Before the End (Beyond Series Ultimate Glom Edition)

by Kit Rocha

  "That's it, love." He rose, dragging her hand slowly down from his hair, across his chest and stomach, to his belt. "Take what you want."

  And she did, with no fumbling, no shy hesitation. She coaxed open his belt and his pants, and then her hands were on him, slender, clever fingers curling to stroke him to insanity and beyond. Her thumb swiped across the head of his cock, gathering the bit of wetness there, and her eyes found his as she lifted her hand and licked the taste of him away.

  "Whatever you want." He wrapped her legs around his hips and rubbed his cock teasingly against her wet flesh. "Whenever you want it. Anything."

  "Just be Jared." She arched, pulling him closer. "I love him. I love you."

  He knew it, felt it, the same way he felt his blood rushing through his veins or her breath falling on the hollow of his throat. Real, like the clasp of her pussy as he drove deep, and the sting of her nails on his ass.

  In his heart, pumping through him along with his blood.

  Jared sank his teeth into her lower lip. "I love you, too."

  Dallas

  Lili was going to drink them all under the table—and laugh while doing it.

  If someone had told him a year ago that he'd be watching Mac Fleming's daughter knock back her twelfth initiation shot with a steady hand and a smug grin, he would have assumed the crazy bastard had knocked back an impressive number of shots of his own. But there she was, goddamn glowing as she made the circle of hugs and kisses—though fewer of the latter, with Jared following close on her heels. The legend of his run-in with Eden's torture chambers grew with every retelling, affording him a respectful awe previously reserved for Dallas himself.

  Dallas didn't begrudge him that. Fuck, Dallas couldn't begrudge the man anything right now.

  A comforting hand slid around his waist, and Dallas knew he'd been scowling again. He modified his expression—and then denied it. "I wasn't brooding."

  "Liar." Lex tipped her head against his shoulders and laughed. "But you're very good at it, so."

  Lili had reached Ace, who smacked a kiss to her lips in complete disregard of Jared's possessive gaze before spinning her into Rachel's laughing embrace. Lili might be steady on her feet, but she still looked...soft. Vulnerable. Young.

  And he'd let her stroll into Eden to face down a fucking councilman. "How the fuck did this not go sideways on us?"

  "We got lucky, that's how." Lex circled him, switching their positions so that he was the one cradling her. "In more ways than one."

  Losing Jared would have broken something between Dallas and Ace. Maybe not Ace's loyalty, but his trust, his faith that Dallas would only risk his men's lives when there was no other choice—and his belief that Dallas would never leave one of them behind.

  Jared had made him promise. But Dallas had let him. And when the worst happened… "I sent that girl into Eden like a lost little lamb into a pack of wolves."

  "No," Lex said firmly. "You sent a woman who's spent her life surrounded by wolves, who knows how they operate and why, into a pack of wolves. There's a big fucking difference, honey."

  A sop to his conscience. It only worked at all because it was Lex, and Lex had never allowed him to tell himself comforting lies to justify using people. "She's still just a damn girl."

  "Don't be so cranky." She patted his arm. "It was a risk. But if you think the mighty word of Dallas O'Kane could have stopped her from trying to save Jared…"

  Ouch. Soft words, but his ego was stinging. It always did when things had spun out of his grasp, which was another thing Lex had chided him over. The days of kicking back and trusting events to follow the course he'd laid out were over.

  Which meant letting go and trusting the people around him to pick up the slack. The people. Not just the men.

  He watched Lili take her thirteenth and fourteenth shots—with a screwed-up face this time, even though she should be well past the point of tasting anything she drank. She'd come to them broken and haunted, and he'd passed her off to Lex and put her from his mind.

  But damn near everyone came to the O'Kanes broken and haunted. "I'm being an asshole again, aren't I?"

  "A little bit, yeah."

  Dallas tightened his arms around her and rested his chin on her head. "You gonna stab me?"

  "Not yet, Declan." She wiggled her ass against him and turned to look up at him. "But don't lose hope. The night is still young."

  He grinned at her and slid his hands down to her hips. Too much wiggling and he'd say fuck the responsible-leader shit and scandalize everyone by leaving early. "Maybe all this change is starting to make me feel old. Life was easier when the only question was what I could get away with."

  "Life was easier because the dilemmas were simple—stay alive, make enough product, hold off territory takeovers." She winked at him. "Now? It's all philosophical. Instead of what can I do it's what should I do."

  And that was the damn problem. The larger the scope became, the easier it was to slip into viewing it as a game. To view people as tools and bloodshed as acceptable loss. He loved the thrill of competition. The heady rush of victory, of conquering. To play the game, to keep them all safe, he needed to be ruthless. But winning wouldn't mean a damn thing if he turned into the bastards he'd been fighting.

  Over Lex's head, he saw his people. Their people. In the earliest days, it had been a brotherhood, their women brought into the circle of protection because men worked better when they weren't distracted. But Lex had kicked through that door. She'd knocked it off its hinges and trampled over every assumption he'd ever made, challenged him with every breath.

  It was easy to make an exception for Lex, who would leave you bleeding up one side and down the other if you didn't. It was even easy to watch Six take a man apart in the cage and admit, however grudgingly at first, that she was a soldier in his army.

  But he had a bigger army now. And if he was going to win this game without turning into as big a monster as Mac Fleming, he had to cultivate more than one kind of battlefield—and more than one kind of strength.

  He looked down into Lex's eyes again and found her staring up at him with that knowing look, like she could read every thought spinning through his head. He slipped his fingers into her hair—soft, because there'd be time for rough later—and smiled. "Okay, Alexa," he said softly. "You win."

  "Whatever do you mean?"

  "Oh, you know. Just that little argument we've been having since the day you demanded ink." He caught one of her wrists and rubbed his thumb over her cuff. The first time he'd marked her, and even then it had made him crazy, having something on her skin that was his. "I concede the fucking point."

  "That the women belong here as much as the men?" She arched an eyebrow. "Can you even say it?"

  "Having the right to be here was never the question, darling." He matched her expression. "Well, not recently. But it's a lot harder to admit you have the right to fight and bleed alongside us."

  Lex caught his hand. "It's our home, too. Our dream." She glanced over her shoulder. "Look at them. Everyone here would die for that dream. To protect it."

  He obeyed, feeling a tightness in his throat that he didn't want to acknowledge. Mia, with her skill for brutal efficiency. Noelle's instinctive understanding of the technology that Dallas could barely make work. Rachel's similar knack for machinery. Scarlet's dangerous charisma and Jade's quieter but no less deadly skill for manipulation. Trix, Tatiana, and Emma, who might not share Six's passion for violence, but were all capable of tearing a man up in a fight.

  Letting them risk themselves would hurt him. Not letting them try was hurting them. "You're gonna have to help me see what they can do. Kick my ass when I hold them back."

  "And when you push them too far." She rested her hand on his face, warm and soothing. "I've got your back, honey. That's what a queen does for her king."

  Epilogue

  Eden was everything Lili had always dreamed it would be. Bright, gleaming, glamorous…and full of liars who weren't very g
ood at telling lies.

  It was an excellent night for business.

  Her current target was the wife of one of Eden's endless bureaucrats, notable only because he'd been responsible for managing the requisition orders for Sector Five for as long as Lili could remember. And, for as long as Lili could remember, Sarah Jensen had accompanied her husband to business dinners and made a sport of finding creative ways to insult Lili's mother.

  Some things, it seemed, never changed. "You look so much like her, darling. Except that she always seemed so tired."

  Lili channeled her irritation into big, sad eyes. "Losing her was a shock, of course."

  "Of course," Mrs. Jensen echoed. "And then your father? You poor thing."

  Her expression was all perfect sympathy, but her eyes held barely concealed excitement. The truth about what had happened in Sector Five was still clouded in confused gossip and conflicting stories. A firsthand account of the gruesome tragedy would make Mrs. Jensen the star of every dinner party she attended for the next month.

  Lili was happy to give her one—in exchange for a story of her own.

  She rested her hand on the woman's wrist and concentrated all of that pain into her eyes. "You don't know what it means to see a familiar face from home. I had to leave everything behind. If someone who hated my father had taken control…" She trailed off, knowing no horror she could conjure would be as terrible as whatever salacious story was brewing behind the heinous woman's eyes.

  "You could have been killed," she breathed, the excitement in her stare bleeding into her voice. "Murdered, like your mother."

  Lili tightened her fingers around her glass and reminded herself that a gracious hostess wouldn't fantasize about smashing it against a table and grinding the broken edges into a guest, even if that guest was getting hot and bothered imagining Lili's death. The self-defense lessons with Six and Bren were most likely responsible—Six had described just such a maneuver in loving detail while Bren nodded his agreement.

  A nice thought as a last resort, but Lili had to use different weapons. "Until a leader is announced, I won't know if I'll ever be able to go back."

  Sarah Jensen looked around, her gaze darting from side to side as she leaned closer. "Pharmaceutical orders were going through a committee made up of most of your father's highest ranking men. Until recently."

  Lili made her eyes wide, awed. That was what this woman had always wanted—to feel superior, because her position in Eden was barely high enough to grant her access to the elite circles. "Oh, Mrs. Jensen. Please, if you know something…"

  "Just a rumor. But the requisitions have been coming back with the same signature on them for weeks now."

  Slow, Lili. Slow. She clutched the woman's wrist and closed her eyes. "That night was so terrifying. Men screaming, gunfire. I hid in a closet. I didn't know who I could trust. But I saw one man…" All lies, but she managed to make her voice tremble.

  Mrs. Jensen made a soft noise of agreement. "Ryder."

  She should have known. Ryder had always been quietly competent and more than a little intimidating—but he'd been new, too. She couldn't remember having seen him until a few years into her marriage, showing up as Logan's bodyguard when Eden officials ventured into the sectors.

  Apparently his quiet competence had resulted in a big promotion.

  Mrs. Jensen was watching her with undisguised anticipation, so Lili shuddered dramatically and gave the woman what she wanted—a highly fanciful, impossible-to-verify story about the treacherous betrayal of Mac Fleming, laced with just enough protesting-too-much assurance that Lili appreciated Dallas O'Kane's generosity.

  Then she excused herself and headed for the bar.

  Jared was leaning against it, so exquisite her heart skipped a beat. She loved watching him do his job in a way she couldn't have imagined. Because when the two of them worked a room together, it was a game. Dangerous, of course, and involving a level of corruption that could and often did turn her stomach.

  But a game. One he played so, so skillfully.

  She caught his eye as she passed him, just for a moment, and that was all it took to send a silent message. She continued down the hallway, past the open doors where high-stakes card games were in full swing, and men might lose a mill worker's yearly salary in one hand.

  The storage closet at the end was surprisingly roomy. Shelves lined three walls, stuffed with spare glasses and napkins, more expensive garnishes for the top-shelf liquor, extra decks of cards and poker chips, everything they might need to woo and seduce men and women into being loose with their money and their secrets.

  The fourth wall was stacked high with crates branded with Dallas's logo. They seemed to vanish as fast as Rachel's family could bring them in, but tonight there were enough for Lili to perch on the front row and slip off her shoes.

  She was still rubbing the ache out of her left foot when Jared slipped in.

  He took over, lifting her foot to work his thumbs over the arch. "Did she know?"

  "She had a name. Ryder."

  "Mmm." Jared's hands drifted higher, up to her lower calf. "Are you all right?"

  No doubt he could feel the tension in her body. Just like she'd felt the tension in him the night a former client had arrived and spent her evening trying to negotiate him out of retirement. True to the promise they'd made all those weeks ago, she didn't lie. "Not really. I need a bit before I go back out, or I'll use one of those moves Six taught me on her."

  "I wouldn't cry." The corner of his mouth quirked up. "Might get us in some trouble, though."

  Lili closed her eyes and let the warm press of his fingers soothe away the knots caused by stress and rage. "She used to come to dinners and say the cruelest things to my mother. She couldn't sharpen her claws on anyone in Eden because her husband's a glorified clerk, but sector wives aren't allowed to show offense."

  "She'll get what she deserves," he whispered. "I've never really believed that—I've never seen it in action, you know? But I believe it now."

  They'd put it in action, using the endless opportunities they were given to whisper the right words into the right ears. Noelle's father had turned out to be a surprisingly useful tool, for all that he abhorred their existence and their necessity. The only thing he hated more was corruption for its own sake, and a note to him, passed via Markovic, had brought several vile people to justice.

  But there was more than one way to take his words, and Lili didn't want to waste her stolen moments in the mud. She wanted to remember why it was worth wading through it. "You better believe it. Because you deserve me."

  Jared leaned over her—and smiled. "How long can we lock ourselves in here before scandalous tips over into unacceptable?"

  "We're O'Kanes," she reminded him, teasing her foot up his side. "Anything short of unacceptable would be a scandal. We'd lose business, for sure."

  He wrapped his hand around the front of her throat before sliding it into her hair. "Then we should take our time. And be very, very loud."

  The last time he'd convinced her to be very, very loud had been up against the door, his hand pinning hers above her head, her cheek pressed to the wood. He'd thrust so deep like that, but it had been his clever fingers on her clit that had her sobbing, and then begging, and then fighting and failing to muffle screams against her own arm.

  The time before that had been against the door, too, only then it had been her back and shoulders braced against the wood while he wrapped her legs over his shoulders and spent a leisurely eternity making her come on his tongue.

  It was always transcendent, always pleasurable enough to leave her legs weak and mind blessedly clear. But the tension in her tonight wasn't the usual stress of the job, but something deeply personal and still too raw—the reminder of how recently she'd been helpless.

  Tonight, she didn't want to be helpless. Not even with Jared. Tonight, she wanted to do what he'd been coaxing her to do all along.

  Take what she wanted.

  She slipped her
hands up to his shoulders and pushed, guiding him back. "Stand up."

  He obeyed, his eyes gleaming. "I like it when you get bossy."

  "I know." The leather of his belt was smooth. He'd teased her with the idea of it before, of feeling it around her wrists while he took her. It intrigued her, just like it intrigued her to imagine doing the same to him.

  Everything intrigued her, it turned out, when it involved Jared.

  For now, she only had one goal. And she was getting practiced at reaching it, which was a blessing. Tearing his clothes when they had to go back out onto the floor was slightly more scandal than either of them needed. So she was careful until she had his cock in her hands, smooth, velvety-soft skin over hot, hard flesh.

  He groaned and grabbed the back of her head. "I said slow, didn't I? I'm an idiot."

  "So very slow." She knew it didn't matter, though. Once she fell to her knees, Jared didn't care if she swallowed as much of him as she could or took half the night teasing him. He'd let her do anything she wanted to him, and love it because it delighted her.

  It was enough power to make her dizzy. She stroked him again, her fingertips feather-soft, and savored the way his hands flexed on her head. Not tugging, not yet, but she could fix that.

  Just enough light filtered under the door for her to meet his eyes as she parted her lips and traced the tip of her tongue up his cock.

  He let her have that moment—that endless, beautiful moment—and then turned it into something better with a low growl that melted into her name.

  She smiled, giddy with the joy of putting so much desperation into him so quickly. "If you're in a hurry, you know what inspires me."

  He flashed another filthy grin. "Go on and suck my cock, love. Nice and deep. I want to feel you moaning around me."

  An order, but not really, because he was giving her what she'd demanded. The dirty words she was learning to love, because each one sounded like shards of repression and innocence grinding into dust. She rewarded him by wrapping her lips around him and sliding down until her mouth met her hand.