Before the End (Beyond Series Ultimate Glom Edition)

by Kit Rocha

  Mad froze with his fingers tangled in her hair and thought back. When was the last time he'd seen those glassy eyes, that sleepy distance? The night he'd gone to Sector Two with Deacon, maybe, but everything after that was a blur. The bombs had fallen, and then Scarlet and Jade—

  Jade had needed Dylan. They'd all needed him, and Dylan had always been good at pulling it together when he was needed. But never for this long. "You're right. I haven't, either."

  Scarlet exhaled and studied him through the haze of smoke. "That's got to mean something."

  "Maybe it just means...we fit." He traced a zigzag pattern down her arm. "All the broken pieces, all the sharp edges. I tried to protect Dylan from his, but there are some things only Jade can give him. And some things only you can."

  "Don't sell yourself short. Jade's coming out of her shell, too. Taking control of her life." She rubbed her cheek against the inside of his wrist and grinned. "You may not be a prince, but you're definitely a fairy tale come true."

  He laughed and hauled her on top of him. "Maybe I'm warming up to the idea of being a prince—if it means I get to be greedy about the naked people in my bed."

  Her expression softened, and she laid her cigarette in the ashtray on the table. "It's not greed if you're in love."

  He tugged her down until her forehead rested on his. "Can I be greedy about something other than sex?"

  "Name it."

  "Sing for me?"

  She blushed, but she didn't refuse. Instead, she began to hum the first notes of a familiar song—the one she'd been singing the night of the concert in Three.

  The one she'd sung to him.

  By the time she started the first verse, Mad could close his eyes and imagine himself back there. The crush of bodies, the heat and the smoke and taste of whiskey on his tongue. The way she'd looked on that stage, clad in leather and steel, crooning like silk.

  The way her eyes had met his, and for those intoxicating moments, he'd felt seen, understood. Known and loved and forgiven for every goddamn one of his endless list of sins.

  Music was its own religion, a spiritual force that bound them together. All of those people crowded into the bar were there to feel, because poverty and squalor and danger and the fucking end of the world wasn't enough to alter their fundamental natures.

  People loved and lost and grieved and rejoiced, and Scarlet was as much a priestess as anyone in Sector One, with her husky-voiced reminders that they were all the same, in the end. That they all wanted and needed and craved.

  That they were all at least a little broken, because they lived in a broken world.

  Mad stroked Scarlet's back as her voice wove its spell, relaxed in a way he hadn't felt in more years than he could remember. Since his easy faith had begun to shred around the edges, and he'd tattooed the family shield on his shoulder in a desperate grasp for confidence and security.

  His grandfather had played with the idea of God like a sculptor with clay, cutting and reshaping and molding until it reflected everything he needed in a religion tailored to his whims. Trying to form something righteous out of the statue he'd left behind—that was Gideon's battle.

  Mad didn't have to fight it. He didn't have to believe in his grandfather to have faith because there were dozens of paths for divinity to take. Scarlet's music. The sound of his nieces and nephews laughing. Things as vast as the beauty of nature and as inexplicable as Dallas O'Kane—a man with the power to be selfish and cruel, but who consistently resisted temptation while the others around him succumbed.

  The sight of Dylan and Scarlet and Jade—three people with every right to be shattered beyond the possibility of joy—smiling.

  Maybe he still wasn't worthy of their surrender. He'd watched plenty of men make the wrong choices when faced with such power. But he was too damn selfish to walk away now.

  So he'd fucking well make himself worthy.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Five days, five nights. Jade had spent three of them locked up in her new fortress in Sector Two, and Dylan wanted to know why.

  The housekeeper seemed intent on denying him. "Lady Jade asked not to be disturbed. She was quite insistent, sir."

  The woman had a stone face that would do a dedicated poker player proud. "I'm quite insistent, too, and I'd appreciate it if you'd tell her I'm here."

  "I don't think—"

  "Oh, it's you!" The cook who'd brought Jade the rolls came down the hallway with a tray gripped in her hands. "Thank goodness. I was going to carry dinner up myself to coax Lady Jade to eat, but you'll do even better."

  The housekeeper's expression tightened. "Molly, you know she requested privacy—"

  "From outsiders," Molly spoke over her. "You know this is her doctor friend. I'll walk him up. If she's cross, I'll tell her I insisted."

  With another pinch-lipped glare, the housekeeper reluctantly stepped aside. Molly hustled Dylan up the steps. "This way."

  "Thank you." He waited until they were out of earshot of the housekeeper before touching Molly's arm. "Have things been that hectic around here?"

  "It's been…lively." The cook sighed. "I'm sorry the housekeeper was rude to you, but she's very protective of Lady Jade. If we didn't have a dragon guarding the door, we'd be overrun at all hours with people demanding the lady's attention and fretting her half to death."

  Why wasn't Deacon handling the requests? "Is it people who need help and supplies to recover from the bombing, or something else?"

  "Oh, I wouldn't know. I just worry when my trays come back untouched." They reached the top of the stairs and the hallway that led to Jade's office. "You'll see that she eats something, won't you?"

  "Sure." He took the tray from her and braced it on his forearm with one hand. "Thanks, Molly."

  The cook gave him a shaky smile. "It wasn't right, what happened to her mother. Lady Radha was good to us, took care of us. And Jyoti has her mother's heart—" She cut off and shook her head. "I'd best get back. Ring down if you need anything else."

  "I will." She headed back down the stairs, and Dylan rapped on Jade's office door.

  Nothing.

  He pressed his lips into a thin line and opened the door. Jade was seated at her desk, a half-empty bottle of wine at her elbow and a pair of tablets in front of her. "You can set the tray just inside the door," she said without looking up. "I'll get it when I'm finished with this."

  Dylan closed the door behind him. "Somehow, I don't believe you."

  She jerked upright and spun in her chair, her exhausted expression flashing to joy. "Dylan! What are you—?" That fast, worry creased her brow as she rose. "Are Mad and Scarlet okay?"

  "They're fine." He set the tray aside and studied the dark shadows under her eyes. "What about you?"

  "I'm…" She attempted a smile. "I suppose you won't believe fine."

  "No." He might have, even with Molly's concerns, if Jade didn't look like she'd lost weight. If she hadn't been hiding—or, worse, stuck—in this hellhole for nearly a week. "I thought Deacon was supposed to be helping you out."

  "He is." She sank back into her chair. "He took some of the men out to deal with a fresh wave of looters. Word's gotten out that not all of the warehouses are completely empty. Not that what's left has much value unless you have black market connections, but…" Her sigh encompassed not just her exhaustion, but the helplessness of fighting sector criminals who'd risk everything for next to nothing.

  He had to touch her, soothe her. He crossed the room and slid his hands beneath the hair that had loosened from her chignon, massaging the tense muscles of her neck. "We talked about this, Jade. It doesn't matter how much work there is to be done. If you run yourself into the ground, there'll be no one to do it."

  "I know." She tipped her head forward, inviting more of his touch. "I thought if I could just stop the worst of it, I'd have time to catch my breath. But I watched Cerys fighting for respect as a leader all those years, and I should have known better."

  "You didn't exactly get
this place under normal conditions." She'd walked into a ruin of a sector, into the aftermath of the unthinkable, and started restoring order. "Three's still on shaky ground, and how many years has it been since those bombs fell?"

  "Three's improving rapidly at the moment, since all the criminals who are scared of Dallas are coming over here to loot." She laughed suddenly, sharp and wry. "I'm going to have to be more menacing than Dallas O'Kane somehow. Or give up and let him do it for me, at which point no one will ever take me seriously again."

  "Does that matter?"

  "For my ego? No." She twisted to look up at him. "But it makes me less effective. It makes it harder to protect the people who need me."

  Power had its own silent language, one that screamed. It combined tiny, effortless shows of arrogance with bigger, louder displays—of wealth, of violence. The thugs who had invaded Two—hell, not to mention the ones who had already been there—understood this language perfectly, even if their attempts to speak it were awkward, messy. Unsuccessful.

  How long would it take Jade to learn it? "I'm not arguing the fact that a sector—any sector—needs a strong leader. But you can't give more than you have." He tilted her head back farther with one finger under her chin. "Trust me, love. I know."

  "But I haven't given what I have." She stared up at him, eyes dark and cold. "You know what's inside me. I'm more than capable of dragging the next would-be pimp who touches one of those girls out into the street and shooting him in the head myself. Or maybe shoot him someplace that scares men even more than Dallas O'Kane does."

  "How much will it cost you?"

  "Probably not as much as it should."

  "And then what?" He dropped his hand. "You stay here, alone in this house, because you can't stand to look at Scarlet and Mad anymore? Or, rather, to have them look at you?"

  She shut her eyes and looked away.

  His chest ached. "Don't lose them. Don't lose yourself. It could never be worth it."

  "What if this is me?" She wrapped one hand around her opposite wrist, as if blocking out her O'Kane ink—or clinging to it. "I thought being here in this house, where I was Jyoti... I thought I'd remember. But she was just a child, Dylan. It's so much easier to be Lady Jade of Sector Two."

  He knew better than anyone the seductive nature of easy. For years, it had kept him reaching for oblivion, because leaving drugs behind meant facing up to who he was, what he'd done, and easy was so much simpler.

  And it would be just as easy now to go to Dallas, to tell him that Jade—that one of his people—was spiraling, and he had to stop her. Dylan could put that responsibility on the O'Kanes, because the ink Jade was trying so hard to hide meant it belonged to them.

  But it also belonged to him now. That was what her trust and submission meant.

  "Come on. Baby steps." He grasped her hand and pulled her from the chair. "First, you eat. That's not negotiable."

  Her smile was slower to form this time, but it felt real. "That must be the most mundane thing I've ever been ordered to do."

  "You have a short memory." He brushed his thumb over the corner of her sad little smile. "I recall having to ask you to sit down and take a breath when you first came back to Two."

  Her eyes softened. "Yes, but you were still pretending to ask back then. Now I know better."

  She said it with such yearning that his body responded as if she'd touched him. Only it wasn't sex she craved, but something deeper. More intense.

  So he gave it to her. He led her wordlessly to the small table where he'd left the tray, sank into the leather chair beside it, and pulled her into his lap. "Eat."

  She relaxed in his arms and lifted the cover from the first dish. Delicate miniature quiches towered under the dome, warm and fragrant and stacked high enough to feed three. The next dish held hunks of cheese and sliced apples—a priceless delicacy this far out of season.

  Jade bit into a piece with a soft hum of pleasure. "I don't know who Molly's contacts are, but they must put Dallas's to shame."

  He handed her another slice of apple. "That's what this sector's about, isn't it? Trade?"

  "It was. We had trade routes established all across the country." She finished the apple and reached for a piece of cheese. "Eden warned the most influential traders—like my father, apparently—and got them inside the walls. Everyone else was left to their fates, but a few survived. That's what I was doing when you got here. Trying to compile a list of what resources they can access. So much of it is just...frivolous."

  "What do you mean?"

  She lifted another piece of the apple and held it between them. "This is what Sector Two is. Luxury. You could feed a hundred for what a basket of apples cost. I can get food from the farms I control, but everything else is just like this. Silk and tech and rare coffee and a dozen other things that no one outside of Eden can afford to want. We weren't built for survival."

  No one sector was—it was the brilliance of Eden's specialized division of labor. Six could feed itself, but thousands would die every year without the most basic medications they manufactured in Five. And Eight handled everyday items like toilet paper and soap, but without the revenue that came from selling those goods to the city and the other sectors, it would fall apart, too.

  Instead of pointing out that they were all stomping around in a house of cards, Dylan turned Jade to face him. "And the girls in this sector were raised to believe all they could ever hope to do was find a patron and please him. Now, they're learning they can do anything they want. Things can change."

  "They can, can't they?" She smiled and offered him a bite of the apple. "You're being optimistic."

  He let her feed it to him, then winked as he chewed slowly. "Someone has to be, don't you think?"

  "I like it." She cupped his cheek and rubbed her forehead against his. "Maybe we could pack up my dinner and take it back home to share. Scarlet loves apples."

  Home. The word meant everything—safety, warmth. Mad and Scarlet, waiting for them. And, somewhere beyond all that, it meant the most important thing of all.

  It meant they hadn't lost Jade yet.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  There were benefits and drawbacks to spending her nights in Sector Four. Jade could list the benefits easily—security, safety, warmth, love, and the bone-deep satisfaction of letting the stress of the day fall away under Dylan's wicked commands and Scarlet's clever fingers and Mad's eager mouth.

  The main drawback was being late every time someone joined her in Mad's spacious shower in the morning. Though that probably warranted being labeled a benefit, too. Especially when everyone joined her in the shower.

  They had this morning, in a slippery tangle of limbs that had tested her willpower. They'd converged on her as if rendering her incapable of leaving was the point, closing in on her on three sides with the tile wall at her back.

  And with Dylan there, whispering for her to let them tend to her, she'd closed her eyes and floated on the stroking hands and caressing mouths and thrusting fingers, her cries echoing off the tiles as steam made them all slippery…and when her toes had curled and her knees melted, Scarlet had to hold her up while Mad turned on Dylan, a dangerous glint in his eyes—

  With that vivid memory bringing heat to her face, Jade mentally nudged morning showers firmly into the drawback category and forced herself to focus on the tablet in front of her.

  At least it was easier to focus—Dylan hadn't been wrong about that. A week of forcing herself to go home every night had produced plenty of more subtle advantages. Eating and sleeping gave her the energy to tackle thorny problems. And being in Sector Four reminded her that she had more resources at her disposal than Cerys ever dreamed of.

  She had the O'Kanes.

  That list of frivolous items stacked in abandoned warehouses wasn't so frivolous when Six and Bren knew people in Three who could sell it in Eden at outrageous prices. Eden might scramble to reestablish trade contact with the men they'd deemed worthy of saving, but Jade h
ad the goods now, and if the people of Eden were anything, it was impatient when it came to luxury.

  All she needed was a list of what she had to offer, and Six and Bren would turn it into money and supplies. Blankets, sturdy clothing, solar converters. Finn would work with his friends in Sector Five to turn some of that money into med-gel and antibiotics—things Sector Two needed far more than silk tights and custom Italian suits and artwork looted from distant museums.

  She almost had the inventory organized when Deacon stepped into her office. Well, he didn't step in so much as lean one massive shoulder against the doorframe and silently wait to be acknowledged—a strange, stilted courtesy that no number of standing invitations could sway.

  "Come in, Deacon." She arranged a few more things in her spreadsheet before using the connection Noah had rigged for her to send him the file. He'd get it to Six without Jade having to leave her desk—another way the sector boundaries were blurring. "I'm just finishing up."

  "We have a situation."

  The last of the lingering warmth dissipated as she set aside her tablet and rose. Deacon combined Jasper's easy efficiency with Bren's steely nerves—anything he deemed a situation was likely a stone's throw from crisis. "What is it?"

  "There's a girl downstairs," he rumbled. "She's in bad shape, but I thought you might want to see her before I have someone take her to the hospital in One."

  She hurried to meet him at the door—and then hurried even more, because his massive strides devoured the hallway floor. Running wasn't dignified, but the words bad shape echoed in her head until she lifted her skirts to race down the stairs.

  Deacon hadn't been exaggerating. The girl lay limp and fretful on one of the couches in the sitting room, her skin sallow and her eyelids fluttering. Her expression was so slack it took Jade a moment to recognize Lisa, a sixteen-year-old from Rose House who'd been in her last year of training when Jade left. Golden-brown hair stuck to her sweaty brow and cheeks, but her soft moan wasn't one of pain, and Jade's entire body tightened in recognition.