by Kit Rocha
The damn man was going to make him ask. "Catalina's the easy one. What about Tatiana?"
Dallas tilted his head, and Zan knew that look. He was picking his words, deciding just how much truth he was going to drop. "Has she talked to you?" he asked finally.
Not once. Not a single word since the night of the blackout. The night her shop burned to the ground.
At first, he figured she needed some time, maybe even some distance, just to get her feet solidly beneath her again. But as the hours stretched into days, he slowly began to realize that the time and distance might not be enough. He'd half-expected it—but it still hurt. It hurt like hell.
He had to answer, so he shrugged. "No. I guess she's been busy."
"Yeah, she has." With that cryptic remark, Dallas squeezed Zan's good shoulder. "It's not my secret to tell. But if you want her, you need to find her. And ask her."
Ask her what? If she could handle belonging to him? He didn't need to ask, because she had told him—over and over—that she couldn't. Even more damning, she'd shown him.
But maybe Dallas was right. He wouldn't like her answer, Zan knew that much already, but he couldn't move on until he'd heard her say it.
He cleared his throat. "Is fight night still on for this weekend?"
"You know it." Dallas grinned. "Gotta make the usual show, remind everyone why they don't fuck with us. You think you're up to it?"
His shoulder hadn't hurt in days. It was the rest of him that ached. "Yeah, I'm up for it."
"Good. And, Zan?"
He paused with his hand on the open cage door.
"It wasn't my idea."
"What wasn't?"
"You'll know. Go find her."
Cryptic as hell, and more than a little maddening. "You get more like Lex every day, you know that?"
He walked out of the warehouse with Dallas's laughter echoing behind him.
Zan headed for his room to clean up. Talking to Tatiana wasn't enough, not after days of silence. He needed to make a good impression, needed to let her know that he wasn't coming to her casually. He had a purpose, and he was determined to see it through.
He opened his door and stopped short at the sight of Tatiana in his bed.
Naked.
She clutched the sheet to her chest as he stared at her, her cheeks flushed. "This would have worked better without the blanket, but I was afraid someone else might open the door."
Her words barely penetrated the buzzing in his ears. Because she wasn't just naked in his bed, under the covers. She had ink—around her wrists, no less—the O'Kane emblem in all its glory, with everything that meant.
It wasn't my idea. Dallas's words suddenly made perfect fucking sense.
Her gaze followed his, and she held up her wrist. "I made a new deal. Dallas jumped pretty fast when he realized he could ink me and Catalina and wave us under everyone's noses at the crafter meeting tomorrow. Stones wearing O'Kane ink."
The confession jarred him out of his shock. "Is that all it is?" he asked her quietly. "A show to let everyone know how in control Dallas is?"
"No, that's why Dallas agreed." She touched her wrist, tracing the top of the skull. "I agreed because of you."
"So you can wind up hating me?" It was the only thing that had a chance of hurting worse than losing her now.
"I talked to Jared."
Zan managed not to wince. Maybe she was pissed, and she just had a weird way of showing it, because he couldn't imagine she was happy about him interfering in her business. "Yeah?"
Tatiana reached out a hand. "Come here, Zan."
If he did it—if he took that step— "Just say it, Tatiana. Tell me why you're here."
"I have a deal with Dallas O'Kane. I'm going to have my own shop again, and access to Jared's customer list. Give me a year and I'll have enough money to do any damn thing I want." She sat up slowly, letting the sheet slip to her waist, leaving her bare except for her wild hair and that bright, fresh ink. "I don't have to be here. I want to be here."
She was beautiful, and just looking at her like this made his throat go tight. "Because you don't need me."
"I need you." Her voice wavered. "Not to survive. But for everything else. For this..." She touched the ink again. "I still don't know how to believe in Dallas. But you do, and that's enough for me. You're too good of a man to be loyal to a bad one."
The words sparked a guilt that rushed through him, obliterating everything else. "I'm not good, Tatiana. I wanted you. I have for a long time, I didn't lie about that. But I wouldn't have come to you if Dallas hadn't needed your support."
Pain flashed through her eyes, twisting the knife of guilt deeper. She clutched at the sheet, hauling it up, as if she felt too naked. "Why?"
The truth. Would it fix everything, or be the last break between them? "Because you might need me...but you don't want to."
She closed her eyes. "It's not that simple. I needed Gia. Needed her. I might not have survived without her. And I felt it every day, even though she never held it over my head. It made me afraid to be myself, and the person Gia wanted, that person I was trying to be...she never existed."
His chest throbbed with pain as he eased closer and sat on the end of the mattress. "I wouldn't change you, sweetheart. Not a single goddamn thing."
Her breathing hitched. "I thought that's why you did it. Talked to Jared without talking to me. I thought it meant...that you wanted me to be able to support myself, if it mattered to me."
"I want you to be happy," he explained. "Whatever that means. Whether I'm part of that perfect picture you have in your head or not."
She rose to her knees to face him. "That makes you a good man. And I'm not afraid to need a man who doesn't want me to be less than I can be."
For the first time, Zan let himself take it all in—the words, the ink, the big eyes. Her being in his bed was a promise and a question, all rolled into one.
All he had to do was say yes and take it.
"You can stay here without me," he whispered, reaching out to touch the fresh tattoo encircling one of her wrists. "That's what this means. That can be your choice, and I'll treat you—love you—the way I do everyone else."
She caught his hand and dragged it up to her face. "Show me how you'll love me if I stay here with you."
"If?" The pain vanished, replaced by a different kind of sting. Hunger, satisfaction. Possession. Zan slid his hand past her cheek, into her hair, and pulled her closer. "I thought you already said yes."
She smiled. "I've been naked in your bed, and it's taken you this long to touch me. Maybe you don't want me."
"No if there." He held her dark, dark gaze as he eased her back on the bed. "I'm a good soldier, Tatiana. I work hard, take care of my family, and I never ask for anything. I never even thought about it—until you."
"You don't have to ask." She stroked her hands up his arms before resting them on the mattress above her head. "When I'm in this bed, I'm yours."
"And out of it?"
"You're mine."
"I can live with that." He lowered his mouth to hers but hovered just shy of a kiss, teasing them both. "On one condition."
"What condition?"
"No more walls, Tatiana. Just us."
She arched up to brush her lips over his. "I can live with that."
It was a sweet promise, one that tugged at him as he deepened the kiss. The best promise, the only one that mattered—that she could live without him, sure, but why the fuck would she want to?
He rolled her more fully beneath him before breaking away. He twined his fingers with hers and lifted her arm to study her freshly healed tattoo. "I know this is new, but how about another one?"
Her breath caught. "Yours?"
One answer, one word that covered it all, and it echoed between them. "Mine."
Beyond Innocence
For years, Jared has existed on the fringes of both Eden society and Dallas O'Kane's Sector Four gang. He travels between these worlds, protected by hi
s money and power--money he earned selling his body, and power that comes from knowing secrets. He's untouchable—until he starts a new life gathering intelligence for the O'Kanes.
Lili Fleming walked out of Sector Five with a gun, the bloodstained clothes on her back, and an icy determination to survive. She finds herself in a world where people live hard and love harder, and nothing's more terrifying than how much the O'Kanes wake her up, make her feel—especially Jared.
Emotion is a risk he can't afford, and a complication she doesn't need. But neither can resist the lust simmering between them, and the sparks that could either melt the ice around both their hearts…or get them killed. Because the only thing more dangerous than loving an O'Kane is loving a spy.
Chapter One
Two pills stood between Lili and damnation.
She tried not to look at them as she applied her eyeliner, her hand steady from years of practice. The rest of her was shaking, but the line was perfect—smooth black kohl along her lower lash line. She could smudge it into a smoky shadow, but that might be too subtle for the night's festivities.
Her gaze dipped to the two white tablets lined up beside the empty bottle. Just two. She'd come to Sector Four with so few possessions to her name—a gun, a nightgown, and a fur coat. But that coat had deep pockets, and she'd filled them with high-end drugs before she fled her home. At the edge of the desk, seven empty bottles traced the desperation of her last few months, her attempts to cope.
After tonight, she'd have to do it on her own.
She jerked her gaze back to the mirror. No, subtle wouldn't cut it. These O'Kane women were bold. Brazen. Survival meant adaptation. She had learned to play wife when her life depended on it. Now she would learn to play something else.
Whore.
She could hear her dead husband snarling the word at her, taunting her with the most degrading insult he could imagine. Nothing was so crass and despised in Sector Five as a woman who denied a man her body until money exchanged hands. Except perhaps a woman who denied a man her body altogether.
Making that mistake had almost gotten Lili killed.
Forcing back the memory, she thickened the line beneath her eye. She wasn't bold or brazen, but she wasn't meek and submissive, either, no matter how successfully she'd played that role. The makeup was her mask. If she applied enough of it, she could disappear into someone else.
The pills would make it easier. Lex hadn't wanted to let her keep them, but Lili had begged. She'd been numb enough to survive the shame of that. Hell, she'd been so numb there had been no shame. She'd lost her family and her life—she hadn't been ready to give up her peace of mind.
So Lex let her keep the pills, but she made it clear there would be no more. And Lili had tried to make them last. She rationed them out, saving them for when her own reserves of icy numbness just weren't enough.
Two pills left, and not even the strongest ones. She'd sacrificed the last of those to endure the most recent fight night, insulating herself from the raw violence and terrifying lust. Every horrifying warning her mother had ever whispered about sex paled in the face of brutal reality—a man, bloody from battle, slamming a woman against the side of the cage to sate his urges in front of the entire sector.
It was uncivilized. It was barbaric. But the women of this sector faked enjoyment with a finesse that made Lili look like a clumsy novice. Either that, or they were like the dead-eyed girls who'd clung to her father's men—so broken and hopeless they'd convinced themselves they wanted to be pawed at and violated, because wanting the inevitable made it easier to bear.
The liner pencil slipped from her grasp, and Lili realized she was trembling. Curling her hands into fists, she shoved back from her vanity and stalked to the bathroom. No fancy tub or pristine counters piled high with fluffy towels here. Her shower was tiny, the tiles newly laid and crooked. The bulb over her head was bare. The walls were unrelieved cement.
But she had a sink, and a glass on the edge of it. Lili filled it with water and returned to the bedroom. In the mirror, her reflection stared back at her, a stranger in garish makeup and leather, with too much skin on display.
She had the too-short skirt. The too-tall shoes. The dark lipstick and lined eyes, the corset that all but demanded men stare at breasts she'd never even shown to her husband. But she didn't have the ink, and she would never have the attitude.
Without those things, she'd never be an O'Kane. Just a confused girl playing dress-up.
Closing her eyes, Lili swept up the pills. They were bitter on her tongue, and she washed them down with the entire glass of water. The drugs were good, some of the best Sector Five had to offer, and especially popular inside Eden. She'd overheard her father's bodyguards laughing about it once.
I guess it makes that high-strung Eden pussy more agreeable.
Well, where's the fun in that?
Agreeable. A word that covered a multitude of sins, figurative and literal. The well-bred ladies of Eden took the drugs to numb themselves to the ways their husbands violated their bodies.
Lili needed to be numb to watch the O'Kanes violate each other.
She set the glass aside and checked her reflection one last time, while she still cared enough to make it perfect. Her hair was a disheveled mess of curls, the front held back from her face by twin braids that circled the crown of her head. Her fingers itched to smooth everything into place, more out of habit than desire. Tidy fit this place about as well as restrained did.
Somehow, she had to learn to be neither.
The rooms she'd been given were on the third floor of the building where most of the O'Kanes slept. Every time she turned around someone was up here, hammering or painting or hooking up plumbing in another new room. They were expanding, adding blood to their ranks as Dallas's power grew.
That was why Dallas wanted them all at his weekly parties—so that the new faces would know him, and he would know them. It had seemed harmless enough until Lili appeared obediently at the first one only to discover how intimately the O'Kanes defined know.
Fighting a shudder, she straightened her back and lifted her chin. The drugs hadn't kicked in yet, but she imagined she could feel the comforting distance wrapping around her as she descended to the second floor. The party room sat at the end of a long hallway, but the door was open, and she could see flashes of skin.
That was the danger of being late. They'd already started taking their clothes off—at least the ones who'd worn any to begin with.
Just before she reached the end of the hall, Trix walked out of the room with a cigarette in one hand. The redhead was usually as pristine as Lili had always been, embracing the fashion of Sector Five instead of rejecting it.
Not tonight. Instead of a perfectly tailored dress and crinoline, Trix had a man's shirt slipping off one shoulder and falling to mid-thigh. Her hair was a tousled mess—not the artful tumble Lili had labored over, but the kind of disheveled that only came from being tangled around a man's fist.
In spite of that, the woman was smiling. So Lili did the only thing she could—she smiled back. "Trix."
"Lili." The woman's smile didn't fade, but her expression took on a guarded quality. "Having a good night?"
They didn't trust her. The harder Lili tried to blend in, the more she felt the distance between them. And with her most of all, because Lili knew her father had hurt Trix. Her father had hurt every woman who touched his life.
Trix and Lili were the only two who'd survived the association.
Her smile hadn't worked, so Lili let it drift away and settled for being politely impassive. "I am, thank you."
Trix lifted one eyebrow as she brushed past her. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
Faint warning. The things Trix did on stage at the O'Kanes' bar shocked Lili enough, but when Trix's lover won his match at the last fight night, the two of them had—
No, the drugs weren't strong enough to protect her from that memory. And they weren't strong enough to insulate her when
she crossed the threshold into Dallas O'Kane's private den of sin.
The sounds were the most visceral part. There was so much skin, but she could unfocus her eyes, stare at nothing in particular. But that didn't protect her from the sounds, and they were still so alien, even after all these weeks.
Laughter. Moans. The slap of flesh against flesh, of bodies coming together with a force that made her cringe inside. Voices rose and fell in and around the cries of pleasure, as if they were gossiping over tea instead of…
Lili didn't even have a word for it.
A couple was kissing just inside the door, the man's hand barely hidden beneath the woman's sheer skirt. Lili jerked her gaze away and scanned the edge of the wall, desperately looking for a safe corner.
There were so many men. More than there were women, so many more. A few of them tried to catch her gaze, but Lili stubbornly refused, though she knew she'd have to give in to one of them eventually. A woman on her own in the sectors didn't last, and Dallas O'Kane hadn't been able to hide his disappointment at learning how little she knew about the inner workings of Sector Five. His tolerance would wear thin soon enough, and if she didn't have a man willing to claim her...
She'd trained to be a wife, but Sector Four didn't seem to have those. She didn't know what they had—mistresses was the nicest word she could come up with. It was better than the alternative. At least a mistress might have some duties outside of the bedroom.
But if she had to be a whore, she'd do that, too. She'd do whatever it took.
A flash of white in the shadows drew her gaze, and Lili's heart shot into her throat.
Amazing how homesick a well-tailored dress shirt could leave her. She didn't miss much about her life in Sector Five, but she had understood the rules there. The man on the couch in the corner was perfect in a way that felt familiar. Not just well-dressed, but refined. His crisp white shirt and impeccably fitted slacks stood out among the leather and denim popular with the O'Kanes, but he didn't appear to care.