Before the End (Beyond Series Ultimate Glom Edition)

by Kit Rocha

  And she still didn't know what day it was.

  By the time Ace took her by the arm and led her across the courtyard, the sun was peeking up over the eastern horizon. As if nothing had changed, and this was any other day.

  “Jeni.” Gia was waiting for them, her eyes shining with unshed tears. Her arms trembled as she wrapped them around Jeni and held her tight.

  Jeni stood there, breathing in the familiar scent of Gia's perfume. Underneath it, the scents of blood and death lingered. “I need a shower.”

  “I know.” Gia drew her deeper into Ace's bedroom. Ace followed, another familiar presence at her back. “Rachel's on her way back with food and a med kit. Are you hurt anywhere?”

  Everywhere. She didn't realize she'd said it aloud until Ace and Gia traded a serious look. “No, I'm not hurt.”

  “We'll check anyway,” Ace said soothingly, gathering her tangled hair back from her face. “We're gonna get these clothes off, okay? And maybe light them on fire.”

  She kicked off her shoes as they tried to tug her shirt over her head. Her shoulder ached where she'd smashed it against the frame of Hawk's car, but she lifted her arms anyway.

  Gia pulled at her jeans, then stilled. Her gaze flew to Jeni's naked throat as she drew the collar out of her pocket. “What should I do with this?”

  “I don't—” Thinking about it threatened to splinter Jeni's apathy. “Can you just put it somewhere?”

  “I got it.” Ace took it and tossed it onto the table. The metal medallion clinked on the wood, and the tiny sound echoed in Jeni's head as Gia and Ace helped her step out of her jeans and led her toward the open shower.

  Steam already poured from it. Ace coaxed her in and climbed in after her, still fully clothed, ignoring the water that soaked through his T-shirt and jeans. “Baby girl, you are all-over bruises. Do you need some painkillers?”

  For a moment, she thought about it. If they drugged her up, she wouldn't have to worry about anything. She wouldn't have to think. But she'd never used that particular escape, and doing it now seemed...treacherous. Like a narrow path with no place to turn around. “No.”

  “All right.” He tapped her shoulder gently. “Turn around, honey.”

  When her hair was wet, he started to wash it. The shampoo was the stuff Rachel always used, thick and coconut-scented, and Ace worked it through Jeni's hair carefully, avoiding the sore spot on her temple.

  She must have hit her head, too, but she couldn't remember when or how.

  “What day is it?” she asked as he steered her under the hot spray again.

  “What day?” Ace frowned as he drew his fingers through her hair. “Tuesday.”

  Noah had cracked the city's encryption on Sunday. She and Hawk had left for the farm in Six that evening. It had only been one day—one long, interminable fucking day—

  It didn't seem possible that so many things could change in one day. People were dead, an entire sector destroyed, the future she thought she held in the palm of her hand, in her heart, gone.

  In one fucking day.

  The first sob wrenched free of her aching throat like a bullet. She couldn't hold it back, even when Ace gathered her close with a look of alarm. She slumped against him as the dam broke, sob after sob, coming faster and faster until her knees gave way.

  Hawk woke up in a hospital bed.

  A machine beside him beeped softly. A bag hung from the side of it, with a tube leading to an IV attached to his arm. His clothes were gone, replaced by thick bandages around his waist and ribs and another around his arm. He drew his other arm out from beneath the pristine white sheet and stared at the bruises, scrapes, and the tape wrapped around two of his fingers.

  “We almost lost you,” a hoarse voice said next to him.

  Hawk turned his head, and Alya's face swam into focus. She looked tired, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, her hair scraped back from her sorrow-lined face in a tight knot. She gripped his hand and guided it back to the bed. “You stay still until Dylan comes back around to check on you.”

  It was so bossy, so motherly, he couldn't stop a tired smile. “Yes, ma'am.”

  “Don't you yes ma'am me,” she retorted, her sharp tone in contrast to the gentle hand she laid against his cheek. “You came in here with your brain bleeding and three of your ribs broken. The doctor said it's a miracle you don't have a punctured lung.”

  He didn't? Funny, considering how hard it was to breathe. “Is Jeni okay?”

  Alya's expression softened. “Yes. I haven't seen her, but Lex has been keeping me updated. She has some bumps and bruises from the crash, but otherwise—”

  “The crash.” Hawk swallowed and squeezed his eyes shut. “God, I'm sorry. You trusted me with Luna—”

  “Shh.” His mother stroked his hair, and a memory stirred. An early one, blurry around the edges—the summer a fever had swept across the farms. He'd been four or five years old, and so sick, but his father had reserved the medication for the men and boys strong enough to work the crops. Alya had held Hawk in her arms, rocking him through the tremors, her fingers soft and cool on his forehead as she sang under her breath.

  She'd barely been Luna's age.

  “Big John sent out a search party the first morning,” she said softly. “They found your car and hauled it back. And...her.”

  “Jeni said it was fast. That she wasn't in pain.”

  Alya stroked his hair again, her fingers trembling. “We're planning a memorial for her and Shipp next week at the new farm. He'd want to feel like he was there with us, starting our new lives.”

  Hawk swallowed another lump. “Next week?”

  “So you and Jeni are recovered enough to come.”

  Oh God, she didn't know. Of course she didn't fucking know. Alya could stare at the bruises and the lacerations, number his broken bones, know about his bleeding brain, but the worst injury, the one that might never heal…

  Dylan wouldn't have found his broken heart on any of the scans.

  “Hawk?”

  He had to look at her. He opened his eyes, and the worry creasing her brow broke his heart all over again. She'd watched the man she loved get shot down in front of her, had held his bleeding body in her arms.

  Jeni was still alive. Even if Hawk never got to touch her, even if he never got to hold her, she was safe. Whole.

  And Alya's sympathy would kill him.

  “It's nothing,” he choked out. “We just—we had a fight.”

  “What, baby?”

  Maybe it would be easier to admit it because Alya had always been more like a fond, easily exasperated older sister than a mother. Someone not so much older than him, who knew what it was like to grow up hard and not understand all the rules about love. “We broke each other. There was a moment…”

  The horror of it came rushing back. The sick helplessness. Alya squeezed his hand tight and forced him to look at her. “What moment?”

  She traded her life for mine. He couldn't get the words out. Every time he tried, he saw Shipp on the ground, heard Alya's scream.

  He couldn't do this to her.

  “Hawk.” Her voice was as steady and unwavering as her grip. “I don't know what happened between you, but I know about regret.”

  “Alya—”

  “Listen to me.” She leaned closer, her eyes bright. “Shipp tried to love me for years. I beat him back with everything inside me because I was scared of letting anyone close. And those are years I'll never get back, baby. Years I wasted, because I didn't know how few we'd have.”

  His eyes stung. “Ma—”

  “Don't interrupt me.” Her grip tightened until his hand ached. “You take everything on yourself, Hawk. That fool girl's choice to stay with her bastard husband, Luna's choice to run off after Royce's toy. Even all the goddamn mistakes I made with you. You carry our mistakes like you made them happen.”

  The pain in his chest wasn't from the beating. It was a torrent of tears, lodged deep and fighting its way up. “I wanted to prot
ect you. All of you.”

  “That's not a compliment, baby.” She touched his cheek, her eyes swimming. “A little bit is fine. But when you take it too far—it's just another way to make us less than human.”

  He swallowed around the knife in his throat. “I'm not trying to do that.”

  “We know,” she whispered. “It's why we keep letting you do it. But it's not good for us, and it's not good for you. And, Hawk—” Her tears spilled over. “You were a child. You couldn't have protected me. You shouldn't have had to. It was my job to get you the hell out of that nightmare.”

  Hawk wiped the tears from her cheek. “You were a kid, too.”

  “Goddammit, Hawk, stop forgiving me,” she growled, sounding so exasperated that Hawk laughed, and then she was laughing, too, laughing through the tears as he pulled her into a hug that dislodged the sensor on his finger and set the machine behind him off into alarmed screeching.

  The confused nurse found them like that—Hawk's laughter edged with hysteria, Alya's with tears...but laughing.

  It didn't heal his heart. That was still shredded in his chest, and would be until he saw Jeni.

  But it was a start.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Broken Circle was shut down until further notice, and no amount of arguing that she was fine would convince Dallas—or Noah and Noelle, for that matter—to let Jeni back into the workroom to help with monitoring Eden's current transmissions.

  Which meant she was stuck, with nothing to do, and not a damn thing to occupy her thoughts in place of her regrets. So she retreated to the rooftop garden and threw herself into chores there. She watered, she babied the herbs, she thinned plantings, she weeded beds that didn't need weeding.

  And she laughed at herself, because she was working so hard so she wouldn't have to think about Hawk, and yet, here she was, in the one place that reminded her of him more than any other.

  “Jeni.”

  For a heartbeat, she was sure she'd conjured him out of nothing—or that Dylan's gentle warnings about post-traumatic stress were coming to bear. But when she looked up from the spinach planter and brushed her damp hair back from her forehead, Hawk was there.

  His hair was shorter, and his beard had been trimmed. The vicious bruise on his cheek was slowly fading from purple to green. Otherwise, he looked the same—jeans, boots, a black T-shirt. If she let herself, she could almost think this was any other day. That she'd never come along and destroyed his life.

  She swallowed hard. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” He shifted his weight awkwardly. “I hope this is okay, me coming up here.”

  “Yeah. I mean, this is more your thing than mine.” She stepped back from the planter and tugged off her gloves. “I didn't know you were out of the hospital.”

  He shrugged. “Dylan wasn't thrilled. But I needed to see you.”

  Guilt stabbed at her. “I thought about coming by, but I wasn't sure…” No, she couldn't put that on him. “Dallas and Lex haven't been crazy about the idea of me going anywhere.”

  “Good.” He took a few steps forward but stopped just out of arm's reach. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stood there, his gaze roaming over her face, the silence building. “I don't know what to say,” he admitted finally. “I thought the right words would just happen if I saw you, but I still don't know what to say.”

  That would be too easy, the kind of thing you'd see in a romantic pre-Flare movie, right before the heartfelt declarations of love and the swelling music. A few lines in those always seemed to fix the characters' problems.

  But this was real life. “I'm sorry that I hurt you,” she said. “I never meant to.”

  “I know.” He swallowed and looked away. “I wanted to hold you so bad, Jeni. Before Coop and Tammy came? You were so hurt and so scared, and I was making it worse instead of better. But I was afraid to touch you.”

  “You were upset—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “I was terrified. You still don't get it. How far I'd go for you. I didn't even get it until we were standing there. If I'd touched you…” He closed his eyes. “You think I couldn't have made a deal with Peterson to get you out? If he'd asked me to come back here and betray Dallas and Lex…”

  Goose bumps prickled over her flesh, and she rubbed her bare arms. “You wouldn't have, Hawk. Never. There's too much at stake.”

  “I wouldn't have,” he agreed softly. “But that's how crazy I get when I think about you hurting or dying. I wouldn't have done it...but I would have been tempted.”

  It was all a tangled mess of recriminations, one that Jeni couldn't even begin to unravel. She'd made a split-second decision in a moment of weakness, out of broken-hearted desperation—but that didn't mean she thought it was a mistake.

  “I would do it again,” she confessed. “The hardest part of all of this has been trying to figure out how to tell you that I was wrong. And I guess it's because I don't think I was. I made the only decision that I could live with, and if I regret anything, it's that it turned out to be for nothing. I hurt you for nothing.”

  “We hurt each other,” he corrected. “For nothing.”

  “Yeah.” And if that was all it was, harsh words in a moment of unimaginable stress, then it would have been easy to get past it. To work through it. “I think we had a problem before that, though.”

  His mouth flattened into a hard line, and his eyes went bleak. “Me. I'm the problem.”

  “It's not about blame.” She sank to the low bench along one wall of the greenhouse and patted the spot beside her. “I wanted to give you what you needed. I wanted it so much that I did some not-smart things.”

  After a moment, he lowered himself carefully to sit next to her. “Like what?”

  One thing loomed larger than all the others, the very beginning of her bad decisions—the collar. She pulled it out of her pocket and held it out to him. “I shouldn't have accepted it. We weren't ready.”

  She half-expected him to surge off the bench and refuse it. He stared at her hand forever, his expression impossible to read.

  Then he reached out and closed his fist around the leather. “No. We weren't.”

  Relief warred with a completely unfair disappointment. It wasn't like she wanted him to argue with her, but something about seeing the collar clutched in his hand was so final. “I knew it was too much, but I took it anyway. Not my finest moment.”

  He smiled sadly. “And I offered you ink for all the wrong reasons.”

  Hearing that shouldn't have made her feel better. And it didn't, not exactly, but it did make her doubt herself a little less. “We were reckless.”

  “War makes a good excuse for recklessness.” He pressed a hand to his ribs and winced as he shifted. “Doesn't keep it from hurting when it blows up, though, does it?”

  “No.” Sitting here with him could have felt like a beginning or an end, reflecting on the past or looking toward the future. But all Jeni could focus on was the moment, the truths they were sharing. “It hurt, not knowing whether you really wanted me.”

  “That's the one thing you never have to wonder. I wanted you, Jeni. I just…” He trailed off, his expression stormy.

  She nudged him with her knee. “You just what?”

  He flexed his hand. “When I'm scared, I hold on too tight.”

  “Maybe we all do.” Jeni leaned her head on his shoulder. He felt the same as always, solid and strong, steady, but there was a stiffness there too, a distance she hadn't felt since before their first kiss. “I don't know where to go from here. I don't know if we can. But I don't regret it. Even with all the things we fucked up.”

  “I don't regret it, either.” Hawk slid his hand over hers and twined their fingers together. “Lex and Dallas won't let me near Five until my ribs are healed, so I'm picking up the slack for Cruz while he oversees the defense. If you need anything, I'll be here most of the time.”

  “I'll remember that.”

  “Can I ask you for a favor?”

&n
bsp; She squeezed his hand.

  “They're having a memorial for Shipp and Luna in a few days.” He cleared his throat. “Will you come with me?”

  Closing her eyes painted a picture of Luna, gasping with mock outrage as Hawk teased her. Jeni rubbed her fingers over her eyes to banish the image and nodded. “Absolutely.”

  He turned and brushed a kiss to the top of her head. “Thank you.”

  “It's the very least I can do. For you and for them.”

  They lapsed into silence. It wasn't comfortable, exactly, but it was comforting. Jeni hadn't realized until that moment how very much she needed for Hawk not to hate her. Even if they didn't stand a chance of being together, they could still mean something to one another. She wouldn't lose him for good.

  She couldn't lose him for good.

  “Well.” Big John propped both hands on his hips. “This car was cherry. Damn crying shame, for a host of reasons.” He cursed as he crossed himself.

  Hawk stared at the wreckage of his car and tried to let it be just a car, not a symbol for the mess he'd made out of his life. Someone had already ripped out the ruined back seat, but Hawk could reconstruct the crash well enough in his head. The driver's side of the car was bent inward, the metal twisted and split, gaping open. The truck from the city must have slammed into them fast and hard.

  It was a miracle they'd pulled him out of there with any of his ribs—or the left side of his body—still intact.

  He didn't want to be here, staring at the twisted metal and shredded upholstery. He didn't want to remember dragging Jeni's fingers down to stroke the leather as he told her how building the car had given him hope.

  His car had never been just a car. Every moment that mattered had pivoted around it—bringing Shipp back to the farm. Helping Finn and Trix get to Sector Four and earning a place in the O'Kanes in exchange. Bringing Jeni home to meet his family.