Walk the Edge
Page 88

The need to protect her bulldozes through my veins. I can’t lose her. Losing Breanna is not an option. My hand flicks out to seize the paper. “I change my mind—”
She’s faster than me and is on her feet and across the room. Breanna grabs a pencil and stabs holes into the code—taking out the letters and numbers that are supposed to contain the answers. It’s like her mind has fractured.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
She ignores me, tearing at the letters and numbers in such methodical movements that I’m not sure she’s aware of anything beyond her thoughts.
“Breanna!” I shout, but she rips out the last number and then slides the paper she mutilated over the bylaws. My world stills, but Breanna tears another piece of paper from the folder and begins to write.
A slow pulse forms in my brain. Letters poke out through the bylaws and the first word is a name. All the years of twisting comes to a head—it’s my mother’s name. It’s Layla.
The first code, the one that caused me to forbid Breanna to continue, said to consider this our warning shot.
“Razor,” Breanna says as if she’s attempting to talk me off a ledge. “Look at me.”
I can’t. I can focus only on my mother’s name. In the detective’s file, that code was the first and the one containing my mother’s name was the second. The first code a warning—the second one...
“Razor,” she says again. “You don’t know for sure what it means.”
Yeah, I really fucking do know. Anger reverberates between my muscles and bones. The Riot killed my mother and everyone in this club fucking knew. Everyone but me.
I round for the door, feeling like a freight train. My fists ball at my sides. The answers are coming, even if it means beating the hell out of someone.
Breanna’s voice calls behind me, but it’s like she’s on the opposite end of a long tunnel. She sure as shit is shouting, but there’s a vibration in my brain driving me now. The storm within me has been building for years and I’m seconds away from destructive landfall.
Oz bolts from the kitchen, clutching my biceps, shouting, but I don’t hear any words. Just a loud buzz, just my brain cracking in half. He’s pulling on my arm, but I’m a bull going for the target. My hand slams into the screen door and I’m on the front porch.
Chevy had been laughing, but his face falls. He plants his feet and tosses out his arms in an attempt to slow me down. Another yank back and it’s Oz still pulling on my arm. The buzzing in my brain gets louder, Oz and Chevy are in my space, but they can’t halt my momentum.
The guys from the board are at a smaller bonfire near the tree line. They’re laughing. Talking shit. Enjoying the fact that they’ve tried to play with my life. Yelling. Loud shouts. It’s near me, but the chaos controlling me makes it incoherent.
Each man glances up and, like Chevy, they stare at me like I’ve lost my mind. I have. I’ve gone fucking crazy. Pigpen’s on the move. His hands are a stop sign and Eli’s hustling fast to the left, his mouth spewing something, but I’m tracking my father.
He tosses down his beer and has the nerve to act like he’s concerned.
“You can’t hit a brother! You can’t hit a brother!” It’s Oz and Chevy. They’re tackling me. Reminding me of a club rule. Fuck the club because the club has fucked me over.
I’m fighting them like I’m the Colts’ offense, but when I gain no ground, I look my father straight in the eye. “The Riot killed her. The Riot fucking murdered my mother!”
It’s silence. A stillness that causes a cold chill to slither down my spine. The buzzing is gone and my two best friends are no longer battling me, but curling their fingers into my arms as if to hold all three of us up.
“All those years.” A wave of hurt crashes into me. “I blamed myself. I carried her death like a cross, and this club, this family, let me slowly die because I wasn’t worthy of the truth.”
“Who told you?” Anger replaces my father’s shock. “Did you visit the detective?”
Oz and Chevy release me as they also regard me like I’m capable of that type of betrayal. “That’s what you think of me, isn’t it? Disloyal?”
“How else?” Dad shouts.
“Enough!” Cyrus expects compliance. “This isn’t the time or the place.”
“There’s never a time or a place!” I yell. “We’re doing this now!”
Cyrus steps in front of me and he’s not the man I’ve claimed as a surrogate grandfather but the badass biker I’ve seen take men down in a brawl. “Either you take your girl home or I have someone do it for you. Seventeen and here this time of night is nonnegotiable.”
His eyes sway to beyond my shoulder and my stomach knots. Breanna. Fuck me, I forgot about Breanna. On the front porch steps, Emily has an arm around Breanna’s shoulders and the two prospects assigned to Emily’s protection have created a barrier at the bottom of the steps. I abandoned her, just like I promised I wouldn’t.
I swing my glare back at my father. “There was a code in the detective’s file. Two of them. I took pictures.”
There’s a muttered curse behind me as they solve the puzzle of how I figured it out.
“I never talked to the detective again. Doing it would have made life easier, but I’m loyal.” I shove the words like a knife into his heart. “Nice to know what everyone thinks of me.”
As I walk for my girl, Eli captures my arm and exerts enough force that I stop because I’m too fucking exhausted to throw a punch. “What?”