by Kit Rocha
"You got it."
He bypassed the bar and the crowded tables. The side door beckoned, and he made his way down the steep stairs and into the industrial-sized basement kitchen.
Lili was already there, chopping carrots at the kitchen island as chicken sizzled in a skillet next to her. She was wearing a little black dress with a pink and black apron, and he couldn't see behind the island, but she was probably wearing high heels, too. The perfect picture of domesticity, like some pre-Flare television show about perfection in the suburbs.
Even her hair was up. Jared watched as she tucked an errant lock behind her ear, and suddenly wished that the image she presented wasn't so perfect. On her, it looked like shackles, chains. Being forced into a box that didn't quite fit.
He cleared his throat.
She looked up, surprise widening her eyes for a moment. "Jared. I'm sorry, I'm running behind."
"No, you're not. I'm early. I hope that's okay."
"As long as you don't mind watching me cook." She nodded to the stools on the other side of the island. "Have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?"
"Please." He unbuttoned his jacket and eased onto the stool. She was in her element, perhaps, playing the hostess, but she was still nervous. On edge.
She poured two fingers of whiskey into a glass for him, but nothing for herself. Her hand trembled a little as she slid the drink across the steel surface. "I should have asked what you like to eat," she apologized. "Ace said you get enough fancy meals in Eden, so I picked something I used to make for my brothers and sisters. But it's not very sophisticated."
"Whatever you chose is fine." He reached for the glass before she could draw her hand away. His fingers brushed hers, and a sliver of heat kindled low in his gut.
Her breathing hitched. Her gaze dropped to the glass—to their fingers—and her cheeks flushed lightly as she gently drew her hand away. "Chicken pot pie," she said, turning to the skillet. "Well, sort of. The children didn't like the pie part, but they loved biscuits."
She said it almost conversationally, but pain lurked beneath the words. "I was sorry to hear about them. And your mother."
"Thank you." Her attention stayed focused on the skillet as she added more ingredients—flour and then broth, her movements so practiced as she whisked them together that it seemed like comfortable habit. "It's odd. It hurts to know they're gone, but I lost them the day I got married."
Losing contact was one thing. Knowing they'd been murdered was another. "Grief is an odd thing. It doesn't much care sometimes how many years have passed."
"I suppose that's true." She glanced at him, curious but undemanding. "My mother always told me I was fortunate. That people in other sectors often didn't have families to lose."
Surprising, the pain that lanced through him. "Everyone has a family. How long they get to keep it is the variable."
"I'm sorry," she said softly. "That wasn't very graceful of me."
"You don't have to be perfect all the time." He sipped his whiskey and tried to reduce the flood of memories to mere words. "My mother died a few days after I was born. Childbed fever. My aunt raised me on her own. Then she died, too."
"Your aunt was the baker?"
"Yes. A gang hit the shop where she worked for a shakedown. The owner hadn't been paying the extra protection money, so they planned to smash it up. But he'd left her in charge that day, so she tried to stop them."
Lili reached for his hand this time, resting her fingers lightly on his. "That's terrible."
"It's—" It's life. "It was a long time ago. And that's when I met Eladio—and Ace and Gia. They were my family, too."
"I don't think I've met Gia."
She wouldn't appreciate his smile, so he hid it behind his glass. "No, I can't imagine you have."
Lili drew her hand away and returned to her cooking. "I take it she's not an O'Kane, either?"
"No. She runs the most profitable brothel in the sector."
If it shocked her, she hid it better this time. "An independent woman, then. I'd never met one before coming here."
"Plenty of them in Four. We all prefer it that way." Maybe she was getting used to how O'Kane ran things, after all. "What about you?"
"Do I prefer independent women?" She smiled a little. "I could, though I'm not sure I have the skills necessary to be one."
"Why not?"
She waved a hand at the stovetop. "This is what I do—all I can do. Cook dinner, play the piano passably well, and make conversation with people I cordially loathe."
"Ouch." Jared feigned an exaggerated wince. "Really, now?"
Lili wrinkled her nose. "This isn't making conversation. That's polite and bland and empty. We're talking, which is why I'm not very good at it."
He didn't hide his smile this time. "It's nice to know I merit the distinction. Friends always should."
"Friends," she echoed, returning his smile shyly. "Another thing I didn't know existed before coming here."
She'd always possessed a chilly, aloof sort of beauty, the kind they prized highly within the city. But here, warmer, softer, her apron smudged with flour and her hair falling from its chignon—
She was gorgeous.
"A toast, then." He lifted his glass. "To friends."
After a heartbeat of hesitation, she wiped her hands on her apron and poured a second drink. She held her own glass to his and inclined her head. "To friends."
She had to be nervous. She had to wonder what it all meant—the gift of the piano, his attention, his offer of friendship. Things in the sectors were never free, and rarely worth the price you had to pay.
He could fix it all, maybe, with the truth.
He chose his words carefully, watching her as she drained her glass in several swallows. "Not many people know me. They know of me, who I am—well, what I do, mostly. It's a lonely way to be. I think you might understand that."
"I understand that," she agreed, setting the glass down gently. "That night at the party, you seemed familiar. Comforting, I suppose. Maybe even safe."
Safe. The thought might appeal to her, but it was laughable in the face of the days to come. O'Kane wasn't sending one of his warriors into Eden to lay the groundwork for his revolution. He was sending a man whose greatest claim to fame was as the living embodiment of whatever fantasy you held dear. A man so used to molding and remaking himself that sometimes he didn't know who he was anymore.
Lili looked at him and saw safety because that was what she needed from him. All she needed from him.
He avoided her eyes as he refilled their glasses and echoed her. "Safe."
Her whisk clinked softly against the bowl. "You don't blend in with them. And you weren't trying to. I wish I had that confidence."
It wasn't confidence, it was privilege. Dallas had been trying to recruit him for years, and joining up—for him—didn't mean having to blend in. Hell, no one even had to know. "Why?"
"Because I'm not sure blending in is an option for me."
"So don't." She'd earned her spot among the O'Kanes already, and Dallas wouldn't take that away.
Lili didn't answer. Her heels clicked on the concrete floor as she moved to the oven and silently transferred her skillet to it. She hesitated a little over the controls before punching in the time. The appliances weren't the shiny models currently popular in Eden, but more in line with Dallas's priorities—solid, well-made, with a minimum of technological frills.
"I don't know what else to do," she admitted finally, returning to pick up her drink. "I've been training my whole life to be something no one here wants."
"A wife."
"A trophy."
Of course. A strange ache overtook his chest, and he braced his elbows on the counter. "The things you've learned—does doing them make you happy? Or is it just all you know?"
She ran her finger through a dusting of flour left behind on the countertop, tracing absent lines. "The piano and the cooking. I liked both, when I did them for myself or for people
I cared about. But they are all I know."
"Well, there's your answer." He leaned back, away from the urge to lay his hand over hers. "Sector Four has no need for trophies, but it can always use food and music."
She smiled and peeked up at him. "You're good at this. Talking. I'll have to cook you dinner again to thank you for tonight, at this rate."
She was teasing him, but, somehow, this mattered. Getting to know someone new, letting her know him. Something told him he might need these memories, fresh in his mind, before his time in Eden was finished. "I consider myself the lucky one."
"Now I think you're just flattering me." She lifted her glass higher and adopted a lazy expression and an icily precise inflection. "I'm a nice enough girl, but sector rabble shouldn't aspire to cleverness."
As far as impressions of proper Eden ladies went, it was spot on. He raised his own glass again. "To sector rabble."
Five minutes after arriving at the warehouse for fight night, Lili realized her dinner with Jared had made her dangerously overconfident.
She'd never tried this without the drugs. Without the good drugs, the ones that gave everything a dreamlike quality and coated her nerves with ice. She'd never tried to face it on her own, raw and stone-cold sober, and she'd been stupid to try.
The noise alone was overwhelming, even after she retreated to the comparatively secluded dais where the O'Kane women gathered. There were so many people, more than she'd ever seen in the same place before coming here. Men and women spanning all ages and ethnicities, some dressed in shabby, patched denim and some that gave the O'Kanes competition in finely crafted leather.
It was a jumbled, seething tangle of humanity and life, and Lili's pulse throbbed so loudly in her ears that she barely heard Rachel's greeting. "Over here!"
Lili tracked the sound and spotted Rachel on one of the couches. Relief flooded her, momentarily strong enough to overtake panic, and she moved away from the edge of the platform to join her. "Hi."
Rachel pressed a cold bottle of beer into her hands. "Where have you been?"
"I lost track of time." It was only a little lie. She'd spent a solid hour in front of her meager wardrobe, Jared's words still whispering through her mind even days later. In the end, she'd put back the leather corset and tiny skirt and had reached for the dress she'd worn that night.
Black. Simple. It wouldn't have been acceptable in Sector Five, but it was certainly tame by O'Kane standards, with a skirt that fell to her knees and lace covering her back and upper arms.
Caught between worlds, just like she was.
"You missed the first round," Trix said. "Some yahoo from Three challenged Bren."
"Idiot," Nessa drawled from her perch on the far arm of the couch. "A big idiot, because he thought he was winning until Bren got bored of playing with him."
Bren reminded her of one of her father's men—Ryder, the stern-faced, solemn bodyguard who had become Logan's right-hand man after her father's death. Hard, implacable and unswerving—the kind of man only a fool would cross. "Bren won, I assume?"
"Eventually." Rachel was drinking some red concoction with fruit floating in it along with the ice. She sipped it through her straw, then grinned at Lili over the rim of her glass. "No one cares about that, though. We want to know what happened the other night."
"With Jared?" Lili clutched her hands around the beer bottle. "It was just dinner. We talked."
Nessa clutched her heart and groaned. "Oh my God, you must be a saint."
The others made incoherent noises of agreement, and Rachel raised both eyebrows. "Even Cruz can barely be in the same room with Jared without getting ideas."
"It's the fuck-me eyes," Trix proclaimed.
"And the fuck-me voice," Lex chimed in from behind the couch. She leaned over it, her chin propped on one hand. "So?"
Lili would be lying if she claimed he hadn't given her ideas. From the first time their fingers brushed, her skin had prickled with awareness of him, an awareness that hadn't faded until long after he'd departed. "He's very appealing—"
Nessa cut her off with another groan. "She's about to break our hearts. I hear the but coming."
But I'm scared of wanting. No, true or not, those were words she wasn't ready to share. "We agreed to be friends," she said instead. "I think that's all he wants from me, in any case. And I don't mind."
"He's a good friend to have." There was nothing salacious or sarcastic in Rachel's voice. "Ace has known him forever. They practically grew up together."
"That's what he told me. Ace and Gia?" Over dinner and drinks, she'd teased more of his past out of him, though not nearly as much as he'd coaxed out of her. Having her own conversational tricks turned against her could have been unnerving, but she understood now why they worked. Nothing felt quite like being the focus of someone's fascinated attention.
"Well, aren't you well-informed?" Lex teased.
"We just talked," Lili protested. "About our families, and about growing up in different sectors."
"It's cool." Lex climbed over the back of the couch and bounced onto the cushion beside her. "Flash and Zan finished off the leftovers you had in the fridge, by the way. You have to watch them. They'll eat anything that isn't nailed down."
Rachel snorted. "Or anything they can pry up with a crowbar."
"Don't be surprised if Tatiana comes knocking," Nessa added. "She spoils Zan rotten, but she doesn't cook. I bet you could trade her, though, if you run low on makeup. She makes the best shit."
Now that her head wasn't so foggy, the names were easier to remember. Tatiana was the one Rachel had mentioned the first day, the one who made soap and cosmetics. "I don't mind cooking for anyone who needs it."
Lex eyed her appraisingly. "Okay, then. I'll bite. Tomorrow night. We just got in a shipment of yellow squash." She leaned closer. "If you can figure out a way to get Dallas to actually eat it, you're in charge of the kitchens."
Lili couldn't hold back a bittersweet smile. "I learned how to cook by feeding toddlers and children. I can hide vegetables in anything."
"Okay." Lex patted her knee before rising. "See you then."
She strolled off without another word, leaving Lili to look helplessly at Rachel. "Does that mean I have a job?"
The tiny blonde laughed. "Lex isn't much for ceremony."
"Or domestic bliss." Nessa propped her heeled boots up on the low table. "Just the usual kind of bliss. The kind Jared totally wants from you, even if he's playing it cool."
A week ago, the words would have sent her into a panic. Now, they were unsettling. Terrifying and wonderful, and she didn't know which possibility was worse—that he might want nothing beyond friendship, or that Nessa could be right.
Trix elbowed Nessa lightly in the side. "Come on, leave her alone."
"What? She should know." But Nessa grinned and waved a hand. "But don't listen to me. I'm just jealous. Jared still thinks I'm twelve or something, like every other man in this sector worth climbing on."
"So find one who hasn't been here for years," Rachel suggested. "Hawk's still available."
Nessa scoffed. "You only think that because you're too busy being deliriously in love to notice. Hawk's so not available. Ask Trix."
"Hawk's been preoccupied," was all the redhead would say.
"He's got a crush," Nessa clarified, "and not on me. So I'm going to live vicariously until someone promising climbs behind those steel bars."
The reminder swung Lili's gaze toward the cage. There were two men in it now, both strangers to her, slamming their fists into one another with the sort of gleeful violence that still provoked a shiver of fear.
Rachel must have caught it, because she laid a comforting hand on Lili's shoulder. "I know it seems excessive, but there's no avoiding fights. The cage is how Dallas keeps things clean."
"That's clean?" As soon as the words escaped, Lili regretted them. She sounded sheltered and foolish, as if she hadn't lived her whole life with men capable of doing so much worse. But in S
ector Five, cruelty and violence filled the dark corners and shadows. It didn't play out under harsh spotlights with everyone watching.
Maybe that was Rachel's point.
"Cleaner than where we're from," Trix added quietly, her soft voice barely carrying over the raucous din in the warehouse.
She might as well have screamed, because one word echoed loudly in Lili's ears. We, a word that granted Lili a solidarity she could never deserve. It felt so fragile, a truce so tentative, Lili was almost afraid to reply, to risk shattering it by saying the wrong thing. "It's more honest, I suppose."
"And potentially lucrative." Rachel ran her fingers through her hair, ruffling the shoulder-length strands. "If you know who to lay your money on."
"Always bet on Six," Nessa advised. "The odds against her are crazy, because these idiots still think she's on a lucky streak. She'll make you rich."
Lili's world tilted oddly, then settled while her mind continued to spin. Every time she was convinced she'd mapped out the boundaries of what her new life could be, an offhand comment shoved them outward again. Women could distill liquor and brew beer. Women could run businesses and have trades. Women could fight for money.
She didn't know if she wanted to do any of those things…
But now she knew she could.
Chapter Seven
"So how long have you been spying for Dallas?"
Cruz's casual words startled Jared enough to throw him off balance. He almost missed blocking the man's next blow, and wood scraped over wood as their staffs collided.
Jared spun around and tried to recover his composure. As tactics went, this one was murderously lethal—throw out something shocking, as boldly as possible, then take advantage of your opponent's distraction to strike your killing blow.
"You're a good soldier," he murmured, tightening his fingers around his weapon. The staff was solid red oak—deadly and perfectly balanced. "I bet you're an even better interrogator."
"Not really." Cruz planted his staff on the floor and met Jared's gaze squarely. "My psych evaluations were consistently disappointing. I've always been burdened with an overabundance of empathy. The Base has plenty of soldiers not operating with that particular handicap."