Beyond Control(64)

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 nothing but shame. 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 secondhand 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 seemed to take their 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 behind the bar 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 had tried to smile, but she felt more 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 is going to have to start scheduling 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 f*ck the bitch out of her. Of course, most of the dancers at the Broken Circle wiggled and preened 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. Every person who belonged to Dallas wore those cuffs, and no one 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 taken ink a few months ago, 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 be poking 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 f*cking each other on stage was about the joy. And maybe it was, but it wasn't Six's kind of spectacle. "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, since she was official now, a member of the gang in her own right. Six was still...hell. A prisoner turned reluctant ally turned awkward guest. "I guess I could," she hedged as she bent to pull out 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 insides of her thighs.

The shouts got louder. Tension and anticipation built to the point that the air grew heavy, and Six found herself struggling to take even breaths, to keep herself from dragging air into her lungs like each breath 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 down behind the counter spared her the sight of a gleeful Rachel with her fingers in her *, or rubbing her clit with so much enthusiasm you'd think getting off for three dozen strange lechers 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 f*cked 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 farther, 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 can handle things here. You can 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 easy.

"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 her right led up to the second floor and the employee lounge, but Six skipped it and plowed straight for the exit, needing the fresh night air more than the pitying looks of whatever dancers might be waiting their turns on the stage.

She burst through the back door into the comforting shadows of the parking area. The lot was half empty tonight, in spite of the crowd inside, with only two rusting cars and a spattering of motorcycles clustered close to 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 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 still 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 were always there--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 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 reoriented herself. 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 was the garage where Dallas kept his collection of lovingly restored cars. The living quarters were past the garage, but that wasn't why she headed in that direction. Instead, she slipped through the gate and went in the side door.

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