Ruled

  “That’s right.” The glasses clanged against each other as her shaking hand tried to grab one. She closed her eyes and took two deep breaths. Get it together, woman!

  “I’m guessing Sloan’s not one of your team leaders?” Rylan stayed in the living room, as if he knew Reese needed time to collect herself.

  She gave up on the liquor for the moment and lit up a cigarette. “That’s right.”

  He let out a whistle. “I’m not gonna pretend to know what’s going on in your head, but you do know you’re dealing with live dynamite at this point?”

  Reese sucked until the smoke was half gone before tapping the ash on a plate and answering him. “Yeah, I know. Anyway, Con and I are giving you your own team and outpost. Happy belated birthday.”

  She stuck two fingers into shot glasses, grabbed a bottle of whiskey, and walked back to the living room, where Rylan was studying the map.

  “Thanks, but my birthday’s in three months,” he said without glancing up.

  “Happy birthday in advance.” She slapped the glasses in his hand and took a seat.

  “Look, I’m not one to question orders, but I’ve seen Sloan in action. Keeping him home seems like a mistake.” Rylan poured a generous amount of booze in each glass, handed one to her, and took up the seat Connor had used during the meeting. “He’s one of the best fighters around.”

  “And that’s why I want him to stay here, so he can protect Foxworth.”

  “Yeah? You’re telling me Sloan’s the only one who can man the gates?”

  “He is.”

  Rylan laughed. “What’s the real reason? Because I know you’re not putting me in charge because I fucked you. You’re not that kind of leader.”

  Reese looked sourly into the bottom of her glass. When had she drunk the entire thing? “Nice that someone recognizes that.”

  “Uh-oh. Trouble in paradise?” He patted his knee. “Why don’t you climb on Papa Rylan’s lap and tell me all about it?”

  She ignored him and poured another healthy splash into her glass.

  They drank in silence for the next few minutes. Reese was grateful that he didn’t push her. She still felt raw and exposed from her fight with Sloan and wasn’t sure what would happen when she cracked. She’d either try to kick Rylan’s ass, or rip his clothes off. Neither was the right course of action at this point.

  “You think they smoke and drink inside the city?” he asked unexpectedly.

  She nodded. “Only surreptitiously. Booze and smokes and recreational drugs are banned by the council, but I know Tamara smuggles shit like that to citizens.” She blew out a stream of smoke and watched it dissipate above her head. “Pretty much anything that would make the people happy is banned, unless you’re one of the council families or an Enforcer. Then you can do basically anything you want without repercussions.”

  “What’s it like inside?”

  Reese hesitated. Her background wasn’t a big secret, so confiding in Rylan wasn’t giving up anything important. Besides, the liquor was warming her up and his company was nice. Wanting a few moments of relaxed camaraderie wasn’t a bad thing, even if she had to buy it with her privacy.

  “It’s a totalitarian society. Everyone is controlled by the Global Council. Electricity is only allowed at certain times of the day and for limited periods of time. They say it’s because they don’t have the generator power, but I doubt that’s true. The food’s good, the accommodations are clean. Everyone is assigned a job or craft at a young age. You’re a baker or a mechanic or a technician. You live at home while you train, and when you turn eighteen you’re assigned your own living accommodations and put to work. You get a decent amount of free time, though.”

  “What was your craft?” Rylan stretched his legs out and they were long enough that his boots nearly reached Reese’s toes.

  “Didn’t have one. I was a breeder’s first.”

  He raised an inquiring eyebrow. “What’s that?”

  “My mother was one of the select few who were chosen to breed. As an incentive to remain a breeder, each woman is allowed to keep her firstborn.”

  “That’s . . . barbaric.”

  “And they call us outlaws.” She gave him a wry smile. “My mother would keep the child until he or she was weaned, and then they’d be taken away.”

  “How many firstborns are there?”

  “I have no idea. Enough of us, I suppose.”

  She’d never given much thought to the others like her. When she allowed herself to remember, she thought only of her brothers and sisters. Sometimes when the Enforcers came by, she searched their faces for signs of familiarity. She was always afraid one of them might be a child her mom had been forced to give away. Hell, maybe that was why she preferred to make deals with Enforcers instead of killing them outright like other camps tried to do.

  But the time to spare their lives had come to an end. Once the outpost mission was underway, there wouldn’t be many Enforcers left alive, whether they were related to her by blood or not.

  “The population control must be one reason they don’t want the outlaws to have babies,” Rylan mused. He set down his glass and swiped a bullet off the war map. “If we procreate and they don’t, we’ll eventually overtake them by sheer numbers. A million people with rocks are eventually gonna defeat a smaller community armed with guns.”

  “Plus we use up resources. The council controls the Colonies through access to resources.”

  He tossed the bullet into the air. “None of this really explains why you’re punishing Sloan. If anything, it’s further justification for why he should be with us. I’m down with leading a team, but we shouldn’t hamstring our efforts by leaving one of the most capable fighters at camp.”

  “I’m not punishing him. Foxworth needs Sloan.”

  “There are dozens of people inside your gates and enough food, water, and firepower to withstand a siege for several months. You could even leave Randy in charge.”

  Yeah right. Randy was a sixteen-year-old who’d killed his first Enforcer only two months ago.

  “Foxworth is more than a collection of buildings. It’s the people who are important, which is why I’d be a fool to leave anyone but Sloan in charge.”

  Rylan caught the bullet in midair and set it aside. Leaning forward, with his hands clasped loosely between his legs, he looked at her earnestly. “You’ve always struck me as a straight shooter, gorgeous. You take what you want and make no apologies. It’s one of the things I like best about you. But you’re different when it comes to Sloan.” He hesitated. “If you need to talk it out, I can be a good listener.”

  “Did you ask Con for his life story before you pledged your gun to him?” Reese muttered, tired of justifying her decisions to the men around her.

  “Didn’t have to. We knew each other long enough that it wasn’t necessary.”

  “Are you telling me you aren’t going to lead a team unless I open my veins and bleed for you?”

  He made a tsking note. “Nope. Never said that. You against us getting to know each other better?”

  “Right, because you’ve been so forthcoming with your life story,” Reese scoffed.

  Instead of clamming up, he surprised her. “There’s not much there. I grew up on a farm. It was isolated. We struggled for supplies because we were shitty farmers. Dad whored my mom out in exchange for food, equipment, candles and shit. We’d sit on the porch while Mom and Dad’s mattress got a workout.”

  He told the story of his past nonchalantly, but those meager sentences revealed a lot about him. For all his ready smiles, Rylan was as private as Reese was, and she suddenly felt bad for prodding him. She knew what it was like to walk around raw and wounded.

  “My story isn’t a secret either,” she admitted. “If you asked any of the folks around here, they’d tell you. Jake and Sloan came here five years ago. W
e were smaller then, and my plans weren’t really clear to me at that point. I wanted to take down the council but I didn’t have the manpower, so I started sending out word through various channels that Foxworth was a community for anyone who wanted to fight the GC. We’d take you, your family, your loved ones—didn’t matter how weak you were. I figured there had to be people out there who were turned away from other camps because they were considered a liability. The young, the old, the frail, the sick.”

  “Sloan and Jake aren’t any of those.”

  “No, but Jake was a hothead. You remind me of him.”

  “Kinky.”

  She snorted. “Trust me, if you reminded me too much of him, we wouldn’t be having sex now.”

  His gaze sharpened. “Is that why you turned me away in the beginning?”

  Damn, he was too perceptive for his own good. “Hardly.” The lie rolled easily off her tongue.

  “Ah, gotcha. Then it was because you were afraid you’d get addicted to me. I understand. It happens.”

  Reese noted his cheeky grin was back in place. “Of course. That was totally it.”

  “So . . .” He took on a thoughtful look. “Why was Jake a liability?”

  She took another drag before continuing. “He’d already been kicked out of a number of communities. He was an amazing fighter, but he had a quick-trigger temper, a smart mouth, and he wore out his welcome faster than a bandit in an Enforcer outpost. But as a pair, he and Sloan were irresistible. They gave me solid advice on how to build our defenses. They helped turn this place into a real town. It was my idea, but Sloan was a magician at finding supplies.”

  “Like that pool table.” Rylan shook his head, obviously remembering the new felt Sloan had recently installed on the rec room billiards table.

  She laughed. “Yep. He went on a supply raid just to find that damn felt. Jake and Sloan changed things for me. Foxworth grew. Other capable fighters came. And my plans finally had real meat to them.”

  “No one here talks about Jake,” Rylan remarked.

  “No. He’s a bad memory.” She fell silent, trying not to think about that terrible night, and all the other terrible nights she’d turned away from. “Sloan held onto Jake’s leash for as long as he could, but Jake was a rabid, sick dog and he eventually had to be put down.”

  “So . . . what is it, then? You avoid sleeping with Sloan because he reminds you too much of Jake?”

  “Sloan is nothing like Jake,” she said harshly. “He’s the man Jake wished he could be.”

  Rylan threw up his hands. “Then I can’t figure it out. Wanna help me out?”

  She exhaled in annoyance, but some strange compulsion had her trying to explain it. “Look, you and I . . . we’re a lot alike. I don’t think either of us believes in love. We can care about someone. We can owe our loyalty to them, but we can’t give them more than that.”

  “Ah, now I get it. You’re afraid that if you ever act on the need to bang each other’s brains out, he’ll want something you can’t give and eventually leave you.”

  Reese sucked hard on her cigarette. Rylan’s summary wasn’t exactly right, but it was close enough.

  Truth was, she’d always wondered if she was somehow responsible for pushing Jake over the edge. She’d done that to her own mother, after all. Been the instrument of her mother’s death. Begging her to stop breeding, begging her to run away, begging her to live for her daughter instead of the council. In her selfishness, she’d driven her mom to take her own life.

  And Jake . . . she’d driven him into madness. Because she’d wanted too much. Because she always wanted more.

  She’d never told Sloan what she’d said to Jake to trigger his downward spiral. She wasn’t even sure Sloan suspected she was at fault. All she knew was that her selfish wants had resulted in Cassie’s assault and Jake’s death.

  Sometimes, when it was just her and the moon, she acknowledged that her need to crush the council arose from that same selfish desire. To others, she colored it in language of revolution and cloaked her anger with the ideals of freedom. But none of it would exist without that driving need to exact her own vengeance.

  Rylan drank the last of his whiskey and rose to his feet. “I’m happy to take point on one of the teams.” He leaned down and pressed a light kiss against her forehead. “But I think you’re wrong that you don’t have enough to give. Worse, you’re wrong if you think that a man is gonna be content with the scraps off your table.”

  As he quietly walked out of the apartment, Reese wondered if he was talking about Sloan . . . or himself.

  15

  The morning that Reese rolled out, Sloan wasn’t there to see her leave. He’d taken himself to the outer edges of Foxworth so he wouldn’t be tempted to stand on the street looking like a lovesick calf. He’d walked about three miles, traversing the once carefully plotted community.

  Away from the town center, the houses were larger but eerie in their sameness. With the Sheetrock peeling away, the stick-built construction highlighted the similarities—living space attached to a giant kitchen overlooking a backyard that abutted another backyard. Sometimes there were fences. Sloan wondered if those were to keep people in or out.

  The Foxworth outlaws had stripped each and every one of these houses of value long ago, leaving skeletons made of wood, moldy carpet, and cement. Someday, he didn’t know when, the elements would eventually overtake these structures until they were nothing more than hints of the past—mounds covered by straggly western ground growth.

  He wondered if it was a metaphor for his life, if he wasn’t much more than an abandoned lot filled with the decayed skeletons of his past. Since Jake’s death, Sloan had been in a holding pattern.

  From the moment he’d laid eyes on Reese, he’d wanted her. There hadn’t been much in the way of women in his life, not since the earthquake that killed all but a few of his people. He’d lost his virginity at the age of twelve to a camp follower, a woman who traded her body for food, shelter, and protection. As he and Jake got older, sometimes they’d turn to each other for comfort. At seventeen, Sloan had formed a crush on a girl in a camp to the south, but she’d died from a fever. Life in the free land was often harsh and short-lived.

  He and Jake had rambled from the mountains on the west to the coast on the east and the oceans of the south. An old man had told them that the water in the south was eating away at the land, one tide at a time. They’d laughed at both that and the old man’s insistence that there were miles and miles of territory that had simply disappeared.

  But later, at night when the stars were winking at him, Sloan remembered the earthquake and how one minute there was dirt under his feet and the next minute the earth split in two.

  He’d felt that way when he saw Reese. The earth under his feet fell away. He’d told that to Jake, who’d laughed and said one pretty pussy was as good as another. They’d heard about Reese all the way in the northeast, heard about a camp that was willing to take in anyone so long as they could fight, no matter what kind of baggage they brought to the camp.

  Sloan’s baggage was Jake. After the quake, the two boys had become a family. Jake was the risk taker, pushing Sloan beyond his placid existence. And Jake relied on Sloan to be there to pull him back off the edge.

  But Sloan hadn’t realized his friend’s madness was escalating, otherwise he never would’ve brought Jake to Foxworth.

  Ah, or maybe that was bullshit. Maybe he still would’ve done it. God knew he’d been tired of wandering the free land, constantly looking for a new place to bed down.

  After Jake’s death, Reese said she’d needed him—and those words were enough to keep him bound by her side, a guard dog for all eternity.

  Was he wrong for wanting more? And what was that night with Rylan all about? There was a lot of Jake in Rylan. A certain irrepressible humor. An infectious recklessness. In fact, if Sloan was
honest, he’d say that Rylan had all of Jake’s best traits and none of the darkness.

  The only thing he didn’t like about the man was this creeping feeling he had that he was losing Reese to him. But was he really losing her? Or was Rylan the key to winning her?

  Fuck, he didn’t know anymore. There weren’t any answers in the cracked tar or the dirt. None in the still air either. Empty-handed, Sloan returned to town in a foul mood.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” Bethany greeted him cheerfully when he slid into a booth at the restaurant.

  He swallowed back a caustic remark about how she was the only one. “Thanks,” he muttered.

  She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You in a bad mood because you didn’t get to play vigilante?”

  Bethany was going to make a great mother. She was already adept at making Sloan feel like a stupid kid. “Just worried,” he replied. Then he forced himself to stretch out his legs and found a ghost of a smile somewhere, which he pasted onto his face.

  She rolled her eyes and yelled over her shoulder. “Graham, we’re going to need a cow.”

  The grizzled chef stuck his head out of the kitchen window and gave Sloan a chin nod.

  “Make it extra chewy,” Bethany called. “Give him something to work on.”

  That summoned a more genuine smile from Sloan. “Am I that bad?”

  “Your thundercloud of a face is dark enough to blot out the sun,” Bethany confirmed. She straightened with some difficulty and reached over to squeeze his shoulder. “Don’t worry, sweetie. Everyone’s going to come back in one piece.”

  He wondered how she could say that when her man had gotten shot in the middle of the town square, not more than a few dozen feet from where she was standing now. But as she turned away, he caught a glimpse of her own darkness. Bethany was putting on the best show she could, but she was clearly terrified.

  Sloan felt shame crawl over him. Sticking around Foxworth and protecting people like Bethany and Graham and the kids was a worthy task, and he was an ass for griping about it.