At me.
I knew that look.
It was not trust.
Not yet.
Trust took more than one night and a rescued daughter.
But it was not suspicion either.
It was acknowledgment.
Respect, maybe, carved out of terror and blood.
“You found her,” he said.
I nodded once.
“You brought her home.”
“Yeah.”
His jaw worked.
Then he gave me one short nod.
For Edge Rourke, it felt like a whole speech.
“I owe you,” he said.
The room went quiet again, but this silence was different.
I didn’t know what to do with it.
So I said the only thing that mattered.
“She asked me to tell Regan she was breathing.”
Regan made a soft, broken sound from the stairs.
Edge’s face twisted for half a second before he locked it down.
Then he turned and went upstairs after his daughter.
I should have felt relieved.
I didn’t.
Because upstairs, Destiny Rourke was bleeding through the worst night of her life.
Downstairs, three kids had just cracked open years of secrets.
Outside, men were cleaning a crime scene before the law could put a name on it.
And me?
I stood in the middle of Santa Fe’s clubhouse with her blood drying on my hands, her voice still in my ears, and the memoryof her fingers clinging to my cut like she had known me in the dark.
