by Kit Rocha
She squirmed beneath him, spreading one thigh wider and wrapping the other leg around his hips. "I don't know how you do this."
"Do what?"
"Make it so hot to be this frustrated…" She dug her head back into the bed with a soft moan. "One second I want you to pound me through the mattress, and the next I just want you to play with me all night."
"You want it all." He rolled her nipple between his fingers. "Say it."
"I want it—" Her voice broke, and she clutched at him. "Fuck, I want it all. I want more. Harder, please, just a little—"
He clenched her hair in his fist. "Wait for it, Nessa. Trust me."
She whimpered her protest before her gaze found his. Something in his eyes stilled her impatient wriggling, and she stared up at him as her rapid breaths lifted her breasts. "Is this what you meant? The things you like that aren't a game?"
"I don't know." He'd never really thought about it, and he damn sure couldn't right now, with her trembling beneath him. He only knew that he needed her trust, needed for her to believe that he would give her anything she desired. "Let me take care of you."
Nessa cupped his face again and smoothed her thumbs over his lower lip. "I trust you, maybe more than I trust myself. I'm just made of impulses and impatience, all wanting and doing, and people get tired of trying to stop me."
Another promise he could make. "I'll always stop you, if that's what it takes."
She kissed him softly and then let her hands fall away. Her arms settled on either side of her head, the backs of her fingers brushing the hand he had tangled in her hair. "Make me wait for it."
He wrapped his fingers around her wrist—not to trap her there, but to ground her, so there would be one steady, fixed point, no matter what—and started fucking her.
Slowly, carefully. It had to last forever, through each quickening heartbeat and gasping breath. It had to be enough to earn the trust she'd offered him, to pay it back a thousand times over.
It had to be enough.
Her body heated for him, as eagerly as always. She was shameless, showing him every response, rewarding him with moans and whimpers, and guiding him inexorably to the perfect spots, the perfect rhythm. And through it all she stared up at him, the wonder of it still fresh and bright in her eyes.
Pure honesty. Unbridled truth. Nessa shared the deepest parts of herself with an ease that humbled him even as it strengthened his resolve to shield her from harm, sorrow. From the world.
He caught her mouth again and told her so without words, and she melted beneath him, around him, the sweet clasp of her body growing hotter around his with every thrust.
And tighter. She tensed beneath him, already trembling on the edge of an orgasm. Her teeth sank into his lower lip as she arched her body, straining upward. Ryder narrowed his focus to her reactions, keeping her balanced on the precipice with short strokes and soft whispers.
And when she tumbled over that edge, he kept her there too, coming and coming until her voice was hoarse and hands were back on his shoulders, on his arms, her nails raking over his skin and then just clinging, like he was the only truth in her world.
And when it was too much, she didn't beg him to stop. She turned her face into his cheek and panted. "Michael."
His name on her lips sounded like a broken prayer, and he gave in to it. He followed her into a shuddering bliss that seemed to go on and on, until it could only be measured in the spaces between her hammering heartbeat and his.
When he regained the sense to shift his weight off her, she wrapped her arms and legs around him and dragged him back, holding him against her and inside her. "No. Don't leave me."
"I wouldn't." He rolled them both instead, so that he was lying with her draped over him, their bodies still joined. "Better?"
"Mmm." Her hair cascaded across his shoulder and tickled at his neck as she snuggled her cheek against his chest. "It's almost quiet in my head."
Almost. "Tell me the parts that aren't quiet?"
She pressed her lips to his skin, and he felt her smile. "The part wondering how fast you can do it again. The part wondering how fast I can do it again. The part wondering if I can reach a blanket or if moving my arms might actually be too much. Just three parts. Almost quiet."
An answering smile curved his lips as he hauled the corner of the blanket up and over them, shielding Nessa against the slight chill. "I'll take it."
Chapter Seventeen
"C'mon, Nessa."
It was hard for a man with a voice as low and rumbling as Flash's to sound wheedling, but Nessa had long ago recognized his supernatural ability to be a pain in the ass when he put his mind to it. "Go away," she told him again, struggling to keep her lips from curving up.
It wasn't like the numbers on her tablet were resolving into sense anyway—she'd read the same page of this spreadsheet three times—but she'd promised herself she wouldn't mope once Ryder was gone, and catching up on the tedious parts of her job that she kind of hated wasn't the worst way to carry on. If she was making herself look at crop projections, it meant she believed in a world where people would be harvesting crops this fall, and she'd be turning that grain into liquor.
Not exactly hope, but close enough that she'd given herself a mental high-five before Flash showed up.
"Just one bottle," he said again, leaning against the doorframe to her office. "That stuff you gave us the night I marked Amira. The bourbon that was kinda sweet, like vanilla? I want a present for her birthday, and she loved that."
"I'm sure she did." Nessa glanced up at him with a teasing smile. "You could trade a bottle like that for six months' rent on an Eden penthouse."
He waved a big hand, dismissing the value. "I'll make it up to you."
"Oh, you will, will you?" She was already doing mental inventory, guessing how many bottles she had left in her safe. But needling Flash was fun. "You know that means doing my shopping for, like, a year. Minimum."
"Fine."
"And you have to pick up my laundry."
His eyebrows drew together.
Nessa bit the inside of her mouth to keep her expression stern. "And take a dive in the cage next time the betting gets hot. Maybe against one of the Armstrong brothers."
"Nessa."
She burst out laughing at his outraged expression and tossed the tablet aside. "Yes, you dumbass. I'll find you something—"
The screech of the alarm drowned out her voice, and Flash reached for her before she could fully process the meaning of the loud blare. "Move."
He'd dragged her out of her office and halfway down the hall before her wits caught up to her shock. She wrenched her arm free to keep him from lifting her off the ground entirely and half-ran to keep up with him.
They spilled out into the bright afternoon sunlight, and Nessa put her hands over her ears to dampen the wail of the siren. Customers were starting to trickle out of the Broken Circle, mostly grizzled old men too old to join the militia, along with one worried-looking dancer.
Flash was already turning toward the staging area when a flash of light reflecting off a shiny surface caught Nessa's attention. Something silver streaked out of the sky and crashed into the warehouse where they held fight night. The shriek of ripping metal almost drowned out a muffled explosion that shattered the high windows of the warehouse, and Nessa covered her head as glass rained down on the courtyard.
"Get back inside!" Flash waved his massive arms at the gathering crowd. "Head to the basement—"
Another wicked glint, and a second object flew into the courtyard and slammed into the cracked asphalt. For a split second, Nessa stared at it in horror—it was a drone, the kind they used for surveillance in the city. It had something taped to the bottom of it, something that looked like a wad of modeling clay attached to a black box.
Flash was still hauling her behind a stack of reclaimed tires when the drone exploded, and there was nothing muffled about it this time. Nessa's ears ached not only with the volume of it, but the sh
eer force.
Flash gripped her upper arms. "You okay?"
His lips moved. The words vibrated through a few layers of cotton before she heard them past the ringing. She jerked her head in a nod and raised her voice. "We need to get them all inside!"
His jaw clenched, and when he pulled her from behind the tires, she understood his grim expression.
There was no one left standing in the courtyard. It looked like almost everyone had made it back into the club—almost. A man she didn't know lay still near the exit, a splintered piece of wood from a shipping pallet piercing the left side of his chest. Beyond him, the brick wall was splattered with blood, and another man she did recognize—Fuller, who only drank his tequila with salt, never limes—was slumped against it.
They were dead. No one could look at them and wonder, not for a goddamn second.
It still felt wrong to run past them without trying to help, or look, or just take a fucking moment to process their deaths. But Flash didn't give her the option. One massive arm across her back hustled her toward the back door and through it, into the kitchen with all its cool steel and carefully stacked crates of liquor.
Oh God, if a bomb hit that—
The rise of panicked shouts dragged her across the kitchen and out the swinging doors, Flash close on her heels. The main room of the Broken Circle was chaos, with a harried dancer still in her robe trying to usher customers through the staff door and down the hallway that led to the basement. A bottleneck had formed, and people were shoving to get through.
Someone caught the dancer with an elbow, and Flash waded into the mess, his voice rising above the ruckus. "Settle the fuck down! The next person who shoves someone is getting their ass thrown to the back of the line."
The shouts reduced to mutters, but no one else pushed. Nessa caught the dancer's eye and jabbed her finger toward the door in a silent command. She didn't know the woman, had never talked to her outside of the occasional cordial nod—but the employees were O'Kane responsibility.
And the ink on Nessa's wrists put her in charge.
The dancer nodded and slipped through the door. Nessa moved toward the stage to check for stragglers but stopped when a gravelly voice groaned her name. "Nessa—"
One of the old-timers who usually held down the table near the door was slumped in the shadow of the stage, one gnarled hand clutching his left shoulder. Lewis was pushing eighty years that he'd admit, and probably another ten or fifteen that he kept shaving off the back end. He'd been one of Pop's drinking and poker buddies, sitting up with her grandfather late into the night, swapping increasingly wistful stories of the world before the Flares.
Lewis was sweating. His face was pale and his breathing came shallow and raspy. The hand clutching his chest and shoulder was a bad sign—stress and hard living had run rampant on the ranch, and Nessa had watched too many of the older ranch hands slump to the ground and not get back up.
Lewis had to get the fuck back up.
She wedged her shoulder under his arm and hauled him to his feet, terrified at how fragile he felt. She could hear Flash in the hallway, yelling for someone to move his ass, so she shouted at a few men jostling for position near the front of the line. "Hey!"
One turned, but he didn't abandon his spot until she raised her voice. "Get over here and help him or I will stab you myself."
She didn't know if it was the ink or the threat or if she just had murder in her eyes, but he scrambled over. She passed Lewis off to him with a final order for the old man. "You stay alive until I get down there, you hear me?"
"Yes, ma'am," he wheezed.
As soon as they were moving, Nessa exhaled and made one last sweep of the room. Once Lewis and his helper made it through the door, there were only about five people between her and the hallway.
When the next drone crashed into the Broken Circle, it was five too many.
The sound hit her first. Crashing and cracking from above, and the shattering of glass. Her mind spun with dizzy panic. She couldn't remember if the sector leaders had been meeting in the upstairs office. Surely they would have come down at the first alarm. Surely—
Her body moved. Instinct. Those impulses she usually hated. She dove for the nearest table, crawling under it as the secondary explosion hit, and if the first one was loud, this one was like the end of her world.
The end of the O'Kanes.
Her ears couldn't process the sound because they were still ringing. It was the vibrations that heralded it, the wooden floor trembling beneath her outspread fingers, shaking beneath her knees. Then the groaning—and if she could hear that over the ringing, it had to be a like a howl of doom.
The stage crashed in first. Just collapsed, because the beams of the ceiling were falling into it. Nessa closed her eyes and covered her head with her arms, as if flesh and skin and bone would be able to stop it when the three stories above her crashed into the table and flattened her.
Ryder wouldn't be here to see it. She'd said goodbye early that morning with a kiss that prompted him to fall back into the bed with her for a stolen minute that had turned to ten. Fast and still so good, because everything was good when he touched her, and she was so glad he'd touched her. So glad she'd let him ruin her.
And so glad he was gone. He wouldn't be standing outside, wondering if he could have gotten inside to save her. He'd be sad, because he cared about her, but it wouldn't be his fault. Wouldn't be anyone's fault.
Something thudded hard on the table above her, and she choked back a shriek. God, if she was going to get flattened, she hoped it would just fucking happen, already. Now, before fear caught up with the adrenaline throbbing so hard she wanted to puke.
Something heavy shifted—not the uncontrolled, chaotic smash of falling debris, but like someone searching through wreckage, and a voice called out, "Nessa?"
Her name—muffled, but sailing through the chaos like a lifeline. She forced herself to drop her arms from her head. "Flash?" Her voice broke on the sound, and she lifted it higher, until the volume shredded her throat. "Flash!"
"I've got you." His dust-covered boots crunched on glass as he stopped by the table and reached down for her. "Corner booth, huh?"
Hysterical laughter fought its way into her throat as she grasped his big hand and tried to make herself move. It took two tries to crawl out from under the shelter of the table, and when she did…
Any urge to laugh died.
The Broken Circle—the heart of the O'Kane empire, the symbol of everything Dallas had tried to build—was in shambles. The back part of the bar had collapsed, bringing the meeting rooms above down onto the stage. The giant conference table where Dallas had been planning the war had spilled down from a gaping hole in the ceiling and now balanced precariously on a pile of wood and steel. Leather chairs and glass screens and shattered pieces of tech formed a barricade, blocking their corner off from the rest of the club.
The hallway had caved in, as had the space directly in front of it. Her brain couldn't make sense of the tangle of limbs and bodies—pieces of the people who'd been waiting to get downstairs, and she turned her back before any of it came into focus. She couldn't think about it. Couldn't think about how many people—Lewis—had been struggling to make their way into the basement.
Couldn't think about who might have been upstairs.
Just. Couldn't. Think.
She blinked at Flash instead, a bright spot in the middle of a nightmare leached of color. Dust coated his shirt and arms even more thickly than his boots, and her stomach lurched.
He looked like a ghost. "Flash—"
"Everyone in the hall made it downstairs." He patted her hand. "The front door's blocked, but I think I can move some of this shit. Just don't freak out on me, okay?"
Oh God, she was freaking out. So much for being an O'Kane badass. A few little bombs and one building falling in on her, and she'd melted into uselessness. Just because she was trapped and might never get out—
The familiar panic ros
e, the terror she'd hidden so assiduously from the other O'Kanes. Her deep, dark secret...
Nessa bent over and braced her hands on her knees. Dragging in a deep breath didn't help much—with all the dust, she started coughing. Flash put a hand on her shoulder, but she shook her head. "Give me a second."
She didn't think about that root cellar and the dirt and the fear. She thought about the elevator. Ryder's hands on her arms. The warm, soothing cadence of his voice. The sparks and the butterflies, all the good things worth living for, because he would be on his way here. He'd come back for her. So would Dallas and Lex, and Jasper and Zan and Finn. Ace and Cruz. Six and Bren.
She was never going to be that lonely little girl in the root cellar again, because she had a whole fucking army who would come to save her.
Not that she needed them. She would fucking well save herself. But knowing she had backup was what let her push herself upright and square her shoulders. "Okay. Let's do this."
"Watch out." Flash gripped the edge of the conference table. The muscles in his arms bunched and strained as he slowly lifted it, then tipped it at an angle and set it down more firmly, forming a makeshift ramp toward the front of the building. "Come on, I got you."
Scrambling up the table wasn't graceful. Nessa muttered a few unpleasant words at whoever had polished the damn thing so smooth, but Flash steadied her and followed behind as she maneuvered down the other side. Rubble shifted beneath her boots with every careful step, but Flash had it harder, with his greater weight displacing the precarious pile more easily.
By the time they were on semi-firm ground again, Flash's face was contorted into a grimace. Nessa's worry spiked as he clutched his side with one hand. "Are you okay, man?"
"What? Shit yeah, I'm fine. I just got knocked around a little when the top floors went, that's all." His pained grimace eased, but he was moving more slowly now. "I think I cracked a rib."