Edge of Sanity: An Edge Novel by Shannon K. Butcher

her to withhold information because she thought he was too much of a pussy to face it. “What else did your research uncover?”
    “Not much, really.” kh, it.
    She was hiding something. He could hear it in her voice—feel it in the way her fingers twitched beneath his. “Spit it out, Leigh. I can take it.”
    She let out a sad sigh. “Whoever did this to you did it when you were a kid.”
    “You sound sure.”
    “I am. Either that, or they only do it to men.”
    “What makes you so sure that it has to be one of the two?”
    “My parents were killed in an accident when we were kids. My brothers ended up in one foster home, me in another.”
    That simple confession given in such a clinical tone spoke volumes about Leigh. It spoke of tragedy and loss, of grief and loneliness. Not only had she lost her parents, but she’d also lost her brothers.
    “How old were you?”
    “I was six. Hollis was seven and Garrett was ten.”
    She was just a baby. At least Clay had had his mom around for a few more years. After that it was just him and the step-asshole.
    “I got placed in a great home with a loving family. I still see them a lot. My brothers weren’t so lucky. I think that whatever was done to them happened then.”
    “What makes you think that?”
    “Because when I saw them a couple of years later, they were different. At the time, my foster parents said it was because they were growing up and their hormones were changing. It wasn’t anything to worry about. But then when Garrett became a legal adult and adopted us, I knew they weren’t the same carefree souls I’d known.”
    “They had to grow up fast. That doesn’t prove much of anything.”
    “Except that both of them ended up like you. I didn’t.”
    She had a point. “You think that the people who did this were your brothers’ foster parents?”
    “No, but I think that they let it happen—either with or without their knowledge.”
    A strange, distant memory appeared in Clay’s head, fully formed. He was young. Colin, his asshole stepfather, was speaking to a man in the shadows on the front porch of their crappy, run-down house. The man handed Colin cash. Then Clay was suddenly in the man’s car, driving away.
    The memory lasted only a split second, but that was long enough to leave Clay shaking. He’d been afraid. Even as a kid he knew that the man in the car was bad news. But even more strange than the phantom memory was the feeling Clay had that he knew this man—he’d spent time with him. Shared meals, even.
    He tried to remember what he looked like, but the details were fuzzy, as if someone had intentionally blurred them. The harder he tried to call the man into focus, the vaguer the memory became.
    Clay’s head started to throb. ked nt. A slow, rolling nausea swept through him, leaving him sweating.
    He let go of the memory and rolled down the window to stave off any stomach rebellion.
    “Are you okay?” asked Leigh.
    “Yeah. Sorry. Just a bad memory.” He rolled the window up so she wouldn’t get cold. “What if someone paid for us?”
    “What? I don’t follow.”
    “What if whoever did this paid your brothers’ foster parents off—paid my stepdad—to do this to us?”
    A chilling look of anger crossed her face, driving away the normal softness he was used to seeing. “That would be in line with what I know about my brothers’ foster parents.”
    “And definitely something my step-asshole would have done. He was all about making a quick buck—and not above using me to do so.”
    She shook her head, drawing attention to her wildly mussed hair. The crazy notion of sliding his fingers through it to work out the tangles took him by storm, and he had to fight the need to do just that.
    “What if they’re still doing this, Clay? There could be little kids out there right now being tortured by these monsters.”
    “I will stop them.”
    She glanced his way, but it was long enough for him to see the steely determination