Page 147 of At the Edge of Surrender

Not when I could sense that he and his friends were hedged in secrets. Could see the demons that played in their eyes and danced across their skin.

Could feel the severity of it blister across my own.

And I couldn’t make any of that seem to matter.

Satisfaction tugged at the edge of his mouth, though it was dark and seductive. “Told you that you’d love them. That Maci would love them.”

“You’re all so close.” I didn’t know why I was whispering it. I was pretty sure Maci could have slept through a fire alarm right then.

But this felt like my and Kane’s own little secret.

A dirty secret.

The way those magic eyes fluttered over me as he stared down at me with his face cut in harsh lines of severity that still flickered with this undying softness.

The man straight contradiction.

A conflict that waged in the deepest, darkest place inside me.

Because my stomach tremored, my insides twisting with this foolish need I knew was going to devastate me.

“They are the ones who made me believe in humanity again when I’d come to believe there were only monsters that walked the earth.”

His confession penetrated, cutting through bone to the marrow.

It was as if his thoughts directly matched my own.

As if he saw what haunted me and grasped it in some intrinsic way.

There was also a grimness there. Like he also believed himself one of those monsters.

“Raven told me about when she was young. How she lived with all of you in an abandoned warehouse.” The words were thick and sticky. “How you welcomed them in and took care of her.”

“Yeah.”

I blinked through the disorder that raged around us. “You were homeless…living on the streets when you were a teenager?”

“Much better than living with the assholes assigned to be my foster parents.”

Another punch to my gut, my spirit grappling with the onslaught of pain that rolled out of him.

“What happened to your parents?”

He’d mentioned that he’d lost his mother, but he hadn’t given me any details.

I tried to convince myself I was only asking these things because of Maci. Because I needed to know about her father so I’d understand the person she would be raised by.

It was true in some sense, but that was only part of it. There was another part that needed to know him. The part that wanted to climb inside him the way I wanted him to climb inside of me.

Kane flinched. Old wounds cutting deep into the rugged lines of his face. “Never knew the prick who fathered me. And my mom…”

His jaw clenched, and I could feel the rush of rage that billowed out of him. “My mom was killed when I was sixteen. Her boyfriend murdered her, Emery. Right in front of me.”

A gasp of horror ripped free as an arrow of sorrow struck me.

So fierce and harrowing I was nearly bowled over by it.

“Oh my God. I’m so sorry, Kane.”

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