Page 107 of Redline Baby

Soren continues, calm as ever. "And before Kit takes another ride without me, he and I will be adding a battery check to Rule Three."

"Fifty percent minimum!" Allie calls.

I whip around. "Absolutely not."

She looks delighted. "Sixty!"

"You're not helping."

Soren's mouth twitches. "We'll negotiate it privately."

"Thank you, Daddy."

"Don't sound so relieved yet."

Fuck.

Hands find me almost as soon as Soren steps back. My people. Sol hauls me upright properly by the shoulder. Someone presses a cold bottle of water into my hand. Ni clinks his own bottle against it. Then Dex is beside me, arm thrown around my shoulders and squeezing hard enough to make me stagger.

"Fucking traitor," I tell him.

"You loved it."

"I hope your Kawasaki develops an oil leak."

"See? This is why you get punished."

Allie slaps me between the shoulder blades hard enough to knock me forward half a step. I laugh. My backside throbs. My friends crowd around me. Soren stands close enough that I can reach him without thinking. I take a drink of water.

Everything hurts pleasantly. Everything is loud. Everybody knows exactly what happened. Nobody is looking at me like I'm strange. Nobody is going anywhere.

I'm so fucking happy.

Chapter 25. Soren

The room is still loud when I find him. Kit is somewhere in the middle of it, Sol’s arm across his shoulders, a bottle of water in his hand that’s already half-gone, Dex beside him with his mouth close to Kit’s ear saying something that makes him tip his head back and laugh. The laugh is real. I know the difference now: the practiced one, and this one, which is smaller and brighter and comes out of him like something he didn’t plan to give.

I stand at the edge of the group for a moment and let it happen. The room is warm and smells like it always does: whiskey and leather. I know he must still be feeling the strikes I gave him with the belt, and that thought makes me hard.

I wait until the cluster around him loosens naturally. Sol moves off toward the bar. Dex gets pulled into an argument with Allie. The two of them always seem to be arguing about something. Kit is suddenly just standing there with his water, the flush of exertion still on his cheeks.

I move to his shoulder.

“Hey. Little space corner,” I say quietly. “Want to spend some time there?”

Kit’s eyes move to the corner, and then he looks at me. John is cross-legged on the carpet with a coloring book open across his knees. His tongue is visible at the corner of his mouth, the particular expression of concentrated effort that children wear and adults usually remember to hide. Charles is in the low chair nearby, one hand resting on John’s shoulder, his attention entirely downward.

Kit goes still for half a second.

“It’s okay if you aren’t ready. But I want you to reclaim the corner. It’s yours too.”

He looks back at me. His expression has reset to the practiced face he wears when he’s decided not to feel something. His shoulder lifts in a shrug.

“Sure,” he says. “Why not.”

It is a performance of casualness, and he knows I can see through it, and he goes anyway, which is the only part that matters.

I follow him across the floor.