by CD Reiss
Broken Edge
The Edge - Book Three
CD Reiss
Broken Edge
CD Reiss
The Edge - Book Three
© 2018 Flip City Media Inc.
All rights reserved.
Ebook ISBN - 978-1-942833-52-9
Print ISBN - 978-1-942833-59-8
If any person or event in this book seems too real to be true, it’s luck, happy coincidence, or wish-fulfillment on the reader’s part.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Part I
STOP
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part II
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part III
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Also by CD Reiss
Part One
Cracking
STOP
If you haven’t read the FREE prequel yet, you should do that before reading this book.
GET THE FREE PREQUEL
—— CUTTING EDGE ——
Chapter One
GREYSON
NEW YORK
MARCH 2007
Before he left, he made sure I was set. Here was the property tax bill. Anthony would pay it when he paid the utilities. Here was the water filter system. It needed to be changed in six weeks. He’d have called Franco to do it, but the number was on the—
“You can’t go.”
We were in the laundry room. Its base functionality seemed absurd against the backdrop of my husband going to war. How dare the washing machine be white when this was happening. Fuck you, dryer, for being half an inch higher. The basket of clothespins was a slap in the face, and the steady hush of the water heater was a mockery.
Caden looked green in the fluorescent light, and his eyes were flat gray. He looked as if he were dead already. “I knew I could get called.”
“You were tricked.”
He smiled ruefully. Even green, he was beautiful. Too brilliant to be conned, too loyal to go back on a promise. He put his hands on my shoulders and slid them down to my biceps. “I’m going to be fine. They’re giving me a nice bonus.”
“Because I care about money.”
The smile went from rueful to pleased, and I had to admit he’d been more himself in the past day than he’d been since his alter ego had appeared.
“Did you tell them about Damon?”
“I took a battery of tests.”
“They’d never send you if they knew.”
“As soon as I read that letter, as soon as he read it, he crawled back into the hole he came from.”
“He’s gone?”
“Are you going to miss him?” he teased.
“Are you?”
“If I deploy, he’s staying gone.” He gathered my hands in his. “I won’t miss the little chickenshit.”
“He’s the cowardly side of you.”
He got close to my face and put up his finger. “I don’t have a cowardly side.”
The way he looked at me, I could kind of believe it. He was so strong, so clear, so commanding, even with a part of him stuffed into a dark bag. If I hadn’t known better, I would have forgotten to worry about him. I would have overlooked the broken pieces for the sake of seeing the man in front of me.
“We all have a coward in us,” I said.
“You don’t.”
“I do. She’s scared of heights and spiders. And she’s so scared of losing you.”
He took my chin and pointed it up to face him. “I see that look on your face, Major.”
“What look, Major?” I had to smile at our equal footing.
“You are not to walk into the AMEDD recruiter.”
“I was going to stay in the military for life anyway. It’s easy for me. We can get a dual deployment. They’ll station us together.”
“Maybe. Or they can put us half a world apart.”
“It’s a risk, but I’m willing to take it.”
“I’m not willing.” He put my hands against his chest. “You’re going to run the PTSD unit of Mt. Sinai Hospital. You’re going to do what you were meant to do with your life. Help people after they get back. All you’d do on active duty is manage to get a revolving door of soldiers honorable discharges. They’d come back fucked up with no one to help them because you’re on the other side of the wall.”
I looked away from him at the way our hands wove together against his chest. “You think a lot of me.”
“The world needs you.”
“What about you? Do you need me?”
He unwove our fingers and put his arms around me, squeezing me so tightly it hurt.
“I need you,” he said with his mouth pressed to my scalp, inhaling the scent of my panic. “I need you safe. I need you here. I’m a selfish and greedy man. I need you to stay here and do your work so I can keep it together. You’re the only thing in this world saving me from going insane.”
“What if he comes back?”
“He won’t.”
“He will.”
“Well, then they’ll send me home in disgrace. Maybe he’ll buy a Maserati to make it up to you.” He pulled away enough to meet my gaze. “But if you’re deployed, you won’t be here to make him sell the Ferrari first.”
I laughed. He smiled with me, brushing a ribbon of hair off my cheek.
“I’m going to drive it when you’re gone.”
“Drive it now.” He closed the panel door of the water filtration unit. “It’s got a lot of kick.”
“You’re almost back to your old self.”
“I think he needed a shock to the system. He’s terrified of going back, and when the letter came, he wanted no part of it.” Shrug. “War is his limit.”
“You were forced to face your worst fear.”
I saw his sharp glance behind me, to the false safe. The door was closed, but behind it was the bottle room and a darkness that had its own density. He looked back at me, his stare hard and locked as if he wanted to make sure I was there.
“Definitely the worst,” he said, grabbing me and pulling me to him. “I can handle anything now.” He kissed me, and I moved with him as he pressed his growing erection against me.
“We have about twenty-four hours,” I said. “Can we spend twenty of them fucking?”
“What are we wasting those four hours on?”
“Sleep?”
He picked me up. I wrapped my legs around his waist.
“You’ll sleep when you’re dead.”
We kissed as he carried me, clanking and banging ankles and elbows, kissing between ows and ouches, laughing all the way up the stairs. We wound up rolling on the carpet between the back door and the door to my office, peeling off as much of our clothing as we needed to get his dick inside me.
I braced each foot against an opposing wall as he pushed into me until he hit the end, and with another thrust, he found my limit but kept pushing.
Yes, it hurt. And yes, he knew it.
He did it again, and while he was buried deep, he yanked up my shirt and bra.
“I’m going to miss these tits,” he growled right before getting his mouth under one and sucking the skin, closing his teeth against the flesh in a long, painful
bite.
I fisted his hair, pulling his mouth against me, begging for the hurt. He bit and sucked, thrusting hard and slow, rotating his hips when he was rooted in me.
“I love you,” I cried when I was close. “Caden, I love you.”
In response, he bit me harder, and I came right into the pain.
Chapter Two
CADEN
Greyson passed out at one in the morning after I’d bathed her, laid her on the clean sheets, and taken another of her orgasms. She was sore. I could taste the raw skin when I licked her cunt, sharp with open nerve endings and the threat of blood.
But I couldn’t sleep for the allotted four hours. There was too much to do. As I went about preparing the house for my absence and making Greyson’s world as easy as possible without me, I felt as right as I had in a while. At least as right as I’d felt since Damon had ruptured my mind.
He was in the corners again, but I knew what he was now. He was my fear. He’d always been there, and when I faced him, he went away. My relief didn’t last. Neither did my control.
Damon fled at the thought of war and danger, but something else had been born. It didn’t hum in the white noise. It was a hard buzz, like the approach of hornets. I told myself it was just Damon and I had him in hand, but it wasn’t. I knew it, and I decided not to know it at the same time.
I went back into the laundry room to check on the circuit breakers. I’d be gone a couple of summers. The HVAC unit that had been installed while Greyson was still deployed was newer than the electrical box.
With a roll of tape around my wrist and a felt-tip pen behind my ear, I opened the metal panel. The black switches were labeled with masking tape in my father’s handwriting, and since the new unit had been installed, many of them were wrong. I knew which was which and had never bothered correcting them.
I’d talk her out of selling the house for now. I wanted her to have a place to live in or sell if something happened to me. I’d pitch her the idea that since I wasn’t here, there was no need to worry about me getting triggered by the fucking moldings or whatever she thought had prompted my split. We could sell when I got back.
Peeling off the first swatch of masking tape, I realized how neat my father’s writing had been. He’d made a lie of the cliché about doctors having sloppy handwriting. He’d made a lie out of a lot of expectations.
I ripped off a piece of tape and put it by the switch. My edge was straight but ragged from the tear. My father had used scissors, of course. And when I wrote “Dining Room” on the tape and it was a mess, I realized he’d written the label while it was still flat on the roll.
I peeled it off and started over.
NEW YORK
1981
Two pairs of scissors.
My favorite T-shirt.
My most recent algebra test.
Three pages torn from an old Hustler magazine.
The shirt was still crisply black, and the three digitally-styled symbols, one for each band member in the Police, were still alarm-clock red. It was laid out on the shiny dining room table without a wrinkle.
My algebra test was lined up parallel to the edge of the table.
The Hustler nudes were spread above that, pages creased, with corners curling and the pinkest parts faded with age.
Dad sat at the head of the table. When I saw my mother kneeling at his feet, I dropped my bag. It was open. A pencil rolled out.
“How old are you, Caden?” my father asked as if he’d ever forget the day the mess was born.
“Eleven, sir.” I tried to make eye contact with Mom, but she was bent toward the Persian carpet.
“Come here.”
I stepped toward him, close enough to hear my mother’s ragged breaths, and with the new angle, I could see that he held the end of a belt. The other end was looped around Mommy’s neck.
“Describe what’s on this table.”
I took my gaze away from my mother and looked at the table. “Two pairs of scissors. My Ghost in the Machine shirt. My algebra test. Three—”
“More on the test, please. Finish the job.”
Mom coughed. I started to sweat. He wanted me to be specific, and I needed to pay attention.
“It’s from last week. Wednesday. There’s an eighty-six in red at the top, and under it is the word ‘good’ in script with an exclamation point. The magazine—”
“You’re not finished with the test. What’s in the left corner?”
“Your signature, sir.”
Mom gasped. I couldn’t look. I couldn’t watch him making the belt tighter, and I knew he wanted me to keep my eyes on the table.
“Did I make that signature?”
“No, sir.”
“Who did?”
“I did, sir.”
“Why did you do that? And be honest, please. I don’t want this to be harder than it has to be.”
“I thought you’d get mad that it was a low grade.”
“I would get mad. I didn’t fight for you to be in eighth grade math so you could get fourteen percent of the questions wrong, did I?”
“No, sir.”
“And what about the magazine? Where would an eleven-year-old boy get pictures like that?”
“Brian Muldoon’s brother.” Brian was Irish. He had six brothers and sisters. The Hustler was a third-generation hand-me-down.
“All the Irish do is fuck and have babies, Caden. Don’t forget it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you tell me what you think you’re looking at?”
If I hadn’t been sweating before, I was when he asked me to study the photos.
“A motorcycle.” Mom heaved a breath. I was shaking. “A naked lady on a motorcycle.”
“What’s she doing?”
“Showing her… thing.”
He yanked Mom up to her knees. Her hands clutched the belt, and her eyes tried to tell me everything was all right.
“Your mother was hiding these with the test when I came home. Do you think she’d bother hiding a meaningless thing?”
“No. Yes? I… I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what? The real name?”
He must have wanted me to not call it a “thing.”
“Puh-puh-pussy.”
“No.” He denied my answer, but it satisfied him enough to let Mom back to the floor. “These ‘things’ have names.”
I swallowed. My mother didn’t make a sound. Her silence was for me. I was old enough to know that but too young to forgive her for it.
“Vulva,” I whispered.
“Louder. Like a man.”
“Labia minora.”
“Better.”
“Labia majora.” Tears streamed down my face, but I spoke clearly around the sobs. “Urethral meatus. Clitoris. Vestibule. Introitus.”
“Very good. You’re qualified for a career in gynecology. Now. You have two pairs of scissors. One is for fabric. One is for paper. Cutting paper with fabric scissors dulls them. Paper scissors cut fabric inefficiently. You use the right tool for the right job. When you’re done, your mother will start dinner.”
I picked up the heavy fabric scissors and sliced my favorite shirt in half. After I’d shredded it to rags, I switched scissors and started on the test. Last, I cut up the motorcycles and the women on them, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I’d left their delicate parts intact. I couldn’t bear to slice those. It hurt to think about.
When I was finished, I was sent into the bottle room until Mom finished making dinner.
NEW YORK
MARCH 2007
“You still look really sexy in dull green,” Greyson said with a wry smile, placing her hands on my shirt.
I wasn’t the only service member stalling by the entrance to security. A quick count of men and women in uniform came to eight, and I would have put ten on all of them going to North Carolina. I didn’t know them, but we nodded to each other. We were each one of a number adding up to an escalation.
“I don’t
want you to worry,” I said, drawing her close.
“I won’t.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“If it happens… if Damon comes back…”
“He won’t. Not while I’m there. After that… I don’t know.”
The security line was getting ridiculous even as we stood there.
“Maybe we’ll just move to the Middle East after the war. I hear the Green Zone’s sorta nice.”
“Sure.”
An agent in a striped scarf and polyester vest moved a velvet rope and flipped a sign, opening a special line for military personnel.
“That’s you.” Her eyes were glassy. Tears would drop at the next blink.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I know we’ve had a hard run. This marriage hasn’t been what you wanted, and it hasn’t been what I expected. But I think we didn’t want or expect enough. We’re bigger than that. We thought we’d be normal, but we aren’t normal.”
She blinked and tightened her lips into a line. I kissed the salty tears that fell down her cheeks.
“I won’t miss you,” I whispered. “Because you’ll be with me. You were always with me. We’re not bound by some vows we made in your parents’ backyard. Those promises were for the rest of the world to hear, but between us? It’s older. Bigger. My cells are tied to yours. Remember I told you that when we met, I couldn’t explain the feeling to myself? I didn’t have a worldview big enough to fit what you were in my life. You were already there. And when I think I won’t be able to handle… whatever it is, I know you’re still there. Your strength keeps me upright when I think I’ll fall. I can’t shake you or forget you, because you run through my veins.”