Beyond Possession (Beyond #5.5) (16 page)

"I want you to be happy," he explained. "Whatever that means. Whether I'm part of that perfect picture you have in your head or not."

She rose to her knees to face him. "That makes you a good man. And I'm not afraid to need a man who doesn't want me to be less than I can be."

For the first time, Zan let himself take it all in—the words, the ink, the big eyes. Her being in his bed was a promise and a question, all rolled into one.

All he had to do was say yes and take it.

"You can stay here without me," he whispered, reaching out to touch the fresh tattoo encircling one of her wrists. "That's what this means. That can be your choice, and I'll treat you—
love
you—the way I do everyone else."

She caught his hand and dragged it up to her face. "Show me how you'll love me if I stay here with you."

"If?" The pain vanished, replaced by a different kind of sting. Hunger, satisfaction. Possession. Zan slid his hand past her cheek, into her hair, and pulled her closer. "I thought you already said
yes
."

She smiled. "I've been naked in your bed, and it's taken you this long to touch me. Maybe
you
don't want
me
."

"No
if
there." He held her dark, dark gaze as he eased her back on the bed. "I'm a good soldier, Tatiana. I work hard, take care of my family, and I never ask for anything. I never even thought about it—until you."

"You don't have to ask." She stroked her hands up his arms before resting them on the mattress above her head. "When I'm in this bed, I'm yours."

"And out of it?"

"You're
mine
."

"I can live with that." He lowered his mouth to hers but hovered just shy of a kiss, teasing them both. "On one condition."

"What condition?"

"No more walls, Tatiana. Just us."

She arched up to brush her lips over his. "I can live with that."

It was a sweet promise, one that tugged at him as he deepened the kiss. The best promise, the only one that mattered—that she could live without him, sure, but why the fuck would she want to?

He rolled her more fully beneath him before breaking away. He twined his fingers with hers and lifted her arm to study her freshly healed tattoo. "I know this is new, but how about another one?"

Her breath caught. "Yours?"

One answer, one word that covered it all, and it echoed between them. "Mine."

The story continues with Jared & Lili in
Beyond Innocence

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Turn the page to find out what's next for the O'Kanes...

Two pills stood between Lili and damnation.

She tried not to look at them as she applied her eyeliner, her hand steady from years of practice. The rest of her was shaking, but the line was perfect—smooth black kohl along her lower lash line. She could smudge it into a smoky shadow, but that might be too subtle for the night's festivities.

Her gaze dipped to the two white tablets lined up beside the empty bottle. Just two. She'd come to Sector Four with so few possessions to her name—a gun, a nightgown, and a fur coat. But that coat had deep pockets, and she'd filled them with high-end drugs before she fled her home. At the edge of the desk, seven empty bottles traced the desperation of her last few months, her attempts to cope.

After tonight, she'd have to do it on her own.

She jerked her gaze back to the mirror. No, subtle wouldn't cut it. These O'Kane women were bold. Brazen. Survival meant adaptation. She had learned to play wife when her life depended on it. Now she would learn to play something else.

Whore
.

She could hear her dead husband snarling the word at her, taunting her with the most degrading insult he could imagine. Nothing was so crass and despised in Sector Five as a woman who denied a man her body until money exchanged hands. Except, perhaps, a woman who denied a man her body altogether.

Making that mistake had almost gotten Lili killed.

Forcing back the memory, she thickened the line beneath her eye. She wasn't bold or brazen, but she wasn't meek and submissive, either, no matter how successfully she'd played that role. The makeup was her mask. If she applied enough of it, she could disappear into someone else.

The pills would make it easier. Lex hadn't wanted to let her keep them, but Lili had begged. She'd been numb enough to survive the shame of that. Hell, she'd been so numb there hadn't been any shame. She'd lost her family and her life—she hadn't been ready to give up her peace of mind.

So Lex let her keep the pills, but she made it clear there would be no more. And Lili had tried to make them last. She rationed them out, saving them for when her own reserves of icy numbness just weren't enough.

Two pills left, and not even the strongest ones. She'd sacrificed the last of those to endure the most recent fight night, insulating herself from the raw violence and terrifying lust. Every horrifying warning her mother had ever whispered about sex paled in the face of brutal reality—a man, bloody from battle, slamming a woman against the side of the cage to sate his urges in front of the entire sector.

It was uncivilized. It was
barbaric
. But the women of this sector faked enjoyment with a finesse that made Lili look like a clumsy novice. Either that, or they were like the dead-eyed girls who'd clung to her father's men—so broken and hopeless they'd convinced themselves they
wanted
to be pawed at and violated, because wanting the inevitable made it easier to bear.

The liner pencil slipped from her grasp, and Lili realized she was trembling. Curling her hands into fists, she shoved back from her vanity and stalked to the bathroom. No fancy tub or pristine counters piled high with fluffy towels here. Her shower was tiny, the tiles newly laid and crooked. The bulb over her head was bare. The walls were of unrelieved cement.

But she had a sink, and a glass on the edge of it. Lili filled it with water and returned to the bedroom. In the mirror, her reflection stared back at her, a stranger in garish make-up and leather, with too much bare skin on display.

She had the too-short skirt. The too-tall shoes. The dark lipstick and lined eyes, the corset that all but demanded men stare at breasts she'd never even shown to her husband. But she didn't have the ink, and she'd never have the attitude.

Without those things, she would never be an O'Kane. Just a confused girl playing dress-up.

Closing her eyes, Lili swept up the pills. They were bitter on her tongue, and she washed them down with the entire glass of water. The drugs were good, some of the best Sector Five had to offer, and especially popular inside Eden. She'd overheard her father's bodyguards laughing about it once.

I guess it makes that high-strung Eden pussy more agreeable.

Well, where's the fun in that?

Agreeable. A word that covered a multitude of sins, figurative and literal. The well-bred ladies of Eden took the drugs to numb themselves to all the ways their husbands violated their bodies.

Lili needed to be numb to watch the O'Kanes violate each other.

She set the glass aside and checked her reflection one last time, while she still cared enough to make it perfect. Her hair was a disheveled mess of curls, the front held back from her face by twin braids that circled the crown of her head. Her fingers itched to smooth everything into place, more out of habit than desire.
Tidy
fit this place about as well as
restrained
did.

Somehow, she had to learn to be neither.

The rooms she'd been given were on the third floor of the building where most of the O'Kanes slept. Every time she turned around someone was up here, hammering or painting or hooking up plumbing in another new room. The O'Kanes were expanding, adding blood to their ranks as Dallas's power grew.

That was why Dallas wanted them all at his weekly parties—so that the new faces would know him, and he would know them. It had seemed harmless enough until Lili appeared obediently at the first one only to discover how intimately the O'Kanes defined
know
.

Fighting a shudder, she straightened her back and lifted her chin. The drugs hadn't kicked in yet, but she imagined she could feel the comforting distance wrapping around her as she descended to the second floor. The party room sat at the end of a long hallway, but the door was open and she could see flashes of skin already.

That was the danger of being late. They'd already started taking their clothes off—at least, the ones who'd worn any to begin with.

Just before she reached the end of the hall, Trix walked out of the room with a cigarette in one hand. The redhead was usually as pristine as Lili had always been, embracing the fashion of Sector Five instead of rejecting it.

Not tonight. Instead of a perfectly tailored dress and crinoline, Trix had a man's shirt slipping off one shoulder and falling to mid-thigh. Her hair was a tousled mess—not the artful tumble Lili had labored over, but the kind of disheveled that only came from being tangled around a man's fist.

In spite of that, the woman was smiling. So Lili did the only thing she could—she smiled back. "Trix."

"Lili." The woman's smile didn't fade, but her expression took on a guarded quality. "Having a good night?"

They didn't trust her. The harder Lili tried to blend in, the more she felt the distance between them. And with Trix most of all, because Lili knew her father had hurt her. Her father had hurt every woman who touched his life.

Trix and Lili were the only two who'd survived the association.

Her smile hadn't worked, so Lili let it drift away and settled for being politely impassive. "I am, thank you."

Trix lifted one eyebrow as she brushed past her. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

Faint warning. The things Trix did on stage at the O'Kanes' bar had shocked Lili enough, but when Trix's lover won his match at the last fight night, the two of them had—

No, the drugs weren't strong enough to protect her from that memory. And they weren't strong enough to insulate her when she crossed the threshold into Dallas O'Kane's private den of sin.

The sounds were the most visceral part. There was so much skin, but she could unfocus her eyes, stare at nothing in particular. But nothing protected her from the sounds, and they were still so alien, even after all these weeks.

Laughter. Moans. The slap of flesh against flesh, of bodies coming together with a force that made her cringe inside. Voices rose and fell in and around the cries of pleasure, as if they were gossiping over tea instead of...