Page 24 of Craving the Edge

I stepped out into a rare blast of Melbourne winter sun. The light did nothing to lift the clouds in my head.

I wondered if I was already in too deep. A supporting character in a story that was never mine, set to be written out the moment the spotlight moved on.

Declan Walsh was an itch that’d go away if I ignored him long enough.

Solid plan, Judge, I thought as I followed Billie toward Sydney Road, where the best food in Brunswick awaited. Solid. As. Fuck.

CHAPTER 9

DECLAN

It was five a.m when my phone jerked me awake.

I fumbled for it in the dark, answering it. “What?”

“They found you.” Rhys.

“What?” I sat up, the doona sliding off my shoulders. The darkness of my bedroom felt a world away from whatever fire he was putting out.

“A fan posted an Instagram story. You’re in the background of a selfie, clear as day. The wanker tagged the gym.”

I ran my hand over my face. It was too early for this shit.

“It’s already got one hundred thousand views,” Rhys went on. “The gossip blogs picked it up an hour ago. The paparazzi will probably be there now.”

Rage. I resisted the urge to throw my phone across the room. They couldn’t just leave it alone. Couldn’t let me have one fucking thing. They’d swarm the place and harass Char because of me. She already hated everything I represented, and any chance I’d had at convincing her otherwise would be destroyed the moment she turned up to work.

“I have to warn her,” I said. “Charlotte.”

A snort came down the line. “Don’t be an idiot, Declan. You’re staying home. I’ll run interference and call the owner.”

His instinct would always be to treat her like a problem that needed to be managed, not a person who was about to have her life turned upside down.

“You’ll stay the hell away from her,” I said.

“Declan, this isn’t the time for you to be thinking with your dick. This is about damage control. The fight is only a few weeks away. Win this, and we go to Tokyo. That’s the⁠—”

I disconnected the call.

It immediately started buzzing again, the screen lighting up the dark with Rhys’s name. I left it on the bedside table.

I was out of bed and dragging on a pair of joggers, a t-shirt, and the charcoal hoodie I’d left on the floor the night before. My right hand throbbed as I scooped my keys and phone from the bedside table, but I ignored that too. I grabbed my gym bag from beside the door and headed out.

My footsteps echoed in the hallway of my apartment building in Southbank. Down in the garage, the Audi’s engine ripped through the silence. I jammed it into drive before the roller door was even fully open, the tyres screaming on the polished concrete as I peeled out onto the street.

Melbourne was a ghost town at this hour. Quiet tram lines and empty intersections. I punched the accelerator, my hands strangling the wheel.

I loathed it. This whole bloody industry was built on turning people’s lives into content. They fed on misery. They fed on clicks and likes. And now they were coming for her, because of me. The sanctuary I’d found at Fighter’s Edge was about to be torn apart by the circus I could never escape all because I wanted to fight professionally.

My fault. My. Fault.

When I turned off Sydney Road and into the lane, it was already clogged. Two dark sedans and a shitty silver hatchback idled by the gutter, their exhausts ghosting in the frosty air.

I drove straight past the entrance to Fighter’s Edge, my jaw locked tight. I swung the Audi into the narrow laneway that ran behind the gym, killed the engine, and sank into the shadows between a graffiti-covered dumpster and the building’s rear brick wall. Luckily no one clocked me.

From here, I had a clear view of the front door. A half-dozen paps were already loitering, smoking and laughing with each other, camera with massive lenses hanging around their necks. One guy leaned against the bonnet of his car, nursing a takeaway coffee. Another paced back and forth, phone pressed to his ear. A third sat in his driver’s seat with a long lens resting on the open window frame, aimed squarely at the gym’s entrance.

The first weak rays of sunlight caught the top of the warehouse, turning the old red brick a soft, warm orange. It made the scene look peaceful. My gaze fixed on the corner of the main road, waiting.