Before the End (Beyond Series Ultimate Glom Edition)

by Kit Rocha

  Don’t you want to be more than an enforcer’s woman? The words echoed in her memory, but her body reacted as if they’d been whispered in her ear. Her skin crawled, her heart thudded, and her upper lip grew damp with sweat.

  She wasn’t looking at her own bed anymore, but the papers strewn across Mac Fleming’s desk. She was small, helpless, and her brain stuttered to a halt, paralyzed by her options—make herself smaller, fold in until nothing could break through the shell at the center of her being.

  Or fight.

  Trix struck out with a whimper, panic eclipsing everything but the need to flee. She scrambled over the bed and slid off the other side. Pain exploded in her side as she fell, hitting the wall on her way down.

  Floorboards creaked under soft footsteps. A huge figure crouched a few feet away—but didn’t touch her. Only his voice, low and gentle. “Trix. It’s okay.”

  The words swam in a haze, and it seemed like an eternity before she understood them. Finn’s voice, her new name. Safety.

  “Oh, God.” She still couldn’t breathe, but she covered her face and gasped out an apology. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, that was stupid—”

  “Shh.” Careful fingers brushed her hair. “You hit the wall pretty hard. Can you get up?”

  “I’m okay.” But when she tried to rise, her knees wouldn’t hold her.

  “Let me—” He touched her arm, but pulled away when she stiffened.

  “No, I’m...” She caught his hand. “I’m okay.”

  “I’m gonna get you off the floor,” he said, moving with heartrending caution. One arm behind her back, one beneath her legs, until she was cradled against the heat of his chest. He rose and carried her not to the bed, but to the couch.

  He sat, leaving her on his lap but dropping his arms to his sides. Trix swallowed hard and leaned her head against his shoulder. “It’s not you,” she whispered.

  Finn wrapped her in a hug then, sinking his fingers into her hair to hold her head. “Something happened to you.”

  She winced. The straightforward words were undeniable, a statement of fact. She’d spent years telling herself that nothing much had happened, nothing special, just the inevitable violations that came along with being a junkie whore on Mac Fleming’s compound.

  Now, she said it aloud for the first time ever. “Something happened to me.”

  “After you left Five?”

  She couldn’t look at him, so she squeezed her eyes shut. “The day I left.”

  “The day Fleming gave you the drugs.” Every muscle in his body tensed, every part of him except for the fingers stroking gently though her hair. “I should have killed him then.”

  “I had to get out of there.” The confession burst forth, a flood of words she couldn’t stem. “I didn’t take anything with me. I didn’t even go home. I knew I could sell the drugs anywhere, so I walked out and I didn’t stop. And you—” She bit her tongue.

  He tilted her head back. “And I would have shot him.”

  He would have gotten himself killed going after Fleming. It was the truth, and it had been one of her reasons for leaving without him, but only one of them. The smallest one, because she could have begged and pleaded and Finn would have left it alone.

  But he never could have stood by and watched while she struggled to get clean.

  Christ, it was tempting to lock that down, keep on hiding it, but she’d made him swear—only the truth from now on. What kind of a hypocritical asshole would she be if she couldn’t give him the same?

  “That’s not all.” Her eyes burned, but she forced herself to form the words anyway. “I had to quit, Finn. I couldn’t do that with you around, breaking down when things got bad.”

  All the stoic strength in his expression shattered as he closed his eyes. “You were dying on me. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “I know.” Her throat ached. “Mac said I made you weak because I made you feel, and then you couldn’t get your shit done.”

  “Bullshit.” He tucked her cheek against his chest, wrapping her in his warmth again. “I wasn’t weak, and he knew it. I was more brutal than ever, because I had someone to fight for. It just wasn’t him, and that scared him.”

  “Everything about you scared him, Finn. Maybe even some things about me, too.” That was the thing about tyrants. They’d always be terrified of people they couldn’t control.

  “But you’re the one he hurt.”

  She straightened and looked down to meet Finn’s tortured gaze. “He raped me. Sometimes I still have nightmares. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t hurt you, too. He had enough cruelty to go around.”

  “You should have told me,” Finn said, his voice rough. Fractured. He shifted his hand to cup her cheek, skin barely making contact with hers. “I scared you.”

  “It happens. Sometimes it’s a word or a sound, or I’ll remember something new, but it—” She wove her fingers into his hair. “It’s not about you. I swear.”

  “But it hurts you, doll.” His hair was soft under her hands, the only soft part of him as he wrapped her in a protective wall of hot skin over hard muscles. “What was it this time?”

  “Something you said, it reminded me of him. It doesn’t matter.”

  He wanted to argue. She could feel it in every tense line of his body. He wanted to demand every detail, drag every bad memory out of her so he could be sure he’d never, ever brush against those wounds.

  And she knew what would happen next, too. He’d pull back into himself, slam the door on those real, raw bits of himself. He’d deny himself the things he needed out of fear of hurting her, never believing that she could need them too. Because the one way Finn had always failed her was by not believing she was strong enough to endure.

  His fingers flexed on her lower back. He wet his lips, and she braced herself for his withdrawal.

  “I should have let you kill him,” was all he said.

  She shook her head, blinking back tears. The moment was so tenuous, and having Finn watch her cry, thinking he’d been the cause of it, could snap it in half.

  She kissed his cheek instead, then rested her forehead against his temple. In spite of the pain of her old scars ripping open and the anguish of telling him the truth, she felt lighter already. Free. “He asked me if I wanted to be more than an enforcer’s woman. And I hadn’t even considered it, you know? It wasn’t how I thought of myself—your woman. I was someone you didn’t want to care about, no matter how much you did. But as soon as he said it, it felt right.”

  “Right for Sector Five,” he murmured. “I’m not an enforcer anymore. I’m an O’Kane woman’s man.”

  His breath shivered over her skin as he spoke, and she smiled. “Even better.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Trix knew that, sooner or later, she’d have to talk to Mad.

  He was in the main warehouse, packing bottles into crates that had the O’Kane logo burned into the side. His shaggy, shoulder-length hair was scraped back from his face in a tight knot, leaving a clear view of his fierce expression—and the bruise decorating one sharp cheekbone.

  He looked pissy, but when his gaze snagged on her, the tight set of his eyes still softened.

  Under all his anger, Mad cared, and that just made it worse.

  Trix crossed her arms over her chest and stared at him.

  After a tense moment, he curled both hands around the wooden crate and looked away. “I’m worried about you, Trix, and I’m not the only one.”

  “Bullshit.”

  The wood creaked under his grip. “We miss you. Since when do you spend every night hiding in your room?”

  She couldn’t keep the sadness out of her voice. “Since if I come out of it, I have to deal with you being a bully, and then telling me it’s for my own good.”

  He flinched. “That’s harsh, sweetheart.”

  “So own it.” She stepped forward. “He hurt Jade. He didn’t want to, but he did, and that’s why you’re so angry.”

  “Damn i
t, it’s not all about Jade.” Mad shoved upright and ran his hands roughly over his hair. “It’s about the choices he made, and trusting someone who’d go that far to save his own skin. I know we’re all survivors here, but some lines a man shouldn’t cross.”

  Her throat burned. “Is that what you tell Bren? Cruz?”

  “You weren’t here when Bren joined up,” Mad countered. “No one trusted him at first. He earned it. Like Cruz has been earning it, bleeding for us damn near every day.”

  “Cruz didn’t have to put up with this shit. Bren vouched for him, and he helped us out, and that was enough.”

  Just as her attempts to vouch for Finn hadn’t been. She didn’t need to say it—it was stark in Mad’s expression, riding hard alongside his own shame at not being able to trust. Mad would never want to hurt her by doubting her, but he was doing both.

  And he knew it.

  “I want to be wrong,” he said finally, letting his hands drop to his sides. “I hope I am. If it makes it easier, I’ll tell Dallas I need to take another tour of the sectors. You won’t have to deal with me, and neither will Finn.”

  “Why? You think it’ll be easier to look at him when you get back?” she asked softly. “Or do you think it won’t matter, because he’ll fuck up and be gone by then?”

  “Or maybe he’ll prove himself. He can’t do it from your bedroom.”

  She didn’t want to cry anymore. She wanted to hit him, slap him right across the bruise on his cheek. “Six did it just fine from Bren’s.”

  He recoiled as if she had hit him. “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Yeah?” She shrugged and took a step back. “I guess I could stand here and let you explain to me how it’s different, but you know what? You don’t deserve it.”

  “Trix—”

  “You consider yourself a champion of the wounded, but the truth is that it only counts when someone fits your idea of what that means. You don’t give a damn about what Finn had to go through, what he had to do, how much it hurt him. You don’t care, because he’s not staring up at you with big eyes, asking you to fix the world.”

  She took another step back and stumbled over a crate sitting on the floor beside a packing table. Mad lunged to steady her, but she shook him off. “No, Adrian. I don’t need you to rescue me, okay?”

  She and Mad had always been close, and the anger tearing through her brought an even deeper sadness. But she turned and walked out, her head held high as her heart thudded a painful rhythm. Because he was wrong—she felt it in every cell, every fiber of her being. Wrong about Finn, wrong about her.

  Worst of all, wrong about himself.

  Finn spent an hour working alongside Bren in silence before he finally came out and said it. “I don’t know how to make friends.”

  “Yeah?” Bren swiped a hand across his sweaty forehead. “Can’t imagine it was a highly valued skill in Five.”

  “Not really.” The best part of working in the garage with Bren was the ever-present bucket of beer. Finn pulled a bottle out of the melting ice and swiped water off the side. “I had one friend, but that was more his idea than mine.” And for all he knew, Ryder had only made friends with him to further whatever goal kept him in Five.

  “It’s not that hard. Find people you like and be yourself,” Bren advised. “If they don’t appreciate that, they’d be shitty friends anyway.”

  It felt too much like what he was already doing. Floating by, letting things land however they fell. It would be easier to lock himself in a room with Trix and lose the key, but easier wasn’t what she needed. She needed her family.

  And he needed her family’s forgiveness. “Mad pretty much hates me. Is that all about the girl from Two?”

  Bren kept working for a moment, then straightened and looked at him. “Hard to say for sure. It’s part of it, a big part. But there’s also Trix.”

  “The shit from our past?”

  “I’d be lying if I said we didn’t all wonder,” Bren admitted. “Why you didn’t get her the fuck out of there.”

  The most damning question, the one Trix never asked because she already knew the answer. He’d been too weak to do what needed to be done. He hadn’t believed in her inner core of strength or her will to survive. “I thought about it, early on. Maybe someone could tell, because one of my dealers gave her laced product. The first prototype of the addictive additive.”

  “So then she was hooked.” Bren searched his face. “You tried, didn’t you?”

  “Once.” His gut still twisted when he thought about those horrible days in his cabin. He’d almost gone back after he’d lost her to burn the thing to the ground, but leaving it standing had seemed like the punishment he deserved. A painful memorial to all the many ways he’d fucked up. “I watched her crawl to the edge of death. When she begged me to save her, I broke. I couldn’t do it.”

  “She’s never talked about it.”

  “Would you?”

  “Nope.” Bren went back to his task.

  Finn drank half of the beer, as if he could wash away the bitter taste of his failure. He couldn’t change the past, but he could make amends. And trying to settle this with Mad was the choice of a man still stuck in Sector Five. A man who believed the hurt he’d put on a woman was a debt he owed the men in her life.

  Time to shake free of that bullshit and start thinking as crazy as an O’Kane. “I want to do something for Jade. Give her something she needs, without getting in her face.”

  Bren wiped his hands on a rag as he considered that. “She has a garden—up on the roof of the main building. She’s having a bitch of a time figuring out how to water it without using up our fresh stores.”

  There were hundreds of creative ways to catch and filter rain, even more ways to play with the water filtration system common in any of the sector buildings built before the Flares. “Can you show me?”

  “Sure.”

  He finished his beer while Bren put away his tools, then followed him out the garage door and across the open space in the middle of the compound. You could still see the roads and sidewalks, evidence of what had been a four-way intersection before Dallas claimed the buildings on every street corner.

  A bar and offices. A garage. Two warehouses, a huge building full of living quarters, a workshop, and a storage room. There was chaos and life in the sprawl, signs of an organization that had outgrown itself again and again. They’d had to make do, more often than not, repurposing what a building was meant for, using the tools at hand to create what they needed.

  It was the sort of problem that had always fascinated him, so maybe it wasn’t surprising that he felt interest stir when Bren led him up a set of exterior stairs and onto a wide roof.

  The skeletal base of the greenhouse was already there. It covered half the available space, with a stack of lumber and tools crowding another third of the roof. With the right reflective material on the tops and sides and a little clever engineering, they’d be able to capture the sunlight and cultivate plants even in the cooler months.

  They needed irrigation, insulation. Energy, but solar power was easy to come by in the desert, if you had the resources to install the right equipment.

  Finn crossed the roof to grip the metal frame, testing its strength. “My mother was a mechanic. Before the Flares, I mean.”

  “No shit? What’d she work on?”

  “Sustainable tech. She was one of the contractors they hired to complete the city, I guess.” It was why she’d been there during the Flares, even though she’d been heavily pregnant with him. “That’s how she fed us, those first years. She could take garbage someone else had thrown away and make something out of it.”

  Those first years. A man like Bren, a soldier trained by the elite forces of Eden, wouldn’t miss the words—but he didn’t ask.

  Instead, he nudged a pile of boards with his boot. “We have lots of stuff stored here. Dallas collects things. Or, if you listen to Lex, hoards them.”

  “I can probably rig
something up, then.” He hesitated, flexing his fingers. “Should someone warn her? Don’t want to make it look like I’m trying to buy her off, but she might not be anxious to look at my face.”

  “What do you think?”

  That Jade would be within her rights to stab him in the balls, since the last time he’d seen her, he’d been advising Lex and Dallas to help her with a soft, quick trip out of the world. It had been the only mercy he could imagine, sparing her the agony he’d watched Trix suffer for those miserable days of withdrawal.

  His habit of underestimating women was clearly going to haunt him for a while. And maybe that was the answer. “I guess I should nut up and ask her, in case she wants to tell me to fuck right the hell off.”

  The corner of Bren’s mouth curved up in a smile. “Now you’re catching on.”

  Only by going against every damn thing he’d ever learned. But those lessons had been ill-fitting, driven into him with pain and punishment. Some had never really stuck at all, and some had lingered only as long as the pain had before his own stubborn nature reasserted itself.

  He’d been fighting against the current for so damn long that letting it push him in the other direction was a relief. And it was lazy.

  Enough floating. It was time to swim.

  Lili

  After five years as a token wife, Lili knew the proper tempo of a supplication.

  Not before dinner, of course. And not without preparation. Every detail mattered, though her husband would never acknowledge the hours she spent buffing and polishing. She had come to appreciate makeup, because clever application could add life and warmth to her face, even when she felt frozen solid beneath the skin.

  The illusion was enough, as long as it was perfect. Perfection was invisible. Expected. It was the flaws that distracted, and she couldn’t afford distractions. Not tonight.

  She set a pristine table. Soup and freshly baked bread. His favorite fish, marinated in the last of the bourbon. The price of liquor seemed to increase as tensions with Sector Four did. It had cost her a diamond bracelet to secure one bottle of O’Kane whiskey, but she counted it worth the loss.