Beyond Pain

by Kit Rocha

  Blurb

  A woman with no future...

  Live fast, die young--anything else is a fantasy for Six. She's endured the worst the sectors had to throw at her, but falling in with Dallas O'Kane's Sector Four gang lands her in a whole new world of danger. They're completely open about everything, including their sexuality--but she hasn't survived this long by making herself vulnerable. Especially not to men as dominant as Brendan Donnelly.

  A man without a past...

  Bren is a killer, trained in Eden and thrown to the sectors. His one outlet is pain, in the cage and in the bedroom, and emotion is a luxury he can't afford--until he meets Six. Protecting her soothes him, but it isn't enough. Her hunger for touch sparks a journey of erotic discovery where anything goes--voyeurism, flogging, rough sex. He has only one rule: he won't share her.

  In Bren's arms, Six is finally free to let go. But his obsession with the man who made him a monster could destroy the fragile connection they've forged, and cost him the one thing that makes him feel human--her love.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Information

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Mad

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Jared

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Lex

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Rachel

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ace

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dallas

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Cruz

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Before You Leave Sector Four

  Beyond Jealousy

  About the Author

  Other Select Titles by Moira Rogers

  Acknowledgments

  To Alisha Rai. And cookie butter.

  Copyright Information

  BEYOND PAIN

  Copyright © 2013 by Kit Rocha

  Edited by Sasha Knight

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in the case of brief quotation embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Chapter One

  Rachel was dancing again.

  From her vantage point behind the scuffed bar, Six had a decent view of the stage even with men standing three deep on the opposite side. A lot of them were tall fuckers too, the kind that towered head and shoulders over Six, but the floor behind the bar was high enough to put her at eye level with the biggest brutes. O'Kane--or someone close to him--clearly understood the advantage height could give a bartender who had to face down a room of horny, drunk thugs.

  Usually those drunks were crowded around the bar, jostling for booze or attention, but Six hadn't poured a single shot since Rachel's act had started, and she didn't think it was the novelty of having a new dancer that held these men captivated.

  No, it was the fact that Rachel had lost her damn mind. She was grinding to the music as she peeled off layer after layer of perfectly respectable leather to reveal the lacy white garments beneath. Men stared slack-jawed as she rocked and swayed and ran her hands over her body, lost in a haze that fascinated and repelled Six in equal measure.

  She was an object to these pea-brained cavemen, nothing more than the picture they'd hold in their heads when they stumbled back to their hovels and took their dicks in hand. The way they watched her should have made her weaker. Lesser.

  It should have, but the men crowding the stage were nothing to Rachel. Flies to be swatted away if they got too close. Grubby children with their noses pressed against the dirty glass of the bakery, dreaming of something they could never have while hunger gnawed in their guts.

  Rachel was oblivious, and somehow that turned the men into the weak ones. The ones who were less than.

  Six saw it over and over, every time an O'Kane woman took that stage. Power in the place of helplessness, pride where she would have felt sick and exposed. There was a secret in these women that went deeper than the ink around their wrists, and sometimes she thought if she watched for long enough, she could unlock it for herself.

  Of course, watching could be uncomfortable for other reasons.

  Rachel slipped her fingers beneath the ruffled edge of her underwear, and Six turned her attention back to the bar. The low throb of the bass rhythm was harder to ignore, its steady beat vibrating up through the floor. In Sector Three, they'd made do with passable musicians beating on already battered instruments, but the heart of Sector Four was a marvel of miraculous old tech.

  Maddox had shown her the speakers that lined the walls, but Six still had a hard time believing that such bone-rattling sound could come from those tiny, unremarkable boxes. The O'Kanes took these luxuries for granted, but some days she felt as slack-jawed as the drooling morons hovering around the bar.

  "God, this place is insane tonight." Trix dropped a tray on the counter and took a deep breath. "At least it's slowing down--for now."

  For now, Six agreed silently, carefully not looking at the stage. As soon as the crowd broke free of Rachel's spell, they'd be eager to get back to drinking--maybe even more enthusiastically now that Trix was behind the bar. The newest member of the O'Kanes was everything Six wasn't--voluptuous, fashionable, gorgeous--and she spent every night drowning in admiring gazes and generous tips without doing anything more seductive than smiling as she poured whiskey.

  Six tried to smile, but she felt like a stray dog showing her teeth in warning, and the men seemed to agree.

  She swept up a rag and rubbed at a spill on the counter. "I should probably stick around until it clears out. If this keeps up, Dallas'll have to schedule extra help on the nights Rachel dances."

  Trix shook her head as she eyed the stage. "She's making mad money, you know that? She doesn't play to the crowd, either. She ignores them, and they get off on it."

  A stripper cocky enough to ignore a crowd in Sector Three would have to be quick with a knife to avoid some frustrated bastard determined to fuck the bitch out of her. Of course, a lot of dancers at the Broken Circle did wiggle and preen for the audience. The girls who got away with being above it all had one thing in common--intricate tattoos around their wrists, with the gang's symbol front and center. Everyone who belonged to Dallas wore those cuffs, and nobody in Sector Four would lay a finger on an O'Kane.

  Six rubbed her thumb over her own unmarked wrist before glancing at Trix. The other woman had already taken ink, which put her beyond danger. "Are you thinking about doing it, too?"

  "What, dancing like that? I'm a little more old-fashioned, I think." Trix began to line up fresh shot glasses on the bar. "You ever hear of something called burlesque?"

  It was stupid to feel defensive when Trix wasn't the kind of person to poke at her ignorance, but Six still tensed. "No. Sounds fancy."

  "It's kind of like the stripping, only not about getting naked. It's about the show, the spectacle..." She seemed to be struggling for words. "The joy."

  If you believed the O'Kane women, everything up to and including fucking each other on stage was about t
he joy. And maybe it was, but it wasn't Six's kind of thing. "I'd put on a show if Dallas would let me in the damn cage. Can you imagine how much I could make betting on myself? The odds would be crazy."

  Trix started at one end of the line of glasses and poured them full of whiskey, straight down the row. "If it's what you want to do, make it happen. Fight for it."

  Easy for Trix to say. She was official now, a member of the gang in her own right, but Six was still...hell. A prisoner turned reluctant ally turned awkward guest. "I guess I could," she hedged as she bent to retrieve more shot glasses. "But it's not that important."

  "Suit yourself."

  Across the room, Rachel writhed on the floor and kicked her filmy panties--her last remaining scrap of clothing--off the side of the stage. As if it broke some sort of enchantment, the far more familiar hoots and shouts echoed through the room.

  Even safe behind the bar, Six shivered. This was the part that twisted her guts until nausea made the room swim. Rachel was naked, her pale skin bare and vulnerable under the colored lights. Her tattoos did little to harden her soft curves, and every inch of her was on helpless display as she taunted the men by tracing her fingertips up the inside of her thigh.

  The shouts got louder. Tension and anticipation built until the air grew heavy, and Six found herself struggling to take even breaths, to keep herself from dragging them into her lungs like each one could be her last. She busied herself with a second line of shot glasses, placing each glass precisely, its rim an equal distance from those on either side.

  On the stage, Rachel moaned in pleasure.

  A glass slipped through Six's fingers, and she lunged to catch it before it hit the floor. Ducking behind the counter spared her the sight of a gleeful Rachel with her fingers in her pussy, or rubbing her clit with so much enthusiasm you'd think getting off for three dozen strangers was the best fun she'd ever had.

  Getting off. Actually getting off--no faking, no games. Six had done lots of things on stages. She'd been the entertainment, both willingly and unwillingly, clothed and naked. She'd fucked and stripped and bit her lower lip through floggings that left her body scarred. But she'd never, ever given those bastards the satisfaction of one unguarded moment, of one glimpse at her.

  Rachel would work herself to screaming release right there in the middle of the Broken Circle. She wouldn't think twice about sprawling, naked and open, her heart and soul as recklessly displayed as her body. Every time she did it, she pushed a little further, came a little harder...

  And Six had to choke back horror as the watching men lapped it up, taking something that should have been for Rachel alone.

  Trix bent and pulled the shot glass from her shaking hand. "I'll handle things here. Go, if you want."

  Six hadn't even realized she was still crouched behind the bar, and embarrassment joined the ugly jumble of revulsion and fear turning her inside out. "I can stay," she whispered, knowing it was a lie Trix could hear, but she couldn't help it. Pride wouldn't let her escape easily.

  "No, you can't. And that's okay." Trix tilted her head toward the back exit. "Go on. I've got this."

  Grateful, Six squeezed the other woman's hand and abandoned any pretense of dignity. The thick wooden door was marked STAFF ONLY, and she didn't look at the stage as she shoved through it, spilling out into a dark hallway. Doors to either side opened into extra rooms, closets used for storage as well as the small office where Rachel kept records of beer and booze sales.

  A staircase to Six's right led up to the second floor and the employee lounge, but she skipped it and plowed straight for the exit, needing the fresh night air more than pitying looks from whatever dancers might be awaiting their turns on the stage.

  She burst through the back door and into the comforting shadows of the parking area. In spite of the crowd inside, the lot was half empty tonight, with only two rusting cars and a cluster of motorcycles near the entrance.

  She studied the bikes out of habit, looking for the familiar marks that would have indicated friend or foe in Sector Three, but nothing stood out. Nothing would. Most of the enemies of her old life were dead, and even the survivors wouldn't venture here, into the lion's den. Now that Dallas O'Kane ruled sectors Four and Three, she was as safe within the walls of this compound as it was possible to be in this life.

  That was the story, anyway. Her racing pulse and queasy stomach weren't buying it. She sucked in a few deep breaths, forcing herself to calm through stubbornness alone. The fear and panic were still there--they always were--but it had been a long time since she'd let herself give in to them. The O'Kanes were making her weak already, as soft as some city twit who had time to whine about her feelings.

  In Three, fear was everywhere. You lived with it or you died from it, end of options--and that was if you considered dying a viable option. Six never had.

  As soon as her heartbeat steadied, she stopped to get her bearings. Two large buildings loomed out of the darkness; to the east stood the warehouse where the O'Kanes held their weekly cage fights, and to the south sat the garage where Dallas stored his collection of lovingly restored cars. The living quarters lay beyond that, but that wasn't why she headed in that direction. Instead, she slipped through the gate and then through the side door of the garage.

  The knot of tension between her shoulders unraveled when she saw the familiar figure bent under the hood of his car. "How's the work going?"

  "Not bad." Metal clanged against metal as Bren straightened. "Finally got the carburetor rebuilt."

  The words meant little to her. She'd never seen a working car up close before Bren had shoved her into one. "How long before you can drive it?"

  "A while. It runs, but not well, not yet." His grease-smeared forearms flexed as he wiped his hands on a rag. "How was your shift?"

  "Busy." Habit drove her fingers into her pocket to check the tightly rolled wad of bills, tips she'd managed to score from the perverse bastards who got off on being scowled at. "Rachel did her thing again."

  "I know."

  If she tried to talk about the panic that had sent her running, he'd listen. He'd watch her with those eyes that saw everything and probably understand parts of her she couldn't. It was too much exposure for one night, so she sidestepped the moment by hoisting herself onto the worktable. "Is it hard to learn how to drive?"

  He tossed aside the rag and pulled two beers from a bucket next to the table. "Depends on how good you are at turning off your brain and letting your body do the work."

  From anyone else, the words would have sounded like a lewd, clumsy come-on. From Bren, it was a straightforward answer, one made all the more ironic by how her body reacted to him any time she was foolish enough to turn off her brain. She was painfully aware of his graceful movements, of the appealing, subtle shift of muscle under skin as he held out a bottle.

  "You should know," she retorted, taking care not to let her fingers brush his as she accepted the beer. Maybe her tart tone would cover her confusion. "If I could stop thinking, maybe I'd actually beat you in a fight one of these days."

  A rare smile curved his lips. "I've had years of training when it comes to fighting, and decades of practice on the not thinking."

  Those smiles were dangerous, and not only because they made her tingle. They were dangerous because she couldn't not smile in return, her lips tilting up to ruin her scowl. "That just makes you old. I will put you on your ass next time."

  "That's what I like to hear."

  "Sure, grandpa. Tell me that after I beat you."

  He laughed as he leaned against the table beside her. "Cruz and Trix have their ink, but they've still got to drink in, make it official."

  Rachel had explained the process in vague terms, something about having a new member do shots of all the O'Kane liquors before welcoming them into the gang. It had taken Six a month to realize Rachel hadn't been keeping gang secrets--that really was all that happened. No beatdowns for the men, no spreading your legs for the women. Just booze and cel
ebration.

  A few dozen city blocks separated this compound from Sector Three, but she might as well be on the moon. "It's an O'Kane thing, I guess," she said carefully, unable to keep her gaze from his wrists. Dark ink swirled around his muscled forearms, stopping above his broad hands. The gang's signature cuffs, proof that he belonged.

  "An O'Kane thing," he echoed in agreement. "Do you want to go?"

  "Am I allowed?"

  Bren shrugged. "You'll go with me, like Jasper and Noelle's party."

  Maybe it was that simple. Dallas O'Kane was the most powerful man in the sector--one of the most powerful men in their world--and Bren was part of his inner circle. Rules didn't seem to apply to him, or to her when she was with him.

  Which didn't answer his question--did she want to go? "How much like Jas and Noelle's party will it be?" she asked, her cheeks heating at the memory of how quickly that celebration had turned into a shameless fuckfest.

  "More like a fight night," he hastily explained. "People might be getting it on in the corners or grinding on the dance floor, but it's not-- I mean, it's different."

  Six covered her embarrassment by nudging his leg with her boot. "So, no wall-to-wall fucking?"

  "No, just people drinking and having a good time."

  "Okay. It sounds fun." She nudged him again, more for the excuse of contact than anything. He'd encouraged her to ask for physical affection when she wanted it, but she liked sneaking in teasing touches. Liked knowing she could, and that he wouldn't hurt her for taking liberties. "Thanks for including me."

  "You're not a guest." He watched her intently. "This is your home."

  Home. Longing hollowed out her chest, a craving for a concept she could barely fathom, because it started with safety. "I don't know if I've ever had a home before."

  Bren nodded. "A lot of people here haven't. You're not alone."

  She knew what he meant--that she wasn't alone in being overwhelmed--but the words resonated more deeply. Maybe it was because her panic from earlier had faded under the quiet warmth of his undemanding presence.