Page 12 of Edge of Control

“Something about him blackmailing people. I don’t know the full details. I was contacted by someone—I don’t know their name or info; they called from a blocked number—but they wanted me to possibly testify against him. I told them I didn’t want to get involved. They never reached out again.” A baby gave a shrill cry in the background. “Listen, I have to go. I hope you get to the bottom of what happened. Ricky may have gone down a bad path, but he wasn’t always like that. I hope he can rest now, at least.”

“Thank you for your time.”

I hung up the call and leaned against my desk. Sirens wailed outside my apartment building. The call might have given me more questions than answers, but that was fine. Questions would lead me in the right direction. It just meant the puzzle pieces were falling into my lap; all I had to do was arrange them into the correct pattern. It’s what I love most about my job—the piecing together of seemingly random information. There’s a cathartic release that comes once the entire picture is assembled.

I remembered speaking to my dad about it as a child.He hated the investigative aspect of policing. He liked the instant results of pulling up to a crime scene, finding a man holding a bloody knife as he stood over his dead wife, wrestling him to the ground, and snapping handcuffs on him so he could drag him to jail where the criminal would rot. Then on to the next.

I preferred more of a chase. I enjoyed the hunt.

Chapter 5

Theo Glass

I had made a grave mistake.

I realized that the second I allowed Jace to push his cock into me.

Something I never allowed. Never truly craved. But tonight, things had changed. I saw him and knew. Somewhere deep down in the chemistry of my brain, somewhere in an unlocked part of my body, I knew I had to have him inside me.

And I did.

And I fucked up.

And now, I stood across the street from him, rain pattering on my cap. Pedestrians rushed by me to avoid getting wet. Trying to catch their train rides home, trying to go to their midnight shifts. Sinners and saints and all those in between. A river of people who should be asleep, washing over me, past me. Completely unaware of the turmoil that coursed through my veins.

I had told him my name.

I had fucked up.

And I wanted to do it again. Again and again.

What happened in that bathhouse? Why had this man completely rewired the way my thoughts worked? Why had I allowed myself to give up control in a way that could end me? Not even sexually. I’d allowed the detective hunting me down to know my name.

To know my body.

It couldn’t happen again.

Yet, that was all I wanted.

I stood in the shadow of a skinny tree, the lamppost nearest me having gone out sometime earlier in the night. I stood in the darkness. He had no idea I watched him push his key card against the entrance pad of his building. Didn’t know that I watched him walk past the hallway window, backlit by a surgical white fluorescent light. He looked handsome, even when outlined by nothing but ugly, bright lights. His strong shoulders and broad chest drew me in. I felt like a moth that was ready to furiously bat my wings and slam myself against glass, over and over again, leaving nothing but a bloody mess in my desperation to get to him.

He lived on the seventh floor. The light in his living room turned on as he walked in. His curtains were drawn, but I could tell that was his shape. The shape I had hunted down in the bathhouse.

Why? What made me forget about my code? About my protections? I knew what it took to find people. The trails they left, unknowingly and yet so obvious. Especially nowadays. A single post online had enough information todiscern what that person had for breakfast, where they sat for lunch, who they fucked for dinner. It was all there. Whether in the background, the foreground, the tags, the metadata, the caption, the hashtags. There were breadcrumbs all throughout, and I knew how to follow them right to the front of someone’s doorstep.

So: why. the.fuck.

Was I leaving those exact same breadcrumbs?

I wiped the rain from my eyes with the back of my hand. I had to go. This had gone too far.

This sea of pedestrians appeared to part for me as I walked through. I was the only one without an umbrella. I kept my head down, my cap lowered. My body still thrummed with leftover energy from the bathhouse. Fuck. My hole was sore. Tender. It throbbed. I looked over my shoulder. He had fit so perfectly inside me, his thrusts so well-timed. His balls felt like heaven slapping against me. I had never come as much as I had from him filling me with his load. It was still inside me.

I reached the stairs to the subway station. No one was around. I reached behind and slid my hand into my pants. My fingers rubbed over my leaking hole. His cum was warm, dripping out of me.

Fuck.

I’d made such a huge mistake.

---