Beyond Pain

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.

• 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.

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.

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 the 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.