Page 26 of Craving the Edge

“Getting pissed off isn’t going to help her, mate.”

I spun around. “You think I don’t know that? You think I wanted any of this crap for her? For me?” My voice rose, bouncing off the high ceiling. “This was supposed to be quiet. The one place I could just shut the world out and work.”

Tomas held his hands up, a gesture that only fuelled my anger. “I’m not saying you wanted it, but it’s happened. Intent doesn’t mean a thing when those dicks are selling photos of her right now.”

Frustration burned in my chest. He was right. It was a fact. A done deal. The control I thought I had was a bloody illusion. The quiet space I’d found, the one person who could’ve seen past all of it, was gone in an instant.

“I was going to handle it,” I bit out. “I came here to warn her, to make sure she was alright. They were already here…”

“Think for a second, Declan. You rolling up was just confirmation. You gave them a story.”

“Fuck.” In my moronic attempt to help, I’d made it worse. They had pictures of us together outside now.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Rhys. I let it go. It buzzed again. A text this time.

Too late. They got a shot.

I didn’t need to search hard. It was the first thing that loaded on a notorious sports gossip site. WALSH’S NEW FLAME? FIGHTER GETS COSY WITH MYSTERY BRUNETTE.

Beneath it, the picture. Me, my back to the camera, leaning in slightly. Her, face angled towards me, caught in a sliver of light from the rising sun. The angle made it look intimate, a flicker of a moment that made her hatred look like lust.

I scrolled down, my stomach churning. The caption underneath was worse.

‘An anonymous tip has identified the woman as Charlotte Judge, the front desk manager at Fighter’s Edge. Sources say Walsh has been training at the rundown facility for weeks. Is this just a convenient training partner, or something more?’

Charlotte Judge.

They’d printed her name. Her full name.

The words blurred. All I could see was her face, shadowed under her hood, full of fury. This is your circus, not mine.

She wasn’t a mystery brunette. She was a person with a life that’d just been torched simply because she’d stood next to me.

“They ran her name,” I said, showing Tomas my phone.

“The dogs.” He took it and began scrolling. “Anything for a fucking click.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do now?” I started pacing a tight circle on the worn mats, the rubber squeaking under my runners. “Rhys’ll be here any minute, and you know what he’ll do.”

“Be the dick of the century.”

“He’ll see this as a PR problem.” I stopped, my fists clenching and unclenching at my sides. “He’ll see this as nothing more than a liability before the Sydney fight.”

“Then tell him to back the hell off,” Tomas said.

I let out a harsh, bitter laugh. “You think he’ll listen? All he cares about is a trip to Tokyo. People are just obstacles to his bank balance.”

“He works for you, mate. Not the other way around.”

“Doesn’t feel like it,” I muttered. My gaze drifted towards the front. She was up there somewhere, locked in the same cage with me while the scum I’d dragged to her doorstep waited outside.

The beginnings of a headache tightened its grip behind my eyes. I flexed my right hand again, the ache a constant beat that matched the pulsing in my skull. I knew Rhys’s arrival was inevitable. He’d stride in, phone already pressed to his ear, calculating the cost. And I knew his first priority would be neutralising the threat. He’d want to sanitise the whole mess, and Char would be the first thing he tried to scrub clean.

“What the fuck is this?”

Char strode towards us, her phone clutched in her hand like a weapon. Her eyes, fixed on me, burned with a fury that made the hair on my arms stand up. She didn’t stop moving until she was right in front of me, so close I could see the tremor in her jaw.

“Fix it.”