by Kit Rocha
Cerys blinked at her before reaching for the slender cigarette already burning on her desk. She lifted its slim black holder to her lips and paused. “I’m listening.”
“Vaughn wasn’t concerned with my safety.” She let an edge creep into her voice. “If you care about protecting your girls, even a little, you won’t trust him with another Orchid.”
“I’ve spoken with him. He has no interest in taking on responsibility for another Orchid.” One corner of Cerys’s perfectly painted mouth tipped up. “You saw to that. I referred him to Rose House.”
An empty victory, diverting Vaughn’s cruelty from women trained to handle it to women taught to endure it. Jade had always been the exception that proved the rule when it came to Rose House—an initiate who could handle and endure. Too many of the other girls would simply submit in truth, letting Vaughn chip away at their sense of self-worth until they broke under the pain.
Mia should have let Ford kill the bastard.
The rage creeping under her skin made it harder to stay calm. “How much? How much so I can walk away?”
Cerys sighed. “Are you certain you want to?”
“What possible alternative could you offer?”
“You could come back. Stay, and help train the girls.”
An offer that should have turned her stomach, but Cerys was clever. Her traps came in layers, the kind you baited yourself. Train the girls could so easily become warn the girls, and for one reckless moment, Mia considered it. She could stay here, fomenting quiet, subversive rebellion. She could start more whispers, chip away at the dream Cerys was peddling. Feed the dream Lex represented.
Maybe that’s what Jade had been planning before Cerys agreed to start drugging her.
She held up the envelope. “I’m certain. Tell me how much you want.”
The woman’s dark gaze dropped to the heavy envelope, but she only sat back with a mild shrug. “Nothing. You’re free to go.”
Nothing in life was that easy. Mia studied Cerys’s face, struggling to find the trap, but she couldn’t even find the hint of triumph that would mean it had already snapped shut around her. The only possibility that made any sense was that this was a snub, a way of Cerys reinforcing one last time how very little Mia was worth...
The woman watching her with that easy, unbothered gaze hadn’t seized control of a sector by making petty, financially stupid decisions out of spite. She might let Mia walk away, but it wouldn’t be freedom. “I don’t want to go until my debt is clear.”
“I forgive it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“And why not?”
Because Cerys didn’t forgive debts, unless someone else—
Her stomach flipped. The envelope almost slipped through her fingers, and she tightened them until the edges crumpled in. “Who? Who paid you?”
Cerys had turned her attention back to flipping through the neat stack of papers on her desk, and she didn’t look up as she answered. “Who else? Your new patron.”
Chapter Thirteen
The door to his office flung open and crashed against the wall so hard that Ford almost dropped his tablet.
Mia stepped through and slammed it shut even harder.
“How could you?” She stalked toward his desk, fury in every line of her body but her face—her eyes were a gut punch of pain and betrayal, even as she slapped her hands against his desk. “I told you to leave it alone.”
Oh, shit. “Because I had the money, Mia. You can pay me back. Or not, I don’t really care. The important thing is that Cerys is out of your life for good.”
“Oh, is that the important thing?” She leaned over the desk, until her face hovered so close her vicious whisper was almost a caress. “If my new patron thinks that’s the most important thing, who am I to disagree? Thank you, sir.”
A chill raced up his spine, and he rose. “Jesus Christ, patron? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You bought me, Ford.” She shoved away from the desk and paced, stripping off her jacket with abrupt, angry movements. “You handed the woman who sold me to Vaughn a stack of cash, and you made the decision without me.”
He would have apologized in the face of her anger—the last thing he’d meant to do was upset her—but framing the situation in such tawdry terms pissed him off, too. “What decision? You owed Cerys money, now you don’t.”
“No, now I owe you money.” She pivoted back to glare at him. “How many kinds of power do you need over me? You’re an O’Kane. You’re my boss. Every scrap of power and safety I have is borrowed from you, and now my freedom is, too.”
What was his alternative? To watch her glancing back over her shoulder every time a stranger walked by, just in case it was one of Cerys’s men? To see her scramble to save enough money to pay the debt, knowing full well she never could?
Fuck that. Ford crossed his arms over his chest. “I’d do it again.”
Her eyebrows swept up. “That’s your response to seeing how much it hurt me? I’d do it again? And I’m supposed to believe you don’t want control over my life?”
“I’d do it again because you’re being silly,” he countered. “You let all this shit get in your head, and now you’re shoving it off on me. I was helping you, that’s all.”
“Like I was trying to help you on my first day by acting like you couldn’t walk across the room to file some papers on your own?”
Things were going wrong, spinning out of control. All she needed was to be placated, for him to apologize, and he opened his mouth, but the words wouldn’t come. Frustrated, he ground out a curse and ran his hands through his hair. “This is stupid, Mia. It’s a stupid argument.”
She clutched her coat against her chest, her posture rigid. Defensive. “Maybe it’s stupid that you walk all over this damn sector without your cane. And that you hide up here, licking your wounds, when you have a whole family out there who loves you whether your leg works or not. Or that you’re so desperate to hide your weakness you can’t see how strong you are. Maybe all of those things are stupid, but they’re not stupid to me. Because they matter to you.”
That brought him up short and stabbed pain through the center of his chest. Ford dropped his hands by his sides. “I just wanted you to be safe, and now you are.”
“I hope so.” Mia slipped a hand into her jacket pocket and pulled out an envelope. It clicked with the sound of credit sticks bumping together when she set it on his desk. “This should cover what you paid. If I still have a job, I’d like the rest of the day off.”
“If you still—” He bit his tongue to cut off the words. “Thanks a lot, Mia.”
She flinched and turned for the door. “Making me feel guilty for standing up for myself doesn’t make you right. It makes you like him.”
“And you feeling like a whore doesn’t mean I treated you like one.” The pain in his chest deepened into an ache that throbbed through him. “You didn’t even ask me why I went to Cerys. You just came in here, throwing around ugly words, thinking shit around here is exactly like it was back home in Two. So yeah, one of us is exactly like Vaughn. But it isn’t me.”
Her steps faltered, but she didn’t look back. Just opened the door, and closed it carefully behind her.
Go after her. Ford wrapped both hands around the edge of his desk to keep from obeying the silent command screaming through him. Why should he, when she was the one who hadn’t even afforded him a chance to explain before tearing into him? Before comparing him to the bastard who’d treated her like shit.
No. He relaxed his fingers, sat down, and stared unseeingly at the papers on his desk. If she thought so little of him, so be it. She could run, but he wasn’t like Vaughn.
He wouldn’t chase her.
It wasn’t a long walk from Ford’s office to the rooms Nessa had so generously offered to share. Down the steps at the back of the Broken Circle, across an empty parking lot and what might have been a street before the O’Kanes had commandeered four city blocks to build
their sprawling home.
Most of the O’Kanes seemed to live in a large building on the far side of the compound, but Nessa was like Ford. She’d claimed space close to where she worked, which meant that getting there meant walking through the warehouse where the O’Kanes made their whiskey.
It meant walking by O’Kanes, Ford’s brothers, men who glanced at her before looking away, because they didn’t know yet. They didn’t know that she was hysterical, or ungrateful, or whatever Ford would say when he complained about how crazy his goddamn assistant was.
If she even had her job anymore.
But she could handle the men. Nessa was the final straw, popping out of her office as Mia reached the stairs to the second floor. Nessa didn’t glance at her and go about her business. She took one look at Mia’s expression and swore. “Oh hell, what the fuck happened?”
So much defensive anger. It would vanish when the truth came out, because Nessa had ink wrapped around her wrists, too. She was an O’Kane, and Ford was family.
Mia was just a broken girl foolish enough to think freedom was real.
Her self-control crumpled. The tears that had been stinging at the back of her eyes overflowed, and she couldn’t make them stop. Not when Nessa wrapped slender arms around her in a bruising hug, not when the other woman dragged her back into her office and down onto a couch, still holding on to her like Mia deserved comfort, deserved friendship.
That only made her cry harder.
“Jas said something was up.” Lex hovered in the doorway, her shoulders tense. “Ford?”
“Probably, the asshole,” Nessa grumbled, and the fact that she was talking about her like she wasn’t even there was what let Mia seize control of her traitorous body.
“It’s not—” Her voice cracked, and she eased from Nessa’s grip and scrubbed her hands over her face. God, she couldn’t face Lex like this. A wreck, every defense laid to waste, sobbing like a first-week initiate who still got homesick. “I’m okay. I’m sorry.”
Lex knelt in front of the couch and peered up at Mia for a few moments before sighing. “Oh, shit. He didn’t.”
Hope flared, and it hurt. She hadn’t realized how cast adrift she’d felt until she looked into Lex’s face and saw comprehension. The world wobbled, and she reached for Lex, literally and metaphorically, clutching Lex’s hands as she asked the question that could break her. “Am I overreacting?”
“I don’t know, honey. Did you tell him he was being a presumptive ass?”
Mia closed her eyes with a pained laugh. “I probably said worse.”
A pause. “How much worse?”
There was no point in hiding the truth, so she told Lex everything. What Cerys had said, what she’d said, sparing herself not at all...
And Ford’s words. Even the ones that had cut the deepest because they seemed reasonable. Felt true. The ones that kept bleeding, because they echoed Vaughn’s. Not in tone, but in meaning. Poor, delusional Mia, thinking she has value. Thinking she can be free.
Wasn’t that what Ford had said, with actions if not words? He’d been saying it over and over since the start, and she’d let him. First the heater. Then the jacket. And the raise. Maybe she was the one sending mixed signals, letting him help her until her pride snapped.
And he meant well. God, she knew he did. But did it matter if he meant well, when every gift was a reminder that she needed someone in her life who meant well, who bridged the gap between her abilities and her ambitions?
So she told Lex everything. And when she ran out of words, she fell silent, staring at their joined hands, unable to look down into the face of a woman whose abilities so outstripped Mia’s own that no ambition was out of reach.
“Motherfucker.” Lex squinted as she pulled one hand free and rubbed the center of her forehead as if it ached. “He should not have done that, Mia—any of it. He had no right, and I’m sorry.”
It was like standing across from Cerys again, hearing the words You’re free to go. Too good to be true. “I lost my temper. I was mean.”
“Hell yeah, you were. I’m not saying you acted like a peach, either.”
“I knew how to hurt him,” Mia agreed. “I think I wanted to. I wanted him to hurt me back.”
“Makes it all easier, huh?” Lex rose before sliding onto the couch beside her. “You both got upset. It happens. What really matters is what you do now.”
She said it like there were a million options. “I gave him the money I borrowed from Jade. I had to.” And now she’d have to spend the next fifteen years working to pay off that debt.
Lex waved a hand. “Not what you do about the money. About Ford.”
Mia dropped her gaze to the hand holding hers. To the ink etched over Lex’s slender wrist. “I don’t know. Listening to me when I say no isn’t just about sex.”
“No, it’s not,” she agreed.
“Did I do something wrong?”
“Wrong? Maybe.” Lex slipped her fingers into Mia’s hair and leaned her head against hers. “You let Cerys get in here and fuck you up. We’ve all done that. Were you wrong to be angry with Ford? No.”
Mia took a deep breath and held it until her lungs burned. Then she let it out, slowly, and allowed the pain and hurt to slip away with it. “This is what Cerys wanted. Me, furious and hurt and desperate enough to take what she offered.”
“And to make you think that things here couldn’t be different. Better.”
“Promise me they can be,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “You know where I’ve been. What I am. Just tell me there’s hope.”
“It’s definitely different,” Lex answered. “How much better it can be depends on what you do, and what you want.”
What do you want?
Lex had to know how overwhelming that question was. Want was an impulse, something she indulged on a whim. She wanted cinnamon rolls or a hot bath or Ford’s hands on her body—stolen moments of seized opportunity.
Now she needed to make it more. She needed to dream. “If I figure it out, will you help me get there?”
“Of course I will.” Lex’s arm dropped to her shoulder for a quick squeeze. “It’s what I do.”
Work was impossible. Ford kept staring at the same figures, watching them swim together in an incomprehensible haze of numbers, until he finally gave up and reached for the bottle of whiskey in his desk drawer.
His hand had just closed around the bottle when a sharp rap rattled the door. Only one, and then the door pushed open and Dallas O’Kane was staring at him, eyes dark, face impassive. “Ford.”
Terrific. Now, on top of the swirling confusion and pain, he’d have to explain himself like a little boy. “Come in, Dallas.”
Dallas kicked the door shut and sank into a chair. “Guess it’s not going to come as a surprise that you’ve got some of the ladies riled up.”
No, the women would be circling the wagons, protecting Mia no matter what. “Surprise? Not really.”
“Yeah, someone had to sit on Nessa to keep her from coming over here to crawl halfway up your ass.” Dallas draped his arms across his chest and studied Ford. “The good news? Lex hasn’t tried to stab you yet, so you’ve got that going for you.”
“Maybe she just hasn’t gotten around to it.” Ford met his boss’s gaze squarely. “Or she sent you to do it for her.”
“Lex doesn’t send a man to do her stabbing for her.” Dallas exhaled and shook his head. “Relax, man. Yeah, you fucked up. Yeah, the girls circled the wagons. That’s what they do. You know why?”
There was only one answer. “Because every single one of them knows what it’s like to have some jackass man try to control their lives?”
“Pretty much. I’m sure plenty of those jackasses have had great intentions, too. Doesn’t really matter when you’re stepping all over someone’s pride.”
Pride. After her life in Sector Two, it had been so important to Mia, and he’d chipped away at it every day. The coat, the heater, the payment to Cerys—a never-ending c
ascade of reminders that, even here, her life wasn’t her own.
He pulled the bottle out of the drawer and cracked it open. “You want one, Dallas?”
“Sure.” Dallas watched him pour two drinks but didn’t reach out to take the glass. “The only jackass man who gets to control Mia’s life right now is me. And before I tell you what’s going to happen, I’ll say this. Part of this is on me. I should have come down harder on you about drawing some damn lines, at least until she was free of Cerys’s sick shit.”
“And I should have considered what it would be like to come from a situation like that...and have to deal with me.”
“Fuck yeah, you should have.” Dallas swept up the whiskey and took a sip. When he eyed Ford over the edge of the glass, all of the warmth had left his eyes. The leader of Sector Four was staring at him now, hard and unyielding. “You contacted another sector leader behind my back, Ford.”
“For personal business.”
“None of us can afford to have personal business with other sector leaders. Especially with Cerys. Shit is sincerely unsettled right now, and I need a heads-up if anything—and I mean anything—might tip us off balance.”
“Fair enough.” Ford drained his glass and began refilling it. “I asked Cerys how much Mia owed her, then I wired her more credits than most people see in ten years.”
“And then you let that girl go over there, oblivious, so Cerys could spin her circles.”
He hadn’t had a chance to tell Mia, because he wanted it done before approaching her. So she wouldn’t be able to say no, right? “She could have asked me what it meant. Why I did it.”
“She knows why you did it. In her gut, she knows, or she wouldn’t have come back. Or she only would have come back long enough to steal all your files and bring them to Cerys.” Dallas slammed back the rest of his shot and relaxed back in his chair. “What do you want more? To be right, or to make things right?”
Ford almost snorted whiskey out of his nose. “Be right? That fucking ship has sailed, O’Kane. Best I can hope for now is for Mia not to hate me.”
