Page 227 of At the Edge of Surrender

“He killed him, Emery. He killed that bastard to protect this woman who couldn’t protect herself.”

Even though I’d almost anticipated it, a gasp raked up my throat. I’d known there was something about them, hadn’t I? A dusky, quiet menace that echoed around their spirits?

Grief curled Kane’s brow, and his hand tremored where he settled it on my neck. “Are you still with me?”

It was a plea, his question begging me to understand.

I nodded as a tear slipped free.

Kane gathered the moisture with his thumb, and he tipped his head to the side, his expression turning to awe. “He brought her to us. Wanted us to help him give her a new life.”

A shiver ran through me when he shifted to expose the tattoo on the back of his hand. The two stacked Ss with the blade running from top to bottom with an eye in the middle.

The same one they all had.

He squeezed that hand into a fist. “Sovereign Sanctum. That was the day it was born.”

“Sovereign Sanctum?” It cracked with uncertainty.

Kane gave a tight nod. “It’s what we really do, Emery. It’s who we really are. We left the type of sin and corruption we’d been involved in and turned our brutality to this.”

His voice was a tolling of low thunder. “We get women and children out of whatever dire situations they’re in. Setting them up with new identities and lives…by any means necessary.”

Dark emphasis rode on the last.

I blinked, trying to process what he was saying. “You mean…you’re like…some special undercover cops?”

The second I asked it, I knew it was all wrong.

“No, Emery. There isn’t much of anything we do that’s legal.” He shook his head with the admission.

I tried to swallow around the stone that sat heavily at the base of my throat, my mind spinning through the things that he said.

What he admitted.

Raven’s statement from earlier traipsed through my mind.“But I will tell you that anything he does, he does it because he’s a good man.”

“You…kill people to get them away from their abusers?” God, it felt ridiculous coming off my tongue. Impossible. And yet it so profoundly rang with the truth.

“Only if we have to. Only if there’s not another way.”

“And that’s what happened today? You got shot trying to help someone?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed violently when he swallowed. “Yeah. A woman and her little boy. We tried to get them out without him knowing, but he was watching and followed us. Ended in a gun fight.”

“Are they…” I rasped around the horror.

Relief filled Kane’s nod. “That’s what River was saying. They’re safe. With Theo and on their way here to Moonlit Ridge where they’ll stay at The Sanctuary. It’s what it’s really used for…hiding victims away until we get them on to their new lives.”

“This is…”

“More than you should have to bear, and I’m the bastard who is asking you to do it, anyway. The bastard who can’t fucking stomach the idea of you walking away. But if that’s what you need to do…to protect your beautiful heart…then I will respect that. But I can’t take it back or stop it. Not when these people need us. If my mother would have had someone like us...”

The last broke off, the man unable to speak.

Overcome with old grief.

My heart felt like it was being squeezed. Bled out and filled.

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