by Kit Rocha
It hurt so much more, having a glimpse of something perfect only to realize it couldn't exist, that it fell apart when times got hard. "I have to find someplace, but I'll go." Yet another way she'd betrayed herself. It had been years since she'd kept up a place outside the compound, somewhere to go if things went bad. "If you can give me a few days--"
"No." He advanced on her, and she could hear the thunder. "This isn't how it ends. This isn't what kills us. Not stupid, fucking words."
"What else could it be?" They'd always lived loud, almost violently. Screaming and shouting. It made sense for their relationship to die quietly.
He stopped toe-to-toe with her, looming over her, taking up all the air, all the light. "Not this. Not her."
"Dallas..." All she had left were harsh words, damning ones, and she had to soften them by lifting her hand to his cheek. "It wasn't her."
Pain flashed across his face, jagged as lightning as the storm broke.
And he kissed her.
No, not a kiss. Nothing as gentle as that. His fingers snagged in her hair, yanking her head back as his mouth came down, forceful and desperate. Bruising.
He'd always touched her with care, even when he gave it to her rough, but not now. This wasn't desire but punishment, not need but some twisted version of it.
Not possession but confinement.
Lex let her hands hang by her sides, and the collar fell to the floor. No matter what, she couldn't fight. A dark thread of longing was already unfurling in her belly, and if she fought him, it would all get tangled up in sex.
His teeth dug into her lip, and he growled. "Gonna pretend you don't feel it? You don't feel us?"
Of course she did. She'd felt it the moment she first laid eyes on him, the zing of awareness that hadn't faded over time but deepened into something inescapable, and strong enough to tear them both to shreds.
She shuddered and gripped his shirt, clenching her fingers in the fabric. "This part isn't the problem."
"But this part is so good." He backed her toward the wall, every step pushing her deeper into his room, deeper into him. "Worth fighting through the rest of it. What happened to trusting me?"
She'd given it all to him, and he'd let her down. Because there was a flip side to that trust, an implicit promise that if she handed him her heart, he'd always put her first. And he hadn't.
"I'll hate both of us," she whispered. "Can't you see that? If I keep letting you do these things to me without standing up for myself, it won't matter. There won't be enough of me left to love you."
Her back thumped against the wall. He was smothering her. So warm, so strong, so familiar. "So stand up for yourself. Just don't walk away."
She put her hands flat on his chest and pushed. "Stop it."
"That's it." He slapped his hands to the wall on either side of her head. "Stand up to me."
She'd finally given in, opened herself. Trusted him. "Not like this, Dallas."
"Fucking fight me, Lex."
"I shouldn't have to!" Shaking, she ducked under his arm.
She only made it two steps before his fingers closed around her shoulder. Desperation drove her to slap away his hand, then dive for one of the knives on the floor.
His expression hardened as she held the blade in front of her. Furrowed brow, compressed lips, narrowed eyes--but she couldn't tell what was going on behind that dark gaze. "Would you stab me, Lex?"
"Only if you make me."
His lips twisted into a terrible smile. "Good. Get out before you have to."
Her eyes stung, and her throat burned. Maybe he understood and maybe he didn't, but more words would get her nowhere. "Fine." She dropped the knife and turned for the door.
As she reached for the doorknob, his voice rolled over her again. "This doesn't mean I'm giving up. Cerys and Two can burn. I'll show you, Lexie. Somehow, I'll fucking well show you. I'm not letting you go."
"I know," she said as she slipped out the door.
It was what she was afraid of.
Bren
She was trying to be sneaky, but she was watching the show.
The door behind the unofficial VIP section led to the back staircase, and stood mostly in shadows. Bren doubted anyone else had noticed her there, braced against the jamb with the fingers of one hand on the doorknob, as if she needed her escape route ready to go.
Out on the stage, beneath the garish lights, Ace was flogging a woman. He had her bent over a low table, completely naked and tied so that all he had to do was turn his wrist to flick the leather tails against her exposed pussy.
And Six was watching every quick slap.
Bren studied her profile in the low light. "Do you like the idea?"
She started at his voice and jerked her gaze from the stage, as if she'd gotten caught doing something far more incriminating than watching. "What idea? Getting whipped?"
"That," he agreed easily, "or being on the stage. Not all the shows involve pain."
She folded her arms across her chest, under her breasts. Defensive and wary, and he knew the answer before she spoke. "No, not really. I've never liked being the entertainment."
He stopped beside the curtain and listened to the woman onstage moan and plead. "Is that what you see out there?"
"Maybe. I don't know." She shivered and glanced at him, her expression torn by honest confusion. "Is she acting?"
"Nope." He vaguely recognized the woman as one of Ace's regulars. "She likes it like this. Sometimes he stops when she's ready to fuck, and other times he keeps on whipping her."
"Oh." She seemed flustered, maybe more so when she realized how close she'd drifted to him. No matter how many careful feet he put between them, Six always seemed to cover the distance in a dozen shifts of position or tiny shuffling steps, and she never really relaxed until they stood shoulder to shoulder.
So shy--not about sex, necessarily, but pleasure. Bren held her gaze but tilted his head. "Tell me what you see when you look at that."
She hesitated. "You're not gonna like it."
"Probably not." But he couldn't counter it with his own point of view if she never said it.
Wetting her lips, she glanced at the stage again, just in time to watch Ace drive a choked plea from his lover's lips with a skillful application of leather. Six flinched at the woman's throaty cries and looked away. "A man whipping a woman. And a bunch of other men getting off on it."
"Abso-fucking-lutely. What else?"
Her expression tightened. "That's it. I didn't even see that she liked the pain. You told me that."
"What if I told you that was part of the fantasy for her? Being watched?"
She didn't say anything at first. She took his words and digested them, then turned back to the stage and studied it again, a tiny furrow of concentration appearing between her brows. "So she's using the men to get her fantasy?"
So careful, too, those little leaps in logic. "In a way. She isn't making the best of being on the stage, Six. It's what she wants."
"I don't think I could want that," she admitted after a moment, and there was apology in the glance she threw him. "The people watching, I mean. That was always the part I hated most."
A tiny slip, the kind of glimpse into her former life that made him want to dig up Wilson Trent and kill him some more. Instead, he smiled. "No shows for you, then."
Her slight exhale of relief sounded almost sad. But her gaze swung back to the stage with renewed curiosity, as if the words had freed her from a sense of foreboding. "The pain... Does it feel good because she always likes it, or because Ace is doing something special?"
"To hear Ace tell it, everything he does is special." Bren leaned closer. "Have you ever had an itch, one of those crazy ones that you can't stop thinking about? On your back or your arm, wherever, but all you could fucking think about was scratching it?"
Still watching the stage, she nodded.
"That's just pain. You scratch your skin and it confuses all the nerves, scrambles them so they can't f
eel the itch anymore."
"I didn't know that." She shivered, tickling where her arm brushed his, and changed the subject so abruptly he wasn't sure he'd heard her right at first. "You can fuck me if you want to."
Bren blinked at her. Instead of an invitation, it felt more like paying the executioner before laying your head on his chopping block. "Don't take this the wrong way, but if you really wanted to fuck me, you wouldn't need to tell me it was okay."
She winced and looked away. "I don't know if I want to fuck," she admitted after an awkward moment. "But I don't mind it. And the fucking comes with other stuff here. Everyone's always touching."
Comfort. Connection. "If that's what you want, ask for that. I'll give it to you."
It took her two deep breaths and a wary glance at him to form the words, and they came in a whisper. "Do you mind? If you don't want to..."
He pulled her close with one arm, wrapping it around her body as he moved her in front of him. Her body nestled against his, curvy and strong. He stroked his other hand down her arm and whispered in her ear. "Watch."
Ace had moved on to fucking the blonde on stage. She moaned and thrashed fitfully against her bindings, more so every time Ace slammed deep and paused to work her reddened shoulders with the flogger. He had a sense of theatrics suited to the stage, and a finely tuned understanding of the woman beneath him.
Six squirmed, goose bumps rising beneath Bren's fingers. "I believe you now. She's...definitely not faking."
"Not even a little."
"And you like watching?"
"I like pleasure." Her skin heated, and he slowed his strokes. "Everything about it."
"Oh." A sound, caught somewhere between a gasp and a moan. On the stage, Ace's blonde tipped over the edge into a screaming orgasm, and Six turned her cheek toward Bren's shoulder and closed her eyes.
As if she couldn't watch.
But that was okay. He soothed her with a soft noise and whispered the promise he'd made himself, the one he kept giving her over and over. "Plenty of time."
Chapter Twenty
No one had ever really understood Dallas's reluctance to screw one of the women in the gang. Oh, they pretended to, nodded and smiled, but most of them thought he was fucking crazy for not riding every willing girl who crawled into his lap. God knew there were some smoking hot ladies sporting his ink, but aside from Lex, he'd never been all that tempted.
The guys didn't think he was crazy anymore.
Word spread. He didn't know how, but it always did. The first whispers had popped up the moment Lex set foot outside his room without the collar, and they'd swelled from there. By the next morning, everyone in the gang knew that Lex and Dallas were fighting, and not in their usual way.
Dallas had expected the girls to turn on him. He hadn't anticipated how cold they could get, but their disapproval didn't shock him. The number of men who'd joined them in expressing protective anger did.
Maybe it shouldn't have. Lex championed the women, to be sure, but she was just as prominent a presence in the men's lives. She was the one who dealt with all the details that made life comfortable, the one who kept everyone happy and healthy and harmoniously fucking at frequent parties.
In retrospect, he probably should have expected the men to turn on him first.
The worst part was agreeing with them. He had fucked up. He'd told Lex all the wrong things at exactly the wrong time. Trying to keep his plan from her had been a fool's game. It might have worked before, when they'd lived parallel lives, but not now that they were all tangled up in each other day and night.
Well. They had been.
The knock on his door startled him so much he clenched his fist and snapped a pencil in half. No one had willingly gotten within ten damn feet of him all day--the ones that weren't pissed at him were wary of his temper--which made him wonder what the hell could drive someone into his domain. "Come in!"
The door popped open, and Dylan Jordan strolled into his office. "Good evening to you too, O'Kane."
"Doc." A chill shivered down Dallas's spine as he studied the doctor--whose presence usually meant bad shit had gone down. "You here on business?"
"Sort of." The man dropped into a chair on the other side of the desk and tried to smooth his dark hair into some semblance of order. It didn't work. "I came by to see what the hell's going on around here."
Christ. If the whispers had turned to grumbles that were rippling beyond the gang already, he really was in deep shit. "Who's been shooting off their mouth?"
Doc arched an eyebrow. "Lex sent me a message."
The chill turned to ice. "Saying?"
"She asked me what the process would be for removing her tattoos."
"What?"
"Her cuffs." The man said it like he was talking about the weather. About nothing. "And something about a new one. A name."
The name hurt like a knife in the gut, but even that had nothing on the cuffs. Lex was O'Kane. She'd helped shape what they had become, had helped touch the life of every person wearing O'Kane marks. "You're fucking kidding me."
Doc snorted. "I told her I wouldn't touch the ink unless you said so, but a wise man would make sure she didn't ask me again. I don't know if I'll say no next time."
If it had been anyone else, Dallas would have snarled. He still wanted to, but threats and intimidation were wasted on Dylan Jordan. No matter how many women threw themselves at him, desperate to save him, the man was as self-destructive an asshole as Dallas had ever met. Sometimes he thought Doc pitted himself against dangerous men in the hopes that one would eventually put him out of his enduring misery.
Dallas didn't plan on it. The man was too damn useful to kill. Of course, telling Lex he wouldn't remove the ink without Dallas's permission was damn near suicidal on its own. "You must not have told her no in person, because I don't see any stab wounds."
For a long moment, all the man did was stare at him. "You're pretty goddamn despicable, aren't you?"
"I run a gang of bootleggers," he replied, fighting to keep his temper and his panic on a tight leash. Pretty damn difficult when he could feel his perfect fucking life crumbling beneath him. "I am what I am."
"Yeah? Well, what you are is an ass." Doc rose, shaking his head. "Lex didn't try to cut me when I told her. She just cried."
A knife in the gut? A pinprick compared to how those three words felt. She just cried. Lex, indomitable, unbreakable Lex. He'd coaxed her into trust, shoved and pushed until she let down all those cold, hard walls--
And then he'd hurt her.
Christ.
"Uh-huh." The man dragged a tin from his pocket and popped a small white tablet into his mouth. "Fix it, would you? I don't like it when you kids fight."
Kids, as if Jordan was some kind of fucking sage elder instead of three or four years older than him. Dallas didn't know whether to laugh or strangle the motherfucker. "Gee, Doc, I was having a great fucking time, but if you insist."
"Sarcasm doesn't suit you nearly as well as you think, O'Kane."
"I save my heartfelt confessions for the people wearing my ink." He said it without thinking and damn near winced. Nobody wearing ink wanted to hear his heartfelt confessions. They didn't even want to look at him. He'd always stood slightly apart, but this feeling of standing alone was new. And miserable.
And if Lex was crying, he deserved it.
History fucking loved to repeat itself.
This time, it was Lex shoving her belongings into a bag as Noelle looked on, horrified and outraged. "You don't have to do this, Lex. It isn't fair. It isn't right."
At least she wasn't trying to talk her off the ledge. "Damn right it isn't fair. But it is what it is."
"Bullshit." Crossing the room, Noelle grabbed Lex's arm and held it up, forced her to stare at the ink Doc had refused to remove. "That is a promise. You're the one who taught me that. It's a promise, and being in Dallas's bed has nothing to do with it. This is your home and we're your family."
A truth that
had changed the moment she'd accepted his claim. Lex closed her eyes. "Now you know why his women were always outsiders. It's easier for them to leave eventually."
"Because he drives them away?" Noelle's hands framed Lex's face. "Don't let him. He doesn't get to do that, not to you and not to us. If you don't want to stay in your room, come stay with us."
"This is me, all me," she countered. "Dallas isn't making me go. He doesn't even want me to. But I have to."
"Oh, Lex. No." Noelle released her only to curl an arm around her waist, tugging her toward the couch. "Come on and sit with me for a few minutes. Tell me why you think this is your fault."
"Not fault, not like that." She sank to the cushions and leaned her head against Noelle's shoulder. Support had been hard to come by the last couple of days, mostly because Lex had to hold back from accepting it. It only reminded her of all she'd be leaving behind. "There are just so many things, so many reasons it would be easier to stay. And I can't."
"You should be able to," Noelle whispered. "What Dallas did to you was wrong. You say he's not driving you away, but he is."
It was hard to know for certain when Dallas seemed so oblivious to the real problem, and so sure of himself that she couldn't help but second-guess herself. Noelle had reacted with gratifying outrage, but even that couldn't erase the doubt.
It drove her to grip Noelle's hand. "You understand, don't you? Dallas has no idea what he did, and it's making me wonder if I'm just crazy."
"He put his ambition before you," Noelle said immediately. She traced one of the ink marks swirling across her own shoulder before reaching out to touch Lex's throat. "He asked you to give up all your defenses, and then he didn't protect you. It's wrong. Jasper tried to send me to Eden, but he was cutting out his own heart because he thought it'd keep me safe. Even if he didn't do it, Dallas was considering cutting out yours, just to get more of something he has too much of already."
Lex's throat went tight. It was everything she'd been too wounded and twisted up to say, every reason she'd been betrayed not only by Dallas's actions, but by his confusion. Hearing it all laid bare hurt, so much she couldn't breathe.