Beyond Shame

somewhere, wondering why this place hasn’t gone up yet?”

“I’d go with the latter.” Jasper put his pistols away and looked down at his arm. A steady stream of blood trickled from the cut, but it was slow enough not to worry him. “Think Trent was smart enough to have a backup plan?”

“Not fucking likely, judging by how he played the rest of it.” Dallas holstered his gun and nodded to Jasper’s arm. “Do we need to bandage that?”

“I’ll get some gel on it. It’ll be fine.”

“Let Noelle patch you up.” Dallas grinned, and it held a feral edge. “I bet she’ll kiss it all better.”

She’d been eager to suck his cock after a cage match. What would she be eager to do after a real fight? Jasper pushed through the door. “Should have let you get banged up a little, then.”

“I’ll tell Lex I almost let some bastard shoot me. She’ll beat me up and kiss it bet —” Dallas stopped cold at the sight of Bren—and Wilson Trent, bound and gagged on the cracked sidewalk. “What the fuck?”

The man was only half-conscious, bleeding from one knee. From the livid marks around his throat, Bren had throttled him pretty good.

The blond man blinked at Dallas now, then gestured to Trent. “Thought I’d take him back with us. He’s someone else’s kill.”

Dallas’s confusion melted into narrow-eyed disbelief. “The girl?”

Bren slipped a hunting knife from the sheath on his leg and dragged Trent’s head back by his hair. “If it’s a problem—”

“No.” Dallas waved the offer away. “Fuck, she earned it, if she wants it. If not, you clean up.”

Right on schedule, Flash pulled to a stop at the corner and climbed from behind the wheel of the truck. Three dead men, and a messy plot foiled. By the end of the night, word would spread through all eight sectors—Trent had tried to fuck Dallas, and now he was dead.

Whether that would spell the end or the very beginning of their troubles was anyone’s guess.

Six

The last time Six had seen Wilson Trent, she’d been bound and gagged, bruised and bloodied, her pride stripped away and her future in jeopardy.

This moment had a certain symmetry, which was the first thing she’d found amusing in over a year. She lifted her gaze from the half-dead body to the man who’d brought him. Brendan Donnelly was solidly built, with just enough flesh over hard muscle to hide how much of it there was until he flexed, or wrestled you into submission, or dumped a six-foot man at your feet.

He watched her, waiting for a reaction with an air of anticipation that had her shivering. “I don’t understand. Does Dallas want me to kill him as a test of loyalty or something?” If so, it was a damn shitty one. Most of Trent’s men would have stabbed him in the back for fun.

The corner of Bren’s mouth quirked up. “That’d be stupid. Dallas isn’t stupid.” He held out a knife, his fingers light on the blade and the handle pointing toward her. “I figure this one’s yours, that’s all.”

She could snatch it from his hand and sink it between his ribs. In her fantasies, at least—and maybe his, too, judging from the way he watched her sometimes, as if he liked the idea of her being as dangerous as he was.

Fantasies were the only place she was dangerous. He’d stop her before she grazed the blade across his skin, but apparently he’d let her take that same knife and sink it into Wilson Trent’s traitorous excuse for a heart.

Still, she didn’t reach for it. “No tricks?”

“No tricks.”

Six nudged Trent’s leg with her boot. “Untie him.”

Bren didn’t move, only waved the knife at her. “You do it.”

She curled her fingers around the hilt. It was heavier than she’d expected, the blade itself nearly half a foot long. Trent choked out a muffled protest and squirmed back, and Six felt the first stirrings of satisfaction as she sliced through the ropes.

Fear before death was too good for him. He’d taught her that there were worse things than fear. Things like hope. “Get up.”

“Fuck you,” he rasped.

She planted a boot in his side. “Get up, bastard. Get up and fight. I thought you liked hitting me.”

He lunged up on one knee and grabbed for the knife. Fast, but not fast enough. She slammed her knee into his face, reveling in the crunch of bone as his nose broke. “Take this,” she snarled at Bren, thrusting the knife at him.

“You sure?” But he was already reaching for the blade.

“I’m sure.”

When Trent rocked up, she smashed her fist into his jaw. Pain splintered through her hand and up her arm, and she relished it. Relished the faint hope in Trent’s eyes, as stupid and reckless as it was. He’d fixate on the fact that she was unarmed, see her as the victim he’d made her, and somewhere in his sick fucking skull, he’d think he had a chance.

She’d beat the hope right back out of him, like he’d done to her, and then he could die.

Chapter Thirteen

Her heart in her throat, Noelle shoved through the door to Dallas’s bedroom and nearly moaned her relief at seeing Jasper on his feet, more or less whole. Bring the med kit to my room was all Dallas had told her before wheeling off in search of Lex, and the five minutes it had taken her to collect the first aid supplies and traverse the maze of corridors to the large suite had been among the longest in recent memory.

But she was here now, and he was alive. “Jasper? Are you hurt?”

He held up his arm. “It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”

An odd piece of furniture sat a few feet in front of her, one that looked like two padded leather benches connected back-to-back, so they faced in opposite directions. She set the med kit down on the shared back and lifted the cover. “Sit and let me look at it. I’m not very good, but I know how to use gel and bandages.”

Instead, he slipped his hand into her hair and yanked her down for a rough kiss. The pounding of her heart shifted from fear to exhilaration as she slapped one hand on his shoulder to keep her balance.

Even that didn’t help when he dragged her into his lap and pressed the slim tube of healing gel into her hand. “This and you. That’s what I need.”

She had to catch her breath as she twisted the top off the tube. “How did this happen?”

Jasper growled. “Some bastard got this bright idea to blow Dallas up. We stopped him. Had a little bit of a fight, though.”

Her hand trembled, and it took another breath to steady it enough to apply the healing gel to the long, shallow cut. Blood had dried on his skin, bisecting the flesh left bare of ink, in some places looking like artwork of its own.

“You all could have died,” she whispered as the truth of that fact hit her hard in the gut. The cage fights, those were manufactured danger, violence in controlled form. Tonight had been real.

“We smelled the trap,” Jasper countered. “We had it, solid. No reason for you to worry.”

She frowned. “You’re bleeding.”

“That happens more often than you’d think out here.”

“Then I get to worry if I want to.” She dropped the gel back into the kit and found a precut bandage. His muscles were so large that it only wrapped around his arm twice, and she stripped away the protective panel from