Before the End (Beyond Series Ultimate Glom Edition)

by Kit Rocha

  One of his eyebrows swept up as he caught sight of Jared in his chair, but he didn't say anything. He didn't apologize either, just slid his fingers through his tousled hair and grinned. "Lex said I should invite you back with me. I think I'll take pity on Jeni, though. She was passed the fuck out."

  "Smug bastard." Jared retrieved the tiny plastic data card from his pocket and slid it across the desk. "It'd serve you right if I took your woman up on that generous offer."

  "You call her my woman and she might revoke it. I'm the only one who gets away with that." Dallas sank into one of the wooden chairs and dropped his hand to cover the data card. "Give me the highlights."

  "Peterson thinks you're up to something. The man doesn't have the balls to bring it up officially, but he's been chatting up the other Council members at every party and weekend barbecue. So far, no one's biting."

  "Dumb fucker." Dallas shoved a stack of papers aside and surfaced with a battered cigarette case. "If I wanted to grab Five, I would have done it in the first place, not waited a few months for all the assholes over there to dig in."

  Most everyone in Eden knew and understood that, too, which was why Peterson's witch hunt had failed to gain any momentum. "There's a fairly new member on the Council. Young, idealistic, still wants to do right. Could be worth watching."

  "Yeah? What's your read on him? They gonna beat it out of him?"

  They could—given enough time. Every man had his breaking point, even one as earnest as Nikolas Markovic. "I think that depends."

  "On?"

  "Whether you get to him first."

  Dallas grinned around his cigarette and struck his lighter. He inhaled slowly, tilted his head back, and blew smoke toward the ceiling. "Well, then. How quick can we get to him?"

  "There is no we," Jared reminded him blandly. "You're not forgetting that, are you?"

  "Bullshit. You're not wearing my ink, but you're risking as much or more than any damn one of us, and without the best parts. Someday this…" he jammed his finger down on the data card, "…will be over with, and people will know you're an O'Kane. Doesn't make you less of one now."

  Sometimes, it didn't seem real. He'd always thought giving in to Dallas's recruiting speeches would come with ink, way too much alcohol, and enough brotherhood to choke an elephant. Instead, Jared's sign-up package had included secrecy and business as usual—except for the spying.

  But he'd asked for it, and he couldn't deny he was well-suited to the task. The bar code he'd bought and paid for allowed him easy entry to the city, and his reputation and money took care of the rest. He was a fixture in Eden society, as familiar to its wealthy citizens as their own faces. No one questioned his presence, even when they resented it.

  And no one realized he was listening.

  "I can get to Markovic," Jared assured his leader. "But it'll take time. The man isn't fond of corruption, and let's be honest with ourselves. I spend my days swimming in it."

  "Yeah, you do." Dallas reached for the whiskey and twisted to grab a second glass. He poured it nearly full before refilling Jared's, as well. "You holding up okay? Spending that much time ass-deep in hypocrites can't be a picnic."

  Jared indulged himself in a wry laugh. "Your concern is heartwarming, O'Kane, but I've been doing this for a long time. I'm quite accustomed to hypocrisy."

  "That wasn't supposed to reassure me, was it?"

  "No." He knew better than to make excuses for his lifestyle, for his work. Once you scratched past the surface of endless money and women, it wasn't exactly the stuff dreams were made of. "Why do you think I work for you now?"

  "Yeah, well…" Dallas abandoned his cigarette, slowly crushing out the tip before dropping it to the ashtray. "If you need a break, you tell me. I'm half a second from pulling you out anyway. If we didn't need the intel so damn bad—"

  "But you do." And, really, what was his discomfort weighed against the potential welfare of dozens, even hundreds, of people?

  "But I do. For now." Sighing, Dallas swept the ashtray aside. He leaned forward, his elbows thumping on the desk, and gave Jared a serious look. "I want to bring Bren and Cruz in on this. You need more people watching your back. People with connections inside Eden."

  "No." The denial was reflex, backed up by his hammering heart, and it took him a moment to pin down his sudden fear. "Not Cruz. If something happened and it blew back on him, it would kill Ace. I can't risk that."

  Dallas didn't waver. "And if something happens to you, Ace will kill me. If Cruz doesn't get to me first. If you don't think he's already worrying about you…"

  "I can handle it."

  For a tense moment, he didn't think O'Kane would relent. But he did, sitting back in his chair as he picked up his whiskey. "All right. Bren, for now."

  "Acceptable." His freedom to move about Eden society would only last as long as his association with the O'Kanes was vague, fluid. If anyone inside the city found out he'd allied himself with Dallas…

  His spying days would be over. And so would his life.

  Chapter Three

  Cooking had always been Lili's favorite of her duties. It was soothing. It was complicated. It required attention and focus, but if she followed the rules, she was usually rewarded with success.

  Food wasn't always predictable, but it was manageable. She could control it.

  And it made an amazing bribe. Especially here.

  It hadn't taken Lili very long to realize that almost no one in the O'Kane compound enjoyed cooking. Some of them could cook. Lili had encountered Six baking biscuits or simple bread, always farm fare. More rarely, she found Mad creating dishes that could have come from one of her treasured pre-Flare cookbooks, the one that featured rustic Latin cuisines.

  She'd left behind everything when she walked away from Sector Five, but the cookbooks were one of the things she missed most. Pulling up recipes on the tablet Noelle had provided her didn't feel the same. It was all so sterile, crisp. Unblemished. Foolish of her, she knew, to miss the imperfections, the curling edge of a cover that had fallen victim to a pot boiling over or the sauce recipe stained from the spatter of a dropped spoon.

  Everything had to be put to rights before her husband returned home. The kitchen spotless, her clothes immaculate, her presentation flawless. But the battle-worn pages had been as comforting as old friends, reminding her that the perfection was a lie, a game she had to keep practicing.

  Or maybe it was good she'd left them behind. Maybe it was a lesson best forgotten, because she was starting to believe the O'Kane women weren't lying. Not about sex, not about loving it, not about anything.

  Lex could lie. Lili had no doubts on that count. She recognized the level of control in the other woman, the ability to school her features and hold her tongue. But for the first time last night, she'd watched Lex, watched her touch another woman, kiss another woman, do things to her that made Lili's entire body throb…

  And she'd tried to remember Lex's last lie. Unpalatable truths fell from the woman's lips often, raw reality delivered without hesitation or flinching. Lili had seen her do the same to men and women alike, fearless in her honesty.

  Maybe every moan and every smile was a lie. Maybe the other woman's shuddering and begging and pleading had been lies, too.

  But why?

  It always seemed like fear must be the answer. She convinced herself of it again and again, every time she crawled back to her rooms, overwhelmed and feeling, feeling all the things she'd spent a lifetime not knowing were possible.

  She'd felt so much last night. Because she didn't think even fear could motivate anyone to lie that convincingly. Not forever.

  Lili had crawled out of bed this morning, still aching, still feeling, and had faced a neat row of empty bottles. A silent line marking the end of everything she'd known about life. If she was going to survive in this new, terrifying reality where her skin was too tight and women might be more than nothing, she needed to understand.

  She needed a friend.

>   So she went to the kitchen. She found ingredients. Some of Six's leftover bread and two types of rich cheese to grill, and everything she needed for brownies gooey enough to win over the most reluctant sweet tooth.

  Then she took her culinary bribes in search of Rachel.

  She found the blonde in the garage, smudged with grease and frowning down at a long, handled contraption that almost looked like a cookie press. "Hi," she said absently, barely glancing up.

  "Hi," Lili echoed, already uncertain. Nerves were another thing she could barely remember. The flutter in her chest as her heart beat too quickly, even over something as foolish as this. "I made lunch, and I had extra. I thought…" Trailing off, she held out the plate.

  "Oh hey, that sounds good." Rachel waved the metal cylinder in the air. "Some chucklehead didn't clean it out, and now it's clogged. How am I supposed to grease my fittings with a clogged gun?"

  A rhetorical question, undoubtedly, but the correct response was so ingrained, it was a reflex. "I'm sorry. Can I help clean it?"

  "Thanks, but nah. It'll wait." Rachel laid the grease gun aside and walked to a small sink beside the workbench, where a tub of sludgy soap awaited her. It didn't lather as she rubbed it over her hands and arms, but it did cut through the grime amazingly well. "Tatiana makes it for me," she explained as she dried off. "Have you met Tatiana?"

  The name was familiar, but so many of the faces blurred together. She'd met so many people in those early days, the hazy ones full of grief and pain and all the drugs she could take.

  But she knew how to temporize. How to evade. "I think so. At one of the fights?"

  Rachel levered herself up to sit on the workbench and smiled gently. "I wasn't sure if you'd remember."

  Her muscles started to tense, and Lili didn't even know why. It wasn't as if she'd ever developed any pride. That would have been suicidal, at best, and impossible besides. But maybe this was why people needed it—to protect against the awful, empty humiliation of having a weakness laid bare.

  Everyone knows. It was horrifying, really. But it left her with no reason to lie. "I'm not sure I do, I suppose."

  "You've been pretty out of it." The words were matter-of-fact, and Rachel tilted her head. "Not today, though."

  "No, not today." Lili was still gripping the plate, so she forced her fingers to relax and set it down on the bench next to Rachel. "I remember enough, though. I remember that you've been...kind to me."

  She picked up half of the grilled cheese with a tiny shrug. "When I first came here, everyone made it really easy for me. And it was still hard as hell, and I hadn't lost anyone, either. So."

  Lost. The word was like Lili's world on drugs—numb and soft and disconnected from reality. She hadn't lost anyone. Her family had been stolen from her as punishment, and if she let herself think about it too closely, the guilt would burn her up from the inside.

  She grasped for something else. Anything else. "You aren't from this sector?"

  "I grew up in Eden."

  For the first time, Lili couldn't even school her features. She felt her mouth start to drop open and snapped her teeth back together, but it was too late.

  Eden. The woman who danced on stage at the O'Kanes' bar, the woman who wandered naked through parties, trailing two dangerous, possessive men behind her, the woman who was staring at her now with a smear of grease on her nose, perfectly at home in a place that usually belonged to men…

  She was from Eden. Perfect, pristine, holy Eden. "Oh."

  That made Rachel laugh. "Don't worry. I was never from the proper part of the city. You could say I've always been a bit of a street rat."

  Lili covered her hesitation by breaking off the edge of a brownie. The taste was dizzying, the sweetness of the honey playing off the sharp, bitter edge of cocoa in a way her nutritionally balanced sweeteners never could. The leaders of Five had access to plenty of the food manufactured in the factories of Sector Eight and on the farms beyond the borders, but so much of it was processed past the point of recognition. It tasted fine. It worked perfectly.

  It just wasn't real.

  She wanted to reach for the rest of the brownie, but denying herself was another habit. She'd made the mistake of tasting too much while cooking early in her marriage, and had been educated thoroughly on the consequences of developing unnecessary curves.

  "How long have you been here?" she asked instead, tucking her arms over her chest to remove temptation.

  "A few years now. I make beer, fix stuff, tend bar. Dance." Rachel took a bite of her sandwich and chewed before closing her eyes with a soft noise of appreciation. "This is good."

  It was more approval than Logan had ever shown her. And it felt...nice. Warm, gentle. Not overwhelming, but satisfying. "I had a lot of time at home. Cooking was enjoyable, though finding good ingredients could be difficult."

  Rachel leaned closer and lowered her voice. "Drop a bug in Dallas's ear about what you could do with the right setup, and he'll make sure you have it."

  She imagined the empty kitchens. How few people ate there, and how many ended up buying food from the marketplace instead. There were so many people here that feeding half of them could quickly become a full-time job.

  But it was one she was capable of. One that wouldn't require finding a man and letting him…

  She smashed the memories back down. Dallas's hand in the woman's hair last night. Logan's hand in her hair. Pain, fear, confusion—

  Even if the O'Kane women weren't lying, Lili would be. And maybe the men here wouldn't like manufactured sweeteners when they could have honey.

  "I—I might like that." She found strength in the possibility. Hope. "If you think people would enjoy having me cook."

  "Better than me doing it. I burn everything. Dallas thinks I do it on purpose to fuck with him—" She stopped, and a vague shadow of guilt fell over her face. "Okay, sometimes I do. But not as much as he assumes."

  So many ground-shaking revelations in so few words. That Rachel dared burn food on purpose to irritate a sector leader. That he knew it. That she got away with it. That she wasn't cringing at the consequences.

  Lili could have told her about the time she'd burned her hand and dinner, too. How Logan had dragged her to the sink, shoved her hand beneath the tap, and washed away the med-gel. How calm he'd been as he told her he was doing this for her own good, so the pain would teach her to take better care of his most treasured possession.

  She still had a scar across the heel of her palm. An imperfection. A reminder.

  Lili might be sheltered, but she wasn't stupid. And she didn't want to see pity in Rachel's eyes. "Does he deserve it? When you burn the food, I mean?"

  "On purpose?" Rachel snorted. "Always. He's been better since he and Lex figured out their shit and hooked up, but he still has his caveman moments."

  "Lex is…" Lili gave in and smiled. "I've never met anyone like her."

  "She looks out for us. If you have any problems, you can go to her, you know."

  The smile had been easy enough. Keeping it from slipping was harder. "Oh, compared to where I'm from, I have no problems at all."

  "Okay." Rachel laid down the rest of her sandwich and wiped her hands on the towel she'd used to dry them. "You can come to me, too."

  Once upon a time, Lili had known how to joke. She'd been funny enough to make her younger brothers and sisters dissolve into hysterical giggles. Not much of a challenge, maybe—children who'd never been more than a half mile from their home didn't exactly have sophisticated tastes in humor—but she remembered that sometimes. Laughing. Wanting to make other people laugh.

  I know, that's what the brownies were for.

  It wasn't funny when it was so tragically true. "I am, a little. Right now."

  "Oh yeah?" Rachel tucked her wild, messy hair behind her ears. "What's up?"

  "It's not that I have a problem," she said quickly. "I just... Well, I'm not out of it."

  "And you need something to do."

  She had
n't thought of it that way, but it resonated. Even numb and icy, she'd never been good at simple existence. She'd distracted herself from the silent loneliness of her house with endless mundane tasks, because at least that made her feel useful. "I'm not really accustomed to just sitting."

  Rachel regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. "You don't have to work. But, if you want to, Lex is the person to see."

  People had said that to her before. Dallas had said that to her during the tense ride back from Sector Two, after she'd stood before the other sector leaders and let them paw through every indignity of the past five years of her life. An obvious pattern of cruelty, one of them had declared as she left the room.

  As if it was a surprise.

  "Everyone else works," she said softly. "I should have to, too. Shouldn't I?"

  "Probably," Rachel agreed. "But I don't think anyone would blame you if you needed some time."

  "I can't be the only person who came here from a bad place."

  "Of course not." She toyed with the crust of her sandwich without picking it up. "You're kind of a special case, though. You already know that. You gave Dallas something he needed, and that buys you breathing room."

  Yes. She'd paid with pain, and then cheated, drugged herself so she wouldn't have to feel it. "Did it help? What I did?"

  "Oh, hell yeah." Rachel reached out and grasped her hand, squeezing for only a moment before letting go. "But it must have been difficult, and Dallas and Lex understand that."

  Dallas and Lex care. That was what she was really saying, and she believed it. All the little signs of self-control, the ones Lili recognized in Lex—Rachel had none of them. Just earnestness and openness. Faith. She wasn't saying it, but everything she said screamed it.

  "I don't know if I need a job," Lili said, forcing the words past her sudden nerves. What she was about to ask for was foreign and strange, but the word itself made her slowly melting heart ache with longing. "I think I need a friend."

  A wide grin curved Rachel's lips. "Yeah?"

  It was so bright, that smile. It tugged at all the cold and lonely places inside Lili. It made her want to smile back—for real, this time—and she hadn't done that in so long. "I'm lost. I don't know the rules. And if I start guessing…" She'd offend people. She already had, and she'd do it again. Worse, probably.