by Vivian Arend
If she even had her job anymore.
But she could handle the men. Nessa was the final straw, popping out of her office as Mia reached the stairs to the second floor. Nessa didn’t glance at her and go about her business. She took one look at Mia’s expression and swore. “Oh hell, what the fuck happened?”
So much defensive anger. It would vanish when the truth came out, because Nessa had ink wrapped around her wrists, too. She was an O’Kane, and Ford was family.
Mia was just a broken girl foolish enough to think freedom was real.
Her self-control crumpled. The tears that had been stinging at the back of her eyes overflowed, and she couldn’t make them stop. Not when Nessa wrapped slender arms around her in a bruising hug, not when the other woman dragged her back into her office and down onto a couch, still holding on to her like Mia deserved comfort, deserved friendship.
That only made her cry harder.
“Jas said something was up.” Lex hovered in the doorway, her shoulders tense. “Ford?”
“Probably, the asshole,” Nessa grumbled, and the fact that she was talking about her like she wasn’t even there was what let Mia seize control of her traitorous body.
“It’s not—” Her voice cracked, and she eased from Nessa’s grip and scrubbed her hands over her face. God, she couldn’t face Lex like this. A wreck, every defense laid to waste, sobbing like a first-week initiate who still got homesick. “I’m okay. I’m sorry.”
Lex knelt in front of the couch and peered up at Mia for a few moments before sighing. “Oh, shit. He didn’t.”
Hope flared, and it hurt. She hadn’t realized how cast adrift she’d felt until she looked into Lex’s face and saw comprehension. The world wobbled, and she reached for Lex, literally and metaphorically, clutching Lex’s hands as she asked the question that could break her. “Am I overreacting?”
“I don’t know, honey. Did you tell him he was being a presumptive ass?”
Mia closed her eyes with a pained laugh. “I probably said worse.”
A pause. “How much worse?”
There was no point in hiding the truth, so she told Lex everything. What Cerys had said, what she’d said, sparing herself not at all...
And Ford’s words. Even the ones that had cut the deepest because they seemed reasonable. Felt true. The ones that kept bleeding, because they echoed Vaughn’s. Not in tone, but in meaning. Poor, delusional Mia, thinking she has value. Thinking she can be free.
Wasn’t that what Ford had said, with actions if not words? He’d been saying it over and over since the start, and she’d let him. First the heater. Then the jacket. And the raise. Maybe she was the one sending mixed signals, letting him help her until her pride snapped.
And he meant well. God, she knew he did. But did it matter if he meant well, when every gift was a reminder that she needed someone in her life who meant well, who bridged the gap between her abilities and her ambitions?
So she told Lex everything. And when she ran out of words, she fell silent, staring at their joined hands, unable to look down into the face of a woman whose abilities so outstripped Mia’s own that no ambition was out of reach.
“Motherfucker.” Lex squinted as she pulled one hand free and rubbed the center of her forehead as if it ached. “He should not have done that, Mia—any of it. He had no right, and I’m sorry.”
It was like standing across from Cerys again, hearing the words You’re free to go. Too good to be true. “I lost my temper. I was mean.”
“Hell yeah, you were. I’m not saying you acted like a peach, either.”
“I knew how to hurt him,” Mia agreed. “I think I wanted to. I wanted him to hurt me back.”
“Makes it all easier, huh?” Lex rose before sliding onto the couch beside her. “You both got upset. It happens. What really matters is what you do now.”
She said it like there were a million options. “I gave him the money I borrowed from Jade. I had to.” And now she’d have to spend the next fifteen years working to pay off that debt.
Lex waved a hand. “Not what you do about the money. About Ford.”
Mia dropped her gaze to the hand holding hers. To the ink etched over Lex’s slender wrist. “I don’t know. Listening to me when I say no isn’t just about sex.”
“No, it’s not,” she agreed.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“Wrong? Maybe.” Lex slipped her fingers into Mia’s hair and leaned her head against hers. “You let Cerys get in here and fuck you up. We’ve all done that. Were you wrong to be angry with Ford? No.”
Mia took a deep breath and held it until her lungs burned. Then she let it out, slowly, and allowed the pain and hurt to slip away with it. “This is what Cerys wanted. Me, furious and hurt and desperate enough to take what she offered.”
“And to make you think that things here couldn’t be different. Better.”
“Promise me they can be,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “You know where I’ve been. What I am. Just tell me there’s hope.”
“It’s definitely different,” Lex answered. “How much better it can be depends on what you do, and what you want.”
What do you want?
Lex had to know how overwhelming that question was. Want was an impulse, something she indulged on a whim. She wanted cinnamon rolls or a hot bath or Ford’s hands on her body—stolen moments of seized opportunity.
Now she needed to make it more. She needed to dream. “If I figure it out, will you help me get there?”
“Of course I will.” Lex’s arm dropped to her shoulder for a quick squeeze. “It’s what I do.”
Work was impossible. Ford kept staring at the same figures, watching them swim together in an incomprehensible haze of numbers, until he finally gave up and reached for the bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer.
His hand had just closed around the bottle when a sharp rap rattled the door. Only one, and then the door pushed open and Dallas O’Kane was staring at him, eyes dark, face impassive. “Ford.”
Terrific. Now, on top of the swirling confusion and pain, he’d have to explain himself like a little boy. “Come in, Dallas.”
Dallas kicked the door shut and sank into a chair. “Guess it’s not going to come as a surprise that you’ve got some of the ladies riled up.”
No, the women would be circling the wagons, protecting Mia no matter what. “Surprise? Not really.”
“Yeah, someone had to sit on Nessa to keep her from coming over here to crawl halfway up your ass.” Dallas draped his arms across his chest and studied Ford. “The good news? Lex hasn’t tried to stab you yet, so you’ve got that going for you.”
“Maybe she just hasn’t gotten around to it.” Ford met his boss’s gaze squarely. “Or she sent you to do it for her.”
“Lex doesn’t send a man to do her stabbing for her.” Dallas exhaled and shook his head. “Relax, man. Yeah, you fucked up. Yeah, the girls circled the wagons. That’s what they do. You know why?”
There was only one answer. “Because every single one of them knows what it’s like to have some jackass man try to control their lives?”
“Pretty much. I’m sure plenty of those jackasses have had great intentions, too. Doesn’t really matter when you’re stepping all over someone’s pride.”
Pride. After her life in Sector Two, it had been so important to Mia, and he’d chipped away at it every day. The coat, the heater, the payment to Cerys—a never-ending cascade of reminders that, even here, her life wasn’t her own.
He pulled the bottle out of the drawer and cracked it open. “You want one, Dallas?”
“Sure.” Dallas watched him pour two drinks but didn’t reach out to take the glass. “The only jackass man who gets to control Mia’s life right now is me. And before I tell you what’s going to happen, I’ll say this. Part of this is on me. I should have come down harder on you about drawing some damn lines, at least until she was free of Cerys’s sick shit.”
“And I should have
considered what it would be like to come from a situation like that...and have to deal with me.”
“Fuck yeah, you should have.” Dallas swept up the whiskey and took a sip. When he eyed Ford over the edge of the glass, all of the warmth had left his eyes. The leader of Sector Four was staring at him now, hard and unyielding. “You contacted another sector leader behind my back, Ford.”
“For personal business.”
“None of us can afford to have personal business with other sector leaders. Especially with Cerys. Shit is sincerely unsettled right now, and I need a heads-up if anything—and I mean anything—might tip us off balance.”
“Fair enough.” Ford drained his glass and began refilling it. “I asked Cerys how much Mia owed her, then I wired her more credits than most people see in ten years.”
“And then you let that girl go over there, oblivious, so Cerys could spin her circles.”
He hadn’t had a chance to tell Mia, because he wanted it done before approaching her. So she wouldn’t be able to say no, right? “She could have asked me what it meant. Why I did it.”
“She knows why you did it. In her gut, she knows, or she wouldn’t have come back. Or she only would have come back long enough to steal all your files and bring them to Cerys.” Dallas slammed back the rest of his shot and relaxed back in his chair. “What do you want more? To be right, or to make things right?”
Ford almost snorted whiskey out of his nose. “Be right? That fucking ship has sailed, O’Kane. Best I can hope for now is for Mia not to hate me.”
“If she keeps working for you, yeah.” Dallas pinned him with a look. “Which is why, starting tomorrow, she’s working for me.”
It hurt more than everything else combined. Ford tightened his fingers around the neck of the bottle as he fought a wince. “Is that how it is?”
“You’re still not getting it.” Dallas thumped the glass against the desk. “Power, Derek. You’re an O’Kane, you’re rich, you’ve got all the advantages over her. So I’m doing what I can to level the field. I’m not slapping you down. I’m giving you a chance.”
A chance—to be someone Mia could come to without reservation, without worrying about whether she needed to fight him on every little thing just to maintain her own equilibrium. If he wasn’t her boss, she could embrace the submission she’d claimed to want instead of worrying that doing so meant giving in. Giving up.
Ford met Dallas’s gaze across the desk. “Have you talked to her about it yet?”
“It’s a done deal. I’m setting her loose with Noelle in the tech storage room tomorrow. We’ll see what she’s capable of.”
“A lot.” Something Ford should have told her.
“Yeah?” Dallas seemed to consider that as he leaned in to grab the whiskey. “You want to give her something she needs?”
“Anything.”
Dallas refilled his glass before spinning the bottle in his hand to rub a thumb over the label—over their logo. His logo. “She’s not working for you anymore. That doesn’t mean she can’t work with you. Show her what we can offer. Show me what she can offer. I could have Ace give her ink tomorrow, but it would be just as damn empty as you paying off Cerys. Help her earn her ink, and then she’ll have the kind of power no one can take away.”
The kind the other women had, the kind Lex had been fighting for since day one. “Where do I start?”
“In my experience? I’m sorry. And sometimes presents. Lex likes knives.” Dallas grinned and lifted his glass. “I know I’m forgiven if she only cuts me a little.”
There was only one thing he could think of to give Mia, and it would be the weirdest goddamn gift ever.
Which was why it just might work.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By the second day of her new job, Mia understood how Ford had been so cavalier about tossing expensive tech at her.
Dallas O’Kane had more. Lots more.
“This was all a jumble when I showed up,” Noelle had confessed yesterday morning, waving to shelf after shelf of neatly organized and labeled boxes. “It’s been my side project.”
It needed to be more than a side project, Mia could see that at once. Dallas’s aversion to technology was almost understandable—he was old enough to have been born just after the Flares, which meant his earliest memories must have been the darkness that followed. Data winking out of existence as circuits fried and overloaded, a world in chaos because paper records had long ago been a thing of the past...
So she understood why he clung to something tangible, something that couldn’t simply vanish. Hard copy had its uses...as a backup.
Mia could make that work. With the tech in this room, she could make damn near anything work. She should have been vibrating with excitement, with the possibilities of wrapping her brain around the entire O’Kane operation and finding all the ways to automate the process, to smooth off the inefficient edges.
Her chest felt hollow. Her neck and shoulders ached. She kept catching herself tensing against a blow that wasn’t coming—not physically, anyway. She’d been too cowardly to face Ford, but she was only delaying the inevitable. He was an O’Kane. She wouldn’t be able to avoid him forever.
Even knowing that, she still wasn’t ready when he appeared. Maybe if she’d known, she could have braced herself for the moment, or found the focus to build a polite mask. But she stepped out from between two shelves and there he was, as dangerously handsome as ever, watching her.
Waiting.
But not for long. He shoved his hands into his pockets and nodded to her. “Mia.”
She needed to cling to her mask, to act calm and reserved as she carried the box of supplies to the desk she’d already started to think of as hers. But that mask felt wrong with him still. Fakeness felt wrong. What was the point of giving up everything for independence if you were still trapped in a cage?
She dropped the box to the desk with a soft thud and met his gaze. “I should have come to talk to you. I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your work.”
“You’re not.” She fixed her gaze on his cheek, because it was easier than looking into his eyes. If they went all soft and warm, her resolve would waver. And he’d have so many rationalizations, so many reasons he’d meant well... “I’ll still help you with your office, whenever you need me. If you need me, I mean.”
The corner of his mouth wrinkled up in a half-smile. “Nah, I think Dallas has decided I’m better off working alone. Especially since you made such an amazing program already. It’ll help a lot.”
No, his cheek wasn’t safe, not when it was that close to his mouth. She tore her gaze away and stared down. “I’m sorry I compared you to Vaughn. That was unfair. I hate what you did, but I know you were trying to help, and that’s the one thing Vaughn was never trying to do.”
Ford snorted. “You were right. There was one thing you needed from me, and I couldn’t get it done. I’m sorry.”
Two simple words, and they ripped the ground out from under her.
Surprise finally drove her to meet his eyes, and part of her still expected insincerity. Mockery. Powerful men didn’t apologize. Especially not to ungrateful girls who’d spurned their gifts, shrieked at them in a rage, and stormed out of their lives. But Ford was watching her like he meant it, like he believed it, and when her lips parted, nothing came out.
“So, yeah.” He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and held it out. “Here. You can talk terms with Dallas. It’s his show now.”
Mia took the paper and stared at it until the words swam into focus.
And then she kept staring.
Ford had handed her a bill. Everything he’d given her was listed in a neat row, along with the cost in credits. And, for one heartbreaking moment, it felt like a punishment. She’d walked away from him, and he’d come after her, wanting to recoup his investment. Just like Cerys.
But this bill was different. She’d watched Trix buy the coat, and Ford had fud
ged the numbers, underestimating the cost. Not enough to turn this into a patronizing joke, but enough to blunt the edge of the final total. He’d done it with everything on the list, undoubtedly fighting the urge to keep trimming, to take away the burden instead of adding to it.
Because greed was in Cerys’s nature, but it wasn’t in his. Not like this.
He hadn’t just handed her a bill. He’d handed her a clean slate.
The edge of the paper crinkled under her fingers, and she realized her hand was shaking. She set it down on the desk and smoothed out the creases. “Did Lex tell you to do this?”
He grimaced. “Lex isn’t exactly speaking to me at the moment.”
“Because of me?”
“Because I was thoughtless,” he countered quietly. “Because I would have known better if I’d stopped to think about something besides myself.”
It was a statement as profound as anything Lex had said, because it made her reassurances more than comforting words. Ford had crossed a line. Lex believed it. Dallas believed it.
Ford believed it.
Her clean slate stretched out in front of her. An empty canvas, and she could fill it with anything she was brave enough to reach for. She could fill her life with him.
Gathering her courage and her pride, she stroked the edge of the bill. “Can I ask a favor?”
“Anything.” His calm demeanor cracked, just a little, regret and a shred of hope splashed across his features. “I’d still do anything, Mia.”
She swept up the paper and took one step—figurative and literal—toward meeting him in the middle. Because having the power to say no made yes so much easier. “Could you help me pay this?”
“Help you?” he echoed.
“You can’t pay back Jade,” she said, as hope and nerves danced dizzily in her stomach. “I bought my life back, and I need to pay the debt. That’s the only way it’ll ever feel real. But the little things...maybe too much pride is as dangerous as none.”