Before the End (Beyond Series Ultimate Glom Edition)

by Kit Rocha

  “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—”

  The sound of engines rose again, sending her heart lurching painfully into her throat. But these were motorcycles, not cars, sunlight glinting off chrome as they formed a line between Hawk’s car and the edge of Sector Four.

  Hawk tensed, easing off the gas as they coasted toward the wide, pitted road that marked the official boundary between sectors. “Friend or foe?”

  “I—I don’t...” Then one of the riders pulled off his helmet, and her heart dropped out of her throat and into her stomach. “Mad.”

  The car hadn’t even stopped when she pushed at the back door. It swung open with an angry creak, dented and hanging from its hinges, but Trix ignored it, ignored everything as she tumbled out and ran toward the line of bikes.

  Mad met her halfway, catching her against his chest in a rough hug. “Hey, sweetheart,” he murmured, turning them to put his body between her and Hawk’s car. “I got you. You’re home now.”

  She clung to him, desperate to ground herself against the adrenaline-fueled rush of relief. “We ran, but Beckett—Jesus, I didn’t know if we’d make it—” Her voice broke, and she shook her head and kept babbling
. “And oh my God, Zan. Tell me he’s okay. Please.”

  “Zan’s okay,” he said quietly, edging her toward the bikes. “Beckett lifted the embargo, and Dallas’s regen tech got there in time.”

  The words sent a chill up her spine, and she jerked back. “Beckett tried to kill us.”

  Gravel crunched behind them, and Mad spun, drawing his gun so fast Hawk froze mid-step, slowly holding both hands out to his side. “I just gave the lady a ride.”

  “Stop it.” Trix pushed at Mad’s arm, driving the barrel of the gun toward the ground. “He helped us get here, me and Finn.” She gestured toward the car, but Finn was still sitting in the passenger seat, the door ajar—

  His face deathly pale.

  He met her eyes and worked for a smile. He shoved the door wide and climbed out of the car only to crumple to his knees, and the last thing she saw before he hit the ground was the blood blooming across the front of his shirt.

  Doc

  The first thing Dr. Dylan Jordan did was fill a syringe with enough potassium chloride to stop a fucking elephant’s heart.

  He didn’t use it, but it was there, within easy grasp, and its mere presence made him feel better about digging a bullet out of a man he’d much rather kill.

  “Why are we saving him?”

  Adrian Maddox could move silently when he wanted to, that much was certain. Dylan tilted his head without looking up. “Because he brought Trix back.”

  Mad eased the door shut and crossed to the opposite side of the bed. “How do we know he didn’t take her in the first place?”

  “You saw her,” Dylan answered absently as he reached for a pair of forceps. “Did she look like a woman who was scared of him?”

  “No.” It came out grudgingly, and Mad crouched down to put himself on eye level with Dylan. “But we both know that doesn’t prove a damn thing. Just means it’ll hurt more when he betrays her.”

  Such a clever, beautiful, vengeful man. “Someone else might buy that...but I’m not someone else,” he murmured. “You and I both know what this is really about.”

  Of course Mad denied it. He would always deny it, because he wanted to be the sainted hero. “It’s about him posing a danger to the gang. It’s about the people he could hurt.”