by Kit Rocha
Murmurs around the table came in the affirmative. No one was anxious to linger in Two, not with the cracks showing through Cerys’s pretty façade. It was depressing here, even more than usual, so Dallas was all too ready to shove off and head for the exit. They hadn’t accepted rooms this time—Lex and Lili were waiting in the car with Mad.
Everyone wanted to get the hell out of here.
Jim passed by him on his way out the door. “How did you fare against Beckett’s machinations, anyway? No loss of life, I hope?”
“We’re more or less in one piece.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up in a smile. “More than less?”
Dallas grinned at him. “Someone in particular you’re asking about?”
“No,” Jim answered, his expression mild. Too mild. “I wouldn’t expect you to tell me, anyway. A man has to keep his own counsel.”
“That he does,” Dallas agreed. “Some secrets would be dangerous if they got out too soon.”
“It’s been known to happen.”
Dallas wondered how many more secrets Jim had hiding behind that deceptive face. With his silvering hair and the new wrinkles around his eyes, Jim looked like a pleasant, older businessman. Not the most ruthless leader in all eight sectors—the only one who’d been around from the start.
A man could build up a lot of secrets over that many years. “You should come to the Broken Circle sometime. I’ll crack open one of the special bottles, and we can chat.”
This time, Jim broke out in a full-fledged grin. “You after my secrets, O’Kane?”
“Hell yeah.” Dallas returned the smile. “I’m just a simple bootlegger. I gotta learn somewhere, right?”
“Right. And I’m just a guy who makes toilet paper.” Jim turned down the hall and tossed a wave over his shoulder. “See you when the next crisis hits.”
Dallas bit back a laugh and headed for the front door. But the urge to smile had faded before he hit the street.
When the next crisis hit, not if. Trouble was the only certain thing about life after the Flares but, Gideon’s God willing, maybe they had some breathing room. He sure the hell hoped so, because Dallas could already feel the next storm gathering.
Eden’s greedy waste. The empty warehouses. Special Tasks soldiers defecting. Sector leaders falling one by one.
The luxury of being a simple bootlegger was long gone. From now on, Dallas O’Kane was a man preparing for war—and not the messy-but-confined brutality of a sector war. In his gut, he knew where the real danger lay.
He paused on the sidewalk and twisted to the west. Eden loomed above Two, the walls and skyscrapers climbing high over the two- and three-story structures in Cerys’s sector.
A man prepared to take on paradise could do worse for allies than Jim Jernigan.
Chapter Twenty-One
It took Finn two days to realize Trix wasn’t with him anymore.
She was present. In his life, in his bed. She’d held his hand while Doc patched him up, and clung to him all night long. But Finn had touched her now. All of her, not just her body but her heart and soul. He’d felt the weight of that responsibility, the power of her love.
And it was slipping away, even when she sat by his side and smiled and promised everything was all right.
He had shattered something precious inside her. Her trust, maybe, or her belief in a happy ending. She was holding back from him, building walls to protect her heart, and he didn’t know how to stop it.
Lex poured him a double and slid the glass across her desk. “Well? What do you need to talk to me about?”
“Trix.” He reached for the glass but didn’t lift it to his lips. The sweet, comforting burn of liquor was a distraction he couldn’t afford and didn’t deserve right now. “You were right.”
“Yeah? About which part?”
“I hurt her.” But hurt was too soft a word. Too gentle. “I broke her.”
Lex snorted. “Well, you did walk out on her. Not just that, but on your way to a certain death. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the fact that it didn’t take is a good thing, but it doesn’t change what you did.”
Finn gripped the glass until he was surprised it didn’t shatter, digging glass shards into his hand. “It was the right thing.”
“For a man who tried to sacrifice himself to save us all, you’ve got some pretty black-and-white ideas about the fallout.”
He’d never had black-and-white ideas before. His world had been ugly, soul-crushing shades of gray. “I thought being a good guy would be easier.”
She slowly sipped her whiskey. “Well, it’s not. It’s hard as hell—but worth it.”
Nothing was quite as unfair as a world where the right choice was the one that hurt the one person he needed to protect. “I tried to get her to run away with me, you know. When we were out in Six, I would have headed west and never looked back, because she was my damn world. But I was never hers. This place was. I wanted to keep it safe for her.”
“Her world, huh?” Lex arched an eyebrow. “Then why did she start packing her shit the night you left?”
“She what?”
“I’m not supposed to know, I guess,” Lex allowed. “No one is, probably. But yeah. Packing.” She glowered down at her glass before draining it. “Maybe you underestimated how big a part of her world you are.”
Finn drank, too. The burn in his throat couldn’t match the one in his chest. “I’ll do anything. Tell me how to help her.”
Lex set her glass aside and squinted at him. “Let me guess—she’s distant. Says nothing’s wrong, but you know that’s not true.”
His jaw clenched, Finn nodded.
“Maybe she’s worried,” Lex said softly. “Wondering what you’ll do the next time some asshole decides to flex and threaten us all. If she’ll lose you again.”
He wanted to protest that it would be different, because it had to be. This situation had been personal, pitting Finn’s life against the security of the O’Kanes. No one else could have taken that risk. No one else could have saved so much. He hadn’t been planning to throw his life away recklessly.
This time.
He’d been stumbling forward blindly since the moment he met her, stumbling toward self-destruction from the second he lost her. And Trix knew it.
Maybe she didn’t realize how much that had changed. He’d told her she’d given him something worth dying for. He’d just assumed she’d understood that all the same things were worth living for.
Lex was still watching him. He thumped down the glass and shoved it across the desk. “I won’t fight for you next time. I’ll fight with you.”
She refilled it. “Life here is dangerous, Finn. That’s the flat truth, and Trix knows it. But she also needs to know that nothing short of another fucking apocalypse is going to drag you out of her arms again.”
“All right.” He lifted his glass to Lex. “I guess proving that’s my new job.”
“Not even close,” she shot back. “Proving it’s what you do because you can’t imagine your goddamn life without her in it.”
“All due respect, Lex?” He drained the drink and took his life in his hands. “That’s the only part no one’s ever doubted. If I do this, it’s gotta be because I can’t imagine her life without me.”
Both eyebrows rose, then sank again as a slow smile curved her lips. “Now you’re catching on, new guy.”
“I try not to make the same mistake more than three or four times.”
“An admirable trait.”
Finn set the glass on the desk. “Is Lili—?” He hesitated. He knew the girl through scattered moments of her life. The night her father had promised her to Beckett. The night she’d married him. Celebratory dinners. Planning sessions, when she’d ghosted in and out to refill drinks and serve food in silence. She might know his name, but she didn’t know him any more than he knew her.
Lex’s voice gentled. “She’ll be all right. Eventually. She may even stay here. Where the hell else is she gonna
go?”
Nowhere. She had no survival skills, no way to earn money short of selling herself. And if she was like most of the wives in Five, she’d been taught to consider a bullet between the eyes preferable to letting a man who wasn’t her husband defile her. “If she needs cash or credits or something... Hell, Noah cleaned out my accounts. I’ve got plenty.”
“The world isn’t yours to save all by yourself,” she reminded him gently.
“Yeah, but I took enough of her father’s dirty money. She earned her share, too.”
Lex shrugged. “Then take it up with Lili.”
Still pushing him to face his past—and already pushing Lili to face her future. Finn shook his head and rose. “You’re a hypocrite, Lex.”
“Then I’m in good company.” She kicked his chair beneath the desk. “You’ve got shit to take care of, don’t you?”
“And you’ve got a world to save.” By the time Lex was done shoving Lili to her feet, the girl would be better off than she’d ever fared in Five. “Don’t forget, you owe me a party.”
“I owe you a lot more than that.” She sat up straight and eyed him soberly. “You stopped Dom from getting what he was after—Dallas’s blood.”
And Trix’s pain. He held up one wrist and flashed his O’Kane ink at her. “You gave me a family. Turns out fighting for something feels a hell of a lot better than fighting against everything.”
“Good.” She capped the whiskey bottle and winked at him. “Welcome home.”
Trix was pushing herself, and she knew it.
She got off an early shift at the Broken Circle and headed straight for one of the warehouses, where the dancers from the club had commandeered an empty corner to choreograph and rehearse their dances.
The idea to do a new routine based more firmly in the guns and leather aesthetic of Sector Four had been a lark at first, a wild idea brought on by her dizzy, spinning grief. But in the days since Finn had come home, it had turned into something else. A driving need to prove to herself that she could do it, perhaps. That she had finally shed the last bits of the woman she had been in Sector Five. That she was an O’Kane.
That she’d survive if he left her again.
She stripped down, despite the chill, and spent a couple of hours testing out new moves. The music was different, odd until she turned off her brain, stopped thinking, and just let go. Then it filled her, not only the throbbing beat, but the meaning behind it. Sexuality, strength, and the steel that could only come from both.
She worked until her feet ached, then kicked off her shoes and kept going. When she couldn’t dance anymore, she got dressed, curled up behind a crate, and cried.
It was stupid. It was all so fucking stupid. She had everything she wanted, but she couldn’t seem to banish the dark cloud that hovered over it all. The bone-deep fear that it was only a matter of time before it slipped through her fingers.
She dried her eyes and gathered her things, threw a tired wave to two of the new girls coming in as she was leaving. She trudged home and held her breath as she took the last few steps down the hall. Finn would be waiting. Once again, he’d ask her, with dull, worried eyes, if everything was okay.
But he didn’t. He didn’t even look up as she stepped through the door, his gaze fixed on a folded piece of paper in his hands, his shoulders tense.
Guilt lay heavy in her belly. “I’m late,” she murmured. “Sorry about that. I was working on a new dance.”
“It’s okay.” He glanced up at her, his expression impossible to read. “I just got here.”
Trix dropped her bag beside the couch and leaned over to kiss the top of his head. She lingered, and a little of her unease melted away as she stroked his hair. “What’s that?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he hooked an arm around her waist and tugged her into his lap. “I screwed up.”
Paralyzing fear gripped her, and she had to choke out the question. “What?”
“No, it’s not—” He sighed and pressed his lips to her temple. “This is what I mean. I screwed up. I hurt you. You need to tell me that I did.”
How could she? “Finn…”
He caught her chin and forced her to meet his eyes. “I promised I’d never leave you. And then I turned right the fuck around and left you.”
Her eyes stung. “It wasn’t exactly a normal situation. I get that now.”
“No, it wasn’t.” He stroked her cheekbone, his touch whisper soft, as if he barely dared. “But I did it all fucking wrong. I told you that you were worth dying for, but that’s not what I meant.”
Trix shot off the couch, because she didn’t trust herself that close to him. If he kept looking at her like that, touching her like that, she’d say whatever she had to just to make his pain stop. “I never wanted you to die for me.”
“I know—”
“No, you don’t. You never did. You never understood.” Her lungs burned, but she couldn’t stop the words, not even long enough to draw a breath. “Women used to say that to me. They’d say it like it was some fucking badge of honor—Finn would die for you. And all I could think whenever I heard that was that, someday, Mac would find a way to use it. And he did.”
Finn stared at her, expression stricken.
“I wanted—no, I needed one thing from you. One thing.” Christ, she sounded like a crazy woman now, a half-step away from ranting. “I needed you to be strong enough to let me go if that’s what had to happen. You couldn’t do it when I was trying to get clean, and I knew you wouldn’t be able to do it when Mac—when he—” She dragged in a ragged breath. “And then you came here. And you finally did it, Finn. You let me go. But you were still dying for me.”
“Not for you,” he said softly. “It was more than you this time, more than Dallas and Lex. It was this damn place. It was…” He shook his head. “Fuck, I don’t know. Puppies and rainbows and all the stupid shit I made fun of O’Kane for believing in. It was for me, because that’s what you gave me. If Beckett was coming for me, I deserved to die for the right reason.”
Her throat squeezed tight, and she covered her face with her hands. “God, please tell me I’ve given you better things than that.”
“Everything.” His voice sounded rough. “A family, a home. Something to live for.”
“What good is any of that if you’re going to leave it?”
“I used to go into every fight not giving a damn if I walked away from it. Dying didn’t mean shit.” The paper crumpled in his fingers, and he thrust it toward her. “This is how hard I’d fight to come back now.”
She unfolded the paper. It was a drawing—one of Ace’s, judging from the vivid color and the flourishing lines. A tattoo of a peacock-feather choker, embellished with silver Celtic knotwork and edged in purple stones.
Just like the ring Finn had given her.
Trix sank to the couch and smoothed the page with trembling hands. “Is this mine? For me, I mean?”
“Ace said that’s how an O’Kane says he’s serious.” Finn dug the ring out of his pocket and held it out. “I want you to have this, too. But the ink is different. It’s forever.”
A ring could be put away, hidden in a drawer along with memories, to be taken out only when loneliness proved too great to ignore. But ink… Finn would never have done it before, never marked her in a way she couldn’t set aside if she lost him.
“Are you ready for this?” she asked hoarsely. “Do you believe it? That I want you on my skin because, even if I lose you, I will never, ever get over you?”
“I know what the ink means.” He touched the edge of the paper. “I can never walk away and tell myself you’ll forget me. That you’ll just move on. And no, baby. I can’t believe you want it, but I’m still asking.”
“What did you do when Tracy died? Did you move on?”
“No.” He closed his eyes. “Fuck, no.”
“Neither would I.” She caught his hand. “I want this, Finn. I want it because it means you get it now. That you’ll
be with me, all the way, and that I deserve that. That I deserve you.”
“You deserve the moon and stars, baby doll.” He pressed a kiss to the inside of her wrist. “If you’re willing to settle for me, I’m too damn selfish to give you up. So wear my ink, and you’ll always know I’m coming home to you.”
The tense little knot between her shoulders unraveled. Trix climbed over onto his lap and hid her face against his neck. “It’s not settling. Someday, you’ll see that.”
Instead of answering, he slipped the ring onto her finger. “This was my mother’s. It’s the only thing of hers I still have.”
“You never told me that.” That he’d given it to her so many years ago, that he wanted her to wear it now, brought a fresh wave of tears to her eyes. “If I had known…” She never would have taken it from him.
“It was yours from the day you first put it on,” he said gruffly, folding her fingers toward her palm as if to keep her from taking it off. “I’m glad you took care of it when I couldn’t.”
There was one more thing she needed to say, one more wall left to crumble between them. She met his eyes and swallowed hard. “I’m sorry I left you, too.”
He cupped her cheeks and shook his head. “We both needed to get straight. Maybe we couldn’t do it together. I wasn’t strong enough to let you hurt.”
The truth, laid out between them along with everything else. But it was also the past—and this time they both needed to let go.
Trix placed her trembling fingers over his lips. “No more apologies for shit that’s already happened. We start clean now.”
“With ink?” He shifted one hand to stroke her throat. “Ace made a big deal about doing this tattoo for free.”
“Did he?” Finn’s hand warmed her skin, and her eyes fluttered shut before she forced them open again. “Ace doesn’t work for free. You must have a new admirer.”
“That’ll come in handy.” The pad of his thumb lingered over her pulse, and the soft circles shifted from soothing to sensual. “I’m thinking about another tattoo for myself.”
“Yeah?”
“I want you on my skin, too.”
