Love in the Dark (LarssonSiblingsSeries#1)

CHAPTER FOUR - EDWARD

EDWARD

I love to feel the burn of leg day. Squats. Deadlifts. Lunges. Calf raises. I'm doing it all. I'm pushing myself so hard that my stomach is threatening to spill everywhere. My workouts are something I can control, often taking it too far. It gets me off to know that I'm the one to say when I stop, seeing the results that I've achieved from it.

The gym is my second safe place.

My family call me a control freak, but I like to think I'm good at keeping myself motivated. I take after my father in that way. It's all I learnt growing up. Work hard and work harder. Viktor Larsson is a respected businessman with his fingers in many pies. Finding his niche in the market of seafood, he managed a family-run fish factory close to Amsterdam in the fishing village of Volendam. Going on to buy the business from his uncle at the age of twenty-five, proving everyone who said he was too young to know what to do wrong when he turned it into a multi-million-pound business. It became so trusted that people all over the world wanted to trade with him. It didn't stop there, as his bug for success grew, he started flipping property, investing in stocks and shares and buying parts in other companies, securing his place as one of the richest men in Europe.

Pregnant with me, my mother supported him in his journey to success, moving to another fishing town in the UK, called Grimsby. It's here that he bought space on the docks to keep buying and selling fish to a bigger audience. And, as they say, the rest is history. They've never looked back, our name recognised globally with a lot of people expecting me to step into his shoes and keep improving the businesses achievements. It's a lot of pressure to know people are watching your every move, but I thrive off it.

"Dude, how much you pushing now?" Logan, one of the trainers here says, dragging the industrial mop bucket around with him to wash down the rubber floors.

I got friendly with him over the summer during one of his boot camps, paying him extra for personal training sessions to work on building my strength and curing my stress.

I puff out a long breath as my legs push away from the board on the leg press machine. "Two-sixty on a good day."

Logan leaves the mop bucket in the middle of the gym floor and comes over to me. "That your personal best?"

"No, two hundred and eighty. What's yours?"

Logan looks smug about it. "Three hundred and ten."

I stop the machine and move the weight dial up to three hundred and twenty pounds. "I'm so fucking beating that number."

"Oh, it's on," is Logan's response, the mop falling on to the floor as he runs across the room to the second leg machine.

"Let's do ten reps!"

I feel my veins bug out of my forehead. "Twelve and we're both the winners."

I'm a competitive little shit.

"What's got you so riled up?" he replies, puffing out a breath as he does his first rep.

"Nothing."

The burning in my calf muscles intensifies with my second push with my brain telling me to take it easy on my already worn-out knees, but I ignore it. Forget steady. I'm in for the win.

Logan barks out a laugh. "It about a girl, man?"

Now it's my turn to laugh. "It's not about a girl."

"You sure?" he says, powering through the pain, face almost purple. "I haven't heard you mention Ebony in a while."

I wipe the sweat dribbling down my forehead with my shaking fingers and scrub them on my gym shorts, voice shaking with the force of the machine. "That's because I haven't seen her in a while."