse of the duet managed to pull us both from our current conversational path, and jar him before he slipped into an episode.

We turned to watch as charisma came off her in waves and she sank into the moment with Colt and the song.

“It was easier not to open my eyes/ It was easier not to feel a thing/ Until you.”

---