by Kit Rocha
"Good," Lex breathed fervently. "She's not in this alone."
Lex believed the words, beyond any and all doubt, that much was clear. And Scarlet wanted to, more than anything. They'd all spilled a little well-deserved blood—it was part of living in the sectors, part of defending those who couldn't defend themselves.
Only this was about far more than killing someone who had it coming. It was about the constant stream of pimps, the desperate girls, all the people who wanted to get back to business as usual in Two. It was about Jade, sitting in her father's cold house, surrounded by a million memories but nothing good, every passing moment tearing down a future she'd fought so hard for.
It was about a name that almost no one knew, a name that a little girl had been told to hold tight, because it was all she had that was truly hers.
"I have to go," she mumbled. Lex said something behind her, but Scarlet kept walking. She'd walk all the way to Sector fucking Two if that was what it took.
Someone had to remind Jyoti of all the other things she had now.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mad thought arriving together was a mistake.
Not a big one, maybe—and with Scarlet tangled up with worry and Dylan stone-faced with tension, waiting hadn't seemed like a better idea. But he'd been trained from a young age to appreciate the nuances of power and how you applied it. The three of them arriving at the home of their lover didn't have to be a big deal, but Scarlet was pale and nervous, and Dylan seemed carved from rock.
Nuances. Jade recognized them, too.
She watched the three of them enter her office in silence, her expression so carefully blank Mad knew she'd been waiting for them. Rumors had hit a fever pitch by dinner, washing through Sector Three and into Four, where reactions ranged from wariness to pride. Dallas O'Kane wasn't just a king anymore. Jade's unflinching declaration had made him more—the king of kings, the ruler of an ever-expanding empire.
She'd won a victory today. But until she let her mask slip, none of them would know how much it had cost her.
Scarlet broke the silence. "We heard what happened."
Jade rose and walked to the bar set under one ornate window. "I assumed word would travel. I hoped it would, in any case."
She set four glasses in a row and began to pour, and the hair at the back of Mad's neck rose at the ice in her voice. He'd seen Jade dissemble, had seen her flat-out lie, but he'd never seen her like this. Shut down, blank. Cold. "We were worried about you, Jade. You should have sent a message so we could help you deal with it."
"I had the situation under control." She picked up a glass and held it out to Scarlet. "It wasn't pleasant, but it's over."
"I don't want a drink. I want—" Scarlet took a step toward her. "Just come home, okay? Let someone else deal with this bullshit."
Jade's hand trembled. She recovered quickly and sipped the drink, but that terrifying emptiness had fractured. "I'm okay, Scarlet. But I can't just go running back to Four tonight. I have to let the message sink in for a day or two, and be here to make sure it sticks."
"No." Another step. "I mean come home. It's not worth it, Jade. This place isn't worth it."
Jade went stiff. "The people here are worth protecting."
"Of course they are," Mad said quickly. "No one wants to abandon Sector Two—"
"You just want me to abandon it." Her dark gaze swung to him, and it felt like that morning in the hallway, when she'd held a knife to his balls and cursed his doubt in her. "You don't think I can do this."
Dylan shook his head. "No one said that."
She didn't look away from Mad. Her stare burned through him, damning him for the truth that had always lurked between them. He hadn't thought her capable of running a sector without shattering under the hard choices she'd have to make, not even when he'd fought for her chance to try.
And Jade knew it. "So what are you saying?"
Scarlet moved closer—close enough to touch, though she kept her hands closed in fists at her sides. "You can do this, but so can a dozen other people. And they don't have your history with Two, you know?"
"I know." Jade's voice wavered and came back stronger. "That's why it should be me, Scarlet. There's no one left who knows this sector like I do. I'll be good at it. I just need to find my feet."
"But why?"
"Because I want to!"
Scarlet recoiled as if she'd been slapped. Jade's breath hitched.
Their pain echoed through the tense silence, highlighting the precariousness of the moment. The four of them had managed to come together, and they fit now, jagged edge against jagged edge. But it felt like one wrong move could break them apart again, and this time their pieces might not fit together the same way anymore. Or at all.
Mad took a breath, but Jade was already turning away from them. "I'm good at this, better than anyone else can be. And we're going to war. Everyone is making hard choices, and this is mine. I want to make it."
Scarlet cast a pleading look at Dylan, who crossed his arms over his chest. He leaned against the wall and stared down at the carpet, his face still carefully blank. "You don't see what's happening?" he asked quietly. "Scarlet had to hear that there'd been trouble from another O'Kane. Mad picked it up on the street, and I didn't hear about it at all."
"I would have sent a message," Jade replied just as quietly. But she was still looking away, out the window. Mad could only see the stiff set of her shoulders and the barest hint of her profile. "I just...needed to think before…"
This.
She didn't say it. She didn't have to. She'd wanted time to think before they swept in here with their concern and their worry and their overwhelming need to shelter her against all the ways this sector could shred her heart. She'd needed time to don her emotional armor.
Jade was strong. But she'd let their doubts scrape away her certainty, because it was the one thing she'd never been trained to resist—love. They could hurt her as badly as the damn sector, and with all the best intentions.
"I understand," Mad told her softly.
"You understand?" Scarlet echoed. "Adrian, she's barricading herself in this tomb, and the only people around her are ones who think that it's normal that she came back to her asshole father's house. Like, no big deal."
"I understand that she wanted to think first." Mad approached the window and touched Jade's shoulder, urging her gently to turn. When she did, her mask was back in place—her expression placid, her eyes shuttered. He touched her cheek. "You thought, Jade. So talk to us."
She raised her eyebrows. "Will anything I say matter? Do you want me to cry because I killed someone? Because I don't have any tears in me for a woman who purposefully addicted girls to drugs that might kill them just to make them easier to sell."
"Good. She doesn't deserve your grief." Dylan slipped his hands into his pockets, the movement slow. Deliberate. "We don't want you to cry, or mourn, or lose your shit on us unless it's what you need."
"And if I needed to?" She backed away from Mad's touch. "You'd listen to me cry and mourn and lose my shit, and still support me if I stayed?"
Dylan hesitated. "What if something happened and Mad took over One? How would you feel, watching that place grind him into the dirt?"
Even the thought tightened Mad's chest with panic. But it wasn't a hypothetical concept that he could shrug aside now. Jade was living it—so Mad closed his eyes and faced the question he'd never wanted to have to answer.
Would you do it?
The answer had always been no. When he'd taken Dallas's ink, he'd sworn his loyalty. He'd made a promise—O'Kane for life. Before now, taking up the throne in One would have meant forsaking everything. His adopted family, his pledge, the brothers and sisters who had brought him back from the brink. The lines between sectors had been rigid, and the risk of crossing them too high.
Things were different now. Chaos and ruins lay between One and Four. He'd have the same option Jade had—to use the resources of the O'Kanes as well as h
is own. To protect people who would otherwise suffer and die.
Would it be easy? No. It would hurt like hell sometimes. There'd be emotional bruises around every corner, things that scraped him raw and opened old wounds. It would be a sacrifice.
But he'd do it. If that was what it took to get Sector One through the war, he'd do it. And he'd pray like hell that the people who loved him would understand that protecting his heart at the cost of so many lives was just another way to die a little at a time.
Jade still hadn't answered, so Mad opened his eyes. She looked torn, unguarded and exposed, because Dylan knew her, knew exactly how to make her doubt.
Mad stepped between them. "That's not fair, Dylan."
"Why? Because it's not the same thing, or because it is?"
"Because it's not the whole question. What if I did have to take over One? Is this what you'd do to me? Make me choose?"
Dylan stared back, a fine tremble overwhelming him—the first crack in his steely, careful control. "No," he said finally. "If you got to the point where you felt like you had to choose between us and One, then it wouldn't matter. It would mean you'd already made your choice."
"Bullshit," he growled. "Bullshit, Dylan. Don't put that on her—"
Jade touched his shoulder. "Mad—"
"No," he cut her off. "No, it's not fair to say that if you won't abandon people to whatever the fuck fate, you've already chosen."
"This isn't about that," Scarlet interjected desperately. "It's not about making anyone choose—"
Mad was too angry now to stop. He was standing at the edge of the chasm that had always separated him from Dylan, the one they'd never managed to bridge without Jade and Scarlet between them. "It's about us choosing. Whether to stay and try to protect her from the shit that comes with this job, or leave her to drown in it."
Scarlet squeezed her eyes shut. "No one's leaving."
Jade made a soft, pained noise, almost a laugh. "No, I think everyone should leave. Before words are said that can't be taken back."
Dylan turned to her, stricken. "Jade."
She crossed to the door and dragged it open. "You're all fighting with each other, and I can't watch that. I can't be the one who caused it."
Mad clenched his fists and forced his temper under control. "I'm sorry, Jade. I just wanted—"
"I know," she interrupted. "You wanted to help. You always want to help. So listen to what I'm asking you to do."
Leave.
This was a challenge he couldn't win. He could stay and fight for her and prove her right, or he could walk away and maybe lose her.
Maybe lose all of them.
Scarlet was the first to yield. But she paused in the doorway, her fingers brushing the back of Jade's hand. "You know where I am."
"I do," Jade replied. Soft. Sad.
Mad's chest hurt.
Dylan followed silently, his gaze locked on Jade until he cleared the doorway and disappeared into the dark hall.
"Jade—"
She silenced him with a shake of her head. "Take care of them, Mad. Especially Dylan. He won't take care of himself. He needs you."
It sounded so final. Like she was writing herself out of their lives, and he couldn't figure out why. There was something growing beneath that polite, perfect mask—some pain they'd missed, some secret she hadn't told them because she was afraid to let them see her weakness.
She wouldn't share it now. She was locked down and resolute, and Mad knew the value of strategic retreat. He nodded and walked past her, out into the ornately decorated hallway, his boots digging into the pristine, priceless rugs.
He'd be back. And if he couldn't coax the truth out of her with kindness, he'd piss her the fuck off. He'd probably end up stabbed with one of his own knives, but he could take it.
He could take anything but losing them.
Scarlet's heart howled, a wounded animal caged in her chest. Her pulse screamed louder with each passing thump, but she made it out of the house, all the way down to the circular driveway.
She stopped beside the huge, ornate fountain. No water flowed from the jugs held aloft by the smiling cherubs, and only a tiny bit remained in the shallow pool at the bottom. Her knees locked at the image, the imagery. All of Two was just like that goddamn fountain—pretty and dead.
And they were leaving Jade here.
Her fury boiled over, and she whirled on Dylan. "Why? Why did you do that?"
His jaw clenched, and he shoved one hand through his hair. "I didn't do anything, Scarlet."
"That's crap. You poked him on purpose. You did it on purpose, Dylan!"
"He wasn't poking me." Mad stopped across from them and folded his arms across his chest. "He was using me as a weapon. Very effectively."
The nerve of him, acting as though he'd been blameless in the whole stupid mess. "Don't get me started on you," she snapped. "You're just as bad, maybe worse."
"Me? At least I was trying to listen to her!"
"No, you weren't. You two started swinging your dicks, and you made it all about you." The look on his face would have been comical if it didn't hurt so very, very much. "She isn't you, Adrian. This place isn't her legacy or her birthright. She doesn't have to be here because the people think she's some sort of god, walking among them."
"Maybe not, but she feels like she needs to be here." Mad's scowl softened as he stepped closer to her. "Can't you see it, Scarlet? If we make her fight us and the sector, we'll just break her that much faster."
She backed away. She had to. "This wasn't supposed to be about fighting at all, remember? We were just going to tell her that we're here for her. Ask her not to shut us out."
"It's too late for that," Dylan muttered.
"Well, now it is."
"It already was," he argued. "Her putting that pimp down—you really think that's the only thing she neglected to tell us, Scarlet? The only piece of pain she hid away where you couldn't see it, much less touch it?"
"No." Unshed tears burned her throat, and she looked away from him, only to have her gaze snag on Mad instead—on his beautiful face, on all the emotion he could never bring himself to reveal. "We all hide things. Don't we, Mad?"
"It's the sectors," he replied. So gentle. So sad. "None of us would still be here if we hadn't learned to laugh so no one could see us cry."
Hiding was survival, but only with enemies and strangers, not friends. Not lovers. "What a crock of shit."
"Not to Jade." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "You know what she's probably up there thinking? That she was right not to show any weakness because we still stared at her like she had three fucking heads when she said she wanted to stay. We just taught her to hide more."
"That's not fair, Mad." Scarlet's shock had been simply that—shock, not horror or revulsion or any of the darker emotions he seemed to want to see. And who wouldn't be surprised, when Jade had spent weeks arguing that this was her duty, that someone had to do it, that she was best suited for the job—
She'd never said she wanted it. Not once. But maybe that was Mad's real point—that just because Jade felt something didn't mean she would share it, and Scarlet was an oblivious asshole for thinking otherwise.
Her vision blurred, and she shut her eyes tight.
Mad sighed. "Scarlet—"
"Stop." Dylan's voice carried a stony edge of something beyond anger. "This isn't her fault. It's ours."
"Yes," Mad agreed. "We've been having this fight forever without saying a damn word. So c'mon, Dylan. Just fucking say it."
"Is that really what you want? Be sure."
"Hiding it hasn't worked out so well for us, has it?"
The sick sensation in Scarlet's gut twisted tighter, and what came out of Dylan's mouth next made her want to cover her ears, run away, anything but listen.
"All right," he said. "You're a liar. You spend your time bemoaning the whole prince thing, but it's all you want. More than me, more than Scarlet or Jade—more than life, man. You want to be Sai
nt Adrian, savior of the weak and the broken."
"I want to help people—"
"No, you need it. And it took me forever to figure out why, but it's just that, isn't it? Broken. If we're not smashed into tiny bits, you can't save us." He looked at Scarlet, so many emotions swirling in his eyes that she couldn't decipher them all—regret, grief, even envy. "That's why he wants Jade here. Because you don't need him to fix you—"
Mad snarled. "Stop it, Dylan. You leave her the fuck alone."
He acted as though he hadn't heard the words. "—but you need her. And if she stays here, if this place shatters her, then she'll need him. The transitive property of Adrian Maddox."
The sick feeling spread, until Scarlet had to lean against the fountain to stay on her feet. "So I don't matter?"
"I don't know," Dylan answered helplessly. "Fuck, maybe you matter the most, because you're the one he can only have if the rest of us are in pieces."
Mad's hands balled into fists. For a moment, she thought he'd swing, land a punch to Dylan's jaw and lay him out. But he only stood there, his chest heaving, his eyes wild. "So that's what you see in me. A fucking monster."
"No, not a monster. That'd be easy," Dylan rasped. "You're a martyr. The O'Kanes like to talk about how I'm a suicidal wreck, but I've got nothing on you. You're just waiting to die. And maybe you think that's all you're good for, but you're wrong."
"Oh yeah? Well, if you think I'd break Jade just to—" His voice cracked, came back rougher. "If you think any of that shit, maybe the two of you should go back and save her from me."
He turned and stalked off into the darkness—towards Sector One, thankfully, because Scarlet was planning on walking, too, and heading in the same direction as Mad would completely defeat the point of being alone.
The car keys jingled in Dylan's shaking hand. "Get in the car, Scarlet."
"No." It was the last thing in the world she'd do. She'd drown herself in the two inches of scummy water left in that ridiculous fountain before she got in a car with him. "I don't want to look at you right now."