Beyond Addiction

by Kit Rocha

  Finn curled his fingers around the column of her neck, gentle but heavy. “Is this what you want?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, but she could feel a wild cry building in her throat, so she sank her teeth into her lower lip to hold it back. When her gaze fell on the mirror, Finn was still watching her. Not her swaying breasts or the erotic sight of his cock plunging into her, but her face. Her eyes.

  His hips flexed, driving him deeper. “Don’t hold back from me. Don’t fucking hold back.”

  He’d told her he wouldn’t share her, not even her screams, and suddenly she felt it, too. This was a moment just for them. No one else had to understand or approve, as long as they knew.

  He had to know. “I missed you so much,” she rasped. “I wish—”

  He smothered her regrets with another kiss, forcing her head up and back with one shaking hand on her chin. It was messy and raw, a tangle of tongues and teeth and low, animal noises, as he fucked her in short, rough strokes.

  He held her like that, wrapped in his arms, grinding against her, as if he couldn’t bear to pull away for even a moment. She could feel his heart pounding, thumping in time with hers, and Trix gave in. Finn had always stripped away her resistance, and never more than now, when he was all over her, touching her like he couldn’t get enough. Like he could breathe her instead of oxygen, live forever on the panting moans he drank from her mouth.

  She was an O’Kane. Getting off was easy, simple. This was more, her body drawing him in and holding him as the first pulses of orgasm wracked her, and the world dissolved in a white-hot rush of pleasure until there was nothing left but Finn.

  And when he stiffened above her, surging deep with a final, guttural noise, there wasn’t even him. Just them. Trix grabbed on to it like the stolen moment it was, digging her nails into Finn’s rigid, trembling arms, willing time to stand still.

  But it couldn’t. Finn exhaled slowly and eased his grip on her chin. “You okay?”

  Not even close. “Yes.”

  His gaze clashed with hers in the mirror, and the lazy pleasure on his face faded. “Don’t lie to me, Trix.”

  She lifted her hand to his cheek. “Not okay. Better.”

  He was still stiff. Wary. Hell, that edge in his eyes was damn close to fear. “You’re good?”

  How could she possibly explain? Here, like this, she finally understood how disconnected they’d been from each other before, and it terrified her. If being with him had felt like this, she wouldn’t have had the strength to leave, to save her own life.

  They’d both be dead.

  “This is good,” she told him instead. “I’m just...remembering.”

  He pressed a kiss to her palm before pulling away, straightening his pants as he rose. “Better makes sense, then.”

  She stretched out on the bed and rolled over to watch him. “You should hate me. I don’t know why you don’t.”

  Finn grunted. “I told you to cut that shit out.”

  “Why?” She swallowed hard. “It’s how I feel.”

  He dropped to the edge of the mattress and bent down to unlace his boots, giving her a glimpse of the scars decorating his back. “Fleming gave you drugs, right? The good shit?”

  “The best.” Vial after vial of his own personal stash, the stuff they didn’t even sell on the streets.

  “You know what that means, right?”

  “I’m not stupid,” she snapped. There had always been only one reason Mac Fleming would summon a woman to his office. Only one reason he’d bend her over his desk and rape her, all the while daring her to cry.

  Trix clenched her teeth. Of all the goddamn things in her life, that had to be the one memory that haunted her with crystal clarity—tears streaming out of her eyes to soak into the papers stacked on Fleming’s desk, smearing the ink. Knowing he’d look at the blurred words later and be so very, very pleased with himself.

  Finn’s boot thumped to the floor. “I could never hate you for anything that got you away from him before he—” He ground out a low curse. “I’m glad you left. You could have put a bullet in me on your way out, and I’d be saying the same thing.”

  Before. Nausea roiled in the pit of her stomach. She’d left to save herself, but also to save Finn. If she’d gone back to him, he would have known the truth, and he’d have gotten himself killed. Better that he didn’t know, even now that Fleming was dead. It would only hurt him.

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said instead. “I should have found a way to let you know I was all right, that’s all.”

  His other boot hit the hardwood floor, and he stretched out beside her. “And maybe Mac would have found you sooner if you had.”

  She curled into his arms. “Mac wasn’t looking for me. He was looking for the woman who got Dom kicked out of Four.”

  “Fucking Dom.” Tension tightened his body, but he stroked her arm gently. “I don’t know what Beckett will do with him.”

  Nothing compared to what Dallas would do when he found out what had happened. “I’m spun, and I killed the mood. I’m sorry. When we get back to Four, I’ll have my head on straight.”

  “Hey.” He gripped her arm and waited until she met his eyes. “It’s important, okay? That you get this in your head. I don’t hate you. I could never hate you.”

  “I know.” For her, he had risked his life to kill the most powerful man in his world. He’d say anything, do anything.

  Forgive anything.

  Chapter Six

  Engines before dawn weren’t unusual on Alya’s farm.

  Panicked shouts were.

  Finn rolled from the bed, glad he’d kept his jeans on the night before. Behind him, Trix scrambled for the folded dress on the chair beside the bed. “An attack?”

  “I don’t think so. Not enough cars.” He glanced out the window as he hauled on his boots, but the guest bedroom overlooked the backyard. “But Shipp said he was sending out a messenger.”

  “This early?”

  He might have thought it would be easier to sneak by in the dark. Or he might have just wanted Finn and his baggage the hell away from the people under his protection. Finn couldn’t blame him—but he’d fight him, if he had to. “You should stay here.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” She smoothed the dress into place down over her hips and reached for her ridiculous shoes. “No way. Not if there’s trouble because of me.”

  He slipped on his shirt and stared at her, searching for any trace of the biddable, obedient Tracy he’d known.

  An O’Kane stared back at him.

  “Fine,” he grumbled, hiding the smile that tugged at his lips. She’d complicate shit, but it was hard not to love the new spark of life in her. “Let’s go.”

  Downstairs was sheer chaos. Someone had left the front door wide open as people rushed around in the kitchen, and Finn realized why when Shipp and Hawk hurried up the porch steps, carrying a bloodied man between them.

  Shipp’s jaw was set, hard and angry. “Big John,” he grated out. “He took a bullet on the run to Four.”

  Dishes shattered to the floor as Alya swiped everything off the table. “What about Slider?”

  Hawk shook his head in stony silence.

  Numbness descended over Finn as he watched Alya cut away Big John’s shirt. The man was one of Shipp’s oldest friends, a smart, no-bullshit driver with quick reflexes and a lead foot. And Slider had been young. Cocky but skilled, with a whole damn life ahead of him, a life he’d just lost because Finn had called in a debt.

  Shipp turned, avoiding his gaze. “They ran almost all the way out to the mountains. Beckett’s men must have the whole border covered.”

  Finn had been prepared for a chase, but Beckett’s resources were limited. If he had his men patrolling the line that far past the edge of the sectors, it meant he had a very specific priority—keeping Finn away from Dallas O’Kane. “Did they try to follow your men back?”

  “They tried,” Shipp confirmed grimly. “They failed.”


  And it had cost Shipp. One man this morning, maybe another by the end of the day. A decent man—a friend—would forgive the debt. A life lost for a life saved was already too much to demand.

  Finn couldn’t be a decent man. Not until Trix was safe.

  A groan of pain rose from the table behind him, and Shipp flinched. “It won’t be safe to try again until tonight. Hawk can head the—”

  “No.” Trix stood in the doorway, her hands clenched in fists at her sides.

  Finn ignored the pain in her voice and the pain in his chest. Harder to ignore was Alya’s stricken look, but he locked down everything but the goal. “We have to get you back, Trix.”

  “Not like this,” she argued. “It isn’t right.”

  Yeah, she was an O’Kane now. Someone who had the luxury of worrying about right. “You have a better idea, doll?”

  She stared at Big John for one endless moment, then shrugged helplessly. “No, but I can’t sit here while Shipp’s men are risking their lives. While they’re dying. We should be taking that risk, too.”

  She was an O’Kane, so he bit back his knee-jerk denial. Trying to break her through to Sector Four was a risk, but nothing in her life there would be safe, either. Not with Beckett staring across the sector line at Dallas O’Kane. War was coming for her family as surely as it was coming for Finn.

  “We could go the other way,” he whispered. “Drive west and keep going until we hit the ocean.”

  Trix gazed up at him, shaking her head so gently that he knew she wasn’t even aware she was doing it. “I have to go home, Finn, not run away.”

  The words shoved him past numb, straight into frozen. It stung. Fuck, it burned, without the comfort of heat. She had always been the closest thing he’d had to home. What a sick fucking delusion—one she didn’t share.

  “Okay,” he said, forming the word with stiff lips. “Then we’ll get you home.”

  “No, you don’t—” She reached for him, wrapping her hands as far as they would go around his upper arms. “I want you with me.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  He did, that was the hell of it. Trix wanted to drag him home like a stray dog, oblivious to the fact that he’d already bitten plenty of the people in her life. She’d do it, too, because she wanted him in her life.

  He wanted to be her life.

  Fucking sick, for real. “I get it, Trix. Just...one thing at a time, right? First we get out of Shipp’s hair.”

  The man scrubbed his hands over his face, leaving streaks of sticky, drying blood behind. “Hawk can take you. I’ll have some of the other guys ride out, draw them away from you. Give you your best chance.”

  Trix pressed trembling fingers to her lips. “Thank you. And I’m sorry.”

  Shipp’s voice grew hoarse. “We all are, honey.”

  Everyone except Finn.

  Hawk drove like a crazy man.

  He stared straight ahead, his hands clenched on the wheel, and Trix had to shake away the sick suspicion that he was looking at the windshield, not through it.

  She gripped the back of the front seat and leaned up as Finn double-checked a handgun. “I want one, too,” she told him.

  To his credit, he only hesitated a moment before handing her his. “If something happens, try to cover Hawk. I don’t want to crash.”

  “Not planning on it,” Hawk murmured. “But if something happens, you’d both best hold the fuck on.”

  “I know how to handle a firearm.” It wasn’t something Trix could ever have learned in Five, but with Lex, lessons were mandatory. “I learned from an ex-Eden sniper.”

  Finn lifted a second gun and glanced back at her. “Donnelly?”

  “Yeah. You’ve run into him?”

  “More like he ran into me. When Lex killed that councilman in Five.”

  Trix froze. No one had ever mentioned it to her, not even Jade, who had been at the center of it all. She was the one being abused and drugged, the one Lex had killed to save.

  Then again, why would they tell her? No one knew anything beyond where she’d come from and the fact that she’d been a junkie herself. She’d never breathed Finn’s name to a soul in Sector Four.

  “Oh,” was all she could think to say.

  He studied her face warily. “You didn’t know.”

  The scrutiny left her feeling like she’d fucked up somehow. “I wasn’t a member then. They didn’t exactly invite me to discuss what happened.”

  “Dallas O’Kane almost killed me.” Finn turned to face forward. “But we struck a deal. I framed the leader of Sector Two for the murder. He let me live.”

  A sudden turn nearly pitched her against the door, but it didn’t rock her as hard as his words. “Why?”

  “Why’d I frame her?” He bit off a dark laugh. “So she and Mac would stop playing nice. So I wouldn’t have to drug any more of her girls.”

  A chill shook her, and she let go of the seat to rub her hands over her upper arms. “I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Yeah.” He braced an arm against the window as the car careened again, and she barely heard his question over the roar of the engine. “Did the last girl make it?”

  “Jade,” she supplied. “Her name is Jade. She just took her ink.”

  “Yeah? Maybe O’Kane’s good at pulling off miracles, after all.”

  “No, just more lies,” Trix countered. “The biggest one Mac ever told. Getting clean doesn’t kill people.” It only made them wish they were dead sometimes, especially in the most stinging, desperate throes of withdrawal.

  Finn stared ahead in silence, his jaw clenched. He had to be thinking about those days in his cabin, when he’d endured everything from her crying to her angry, accusatory screams, all with stone-faced acceptance.

  It was what came after that he hadn’t been able to handle—the uncontrollable shaking, the hallucinations. The crying and screaming of an entirely different sort.

  She had to say something. “You tried—” A distant rumble cut off her words. At first she thought it was thunder—

  But then Hawk swore under his breath. “Shit.” He looked out at a dust cloud rising in the distance to their left. “At least two. This’ll get ugly.”

  Trix tightened her fingers around the gun in her hand and tried to recall what Bren had told her about shootouts. Precious little of it had had to do with moving vehicles, but she remembered his admonition to aim for windows instead of tires.

  The engine revved, and the car shot forward. “Hang on,” Hawk ordered.

  Her heart pounded as the dust clouds resolved into two distinct trails, coming in fast and hard.

  Hawk’s hands flexed on the wheel as he angled the car to the right, skimming past their pursuers as gunfire echoed over the roar of the engines. Metal dinged, and Trix had only a moment to realize they were bullets before the back windshield shattered above her head.

  “Get down,” Finn roared as the car lurched again. He turned as if to shoot out the back windshield, but Hawk made a sharp turn, slamming them both against the side of the vehicle. The shiny black car behind them skidded, trying to follow, gravel and dirt pinging skyward in a huge cloud as the wheels lost traction.

  The car behind flipped in a cacophony of crunching metal and shattering glass. Hawk let out a short whoop, but his satisfaction died when the second car sped out of the dust, quickly closing the distance between them.

  “Can you get a shot off on this motherfucker?” he asked tersely.

  Finn rolled down his window and twisted to lean out, ignoring the wind whipping at his hair and clothes. Gunfire erupted behind Trix, and she ducked down in the seat. She wanted to drag Finn back in along with her, but he only grunted when Hawk swerved again, then returned fire.

  She leaned up and caught a glimpse of the passenger and back seats loaded with armed gunmen. There were too many of Beckett’s men pursuing them for them to win a firefight—

  —which meant Hawk had to outmaneuver them. />
  “I thought you were a bunch of gearheads,” she muttered. “Fucking drive.”

  Hawk grunted. “Finn?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Grab the wheel.”

  Finn lunged back into the car and seized the steering wheel. Hawk reached down into the front floorboard and hauled up a massive weapon, something that looked like a two-foot metal tube with handles fused to the sides. He slid a smaller canister inside it, casting a glance her way.

  “Keep your head down,” was all he said before swinging out the window and lifting the tube to rest on his shoulder.

  It looked like the kind of thing that would be loud, but it fired with little more than a whistle. Trix uncovered her ears and peered through the ruined window in time to see the projectile make contact with the second car.

  It exploded, raining fire and shrapnel on the desert.

  Finn bit off a curse and gripped the wheel until his knuckles stood out, stark and white. “You’re a crazy motherfucker.”

  “I know.” Hawk slid back into the car and reclaimed both the gas pedal and the wheel.

  But the relative peace of the moment fractured with a grinding slam as a third car sideswiped them and sent Hawk’s car spinning. The gun flew out of Trix’s hand, and she scrambled for it as the car whirled in dizzying circles.

  Shots fired, and the window above her head exploded. Glass rained down on her as Finn swore again. The car shuddered through another impact, metal screeching against metal.

  Trix lifted her head. The other car was close, close enough to reach out and touch. Instead, she raised her weapon and fired off a shot at the driver. It found its mark, snapping his head to one side as the car careened out of control. It went reeling, scraping in two full revolutions through the dirt before crashing into a boulder.

  Hawk straightened the car and met Trix’s gaze in the rearview mirror briefly before altering their course, cutting slightly back toward where Eden rose in the distance, its tallest towers reflecting the light above its pristine walls. “We’re almost to the border.”

  Trix released the breath she’d been holding, but it came out on a sob. “Good.” Her gun hit the seat with a thump, and she rubbed her shaking hands over her face. “Maybe we can—”