Dallas

He'd been all of nine years old the day his mother had taught him the lesson that would define his life.

Life on the farm had been hard. The world his mother had known had been dead for a decade, but she'd never curled in on herself like so many of the weak and the terrified. Nineteen years old when the lights went out, she'd given birth to him six months later and had held on to her little scrap of Texas at the point of a shotgun, more than willing to kill to defend her son and the people who relied on her wits and strength.

She could be cold-blooded, his mother, but she didn't believe in waste. Rage could give a body the strength to survive in a world gone mad, but not if it was unleashed without care. So the afternoon she'd caught him in a hair-pulling brawl with a boy half again his size, she hadn't taken the other boy to task. No, she'd dragged Dallas to the nearest trough by the scruff of his neck, dunked him in the water until he sputtered, and hauled him to the barn to take out his fury on the woodpile.

Get angry, she'd told him, on that afternoon and a dozen times after it. Get angry, and then make something out of it. Don't fight unless you have no choice, and even then you don't waste time. You end it quick.

So he had. Every day of his adult life, it seemed, he'd gotten angry. And he'd turned that anger into a business, and then a gang, and then a whole fucking sector that he ruled over as absolutely as his mother had over her little ranch. She'd never held as many lives in her hands as he did, but her advice still fit. It worked.

Most of the time.

She'd never known him as an adult. She'd never known Lex, a woman who could make him so damn furious it was amazing he hadn't taken over all the sectors by now. He'd watched her waltz out of the warehouse with two hulking cage fighters. Rubbing them in his face.

You don't own me. She might as well have screamed it. And he couldn't so much as blink a fucking eye, because he didn't own her. Dallas fucking O'Kane couldn't be seen wanting something he couldn't have, because Dallas O'Kane could have anything he wanted.

"Make something out of it," he grumbled, kicking open the door to the workshop. Salvaged lumber lined one wall in towering stacks, mismatched boards from demolished buildings. Someone had pounded out the nails and cut them into manageable pieces, all stacked, waiting to be burned with the O'Kane logo and turned into crates for packing bottles of moonshine.

On the other side of the room, Bren was already bent over the wide worktable. Dallas supposed he should have expected that, too. "Bren."

"Sir." He tucked a pencil behind one ear before looking up. "Ready to get to work?"

"You bet." Dallas closed the door and strode to the table. "Might as well knock out enough crates for the next shipment, eh?"

Bren made a wordless noise of agreement and reached for the measured stack of boards. He fired up the band saw, its whir even louder than the jumble of thoughts racing around in Dallas's brain.

Not that it kept the damn things from racing. Sometimes Bren's silence was a blessing, but right now Dallas would take any distraction from the image of Lex dragging her new playthings out of the warehouse.

He couldn't give her the satisfaction of knowing she'd gotten to him, or she'd do it all the damn time. And that thought had him driving the first nail into wood hard enough to split the board. "Fuck."

Bren shut down the saw and tossed the last of the cut pieces of wood onto the table. "Question."

Thank God. "Yeah?"

"If it bothers you, why let it go on?"

If Bren found the situation perplexing enough to bring it up, shit really had gotten out of control. If it had been anyone else, Dallas would have brushed it off, but Bren was closer to him than anyone but Jasper--and Jasper wouldn't have had to ask the question. He already understood the answer on a gut level.

Bren needed to learn it. "If I start treating women like Wilson Trent does, what the fuck hope do they have with the rest of you?"

"No, I mean--" Bren barked out a laugh, more self-deprecation than humor. "I guess there really aren't many ways to handle it."

"For you, there might be. For me..." Dallas shrugged and reached for a new board. "It's not always good to be king."

"I see." Bren busied himself with fitting four cut pieces together to form the bottom of a crate.

Sometimes it was hard to tell if the man was biting his tongue or had moved on. "If you've got something to say..."

Bren smiled faintly. "Is that my position? Court jester? I get to safely say whatever the hell I want because someone has to speak truth to the king?"

"Trusted lieutenant," Dallas corrected softly. "You and Jas both. He won't let me get too hard, and you can't let me get too stupid."

The man braced both fists on the table and stared down at its cluttered surface. "Never known you to be scared of anything, that's all."

He could sidestep the words easily by claiming he wasn't scared of Lex, and it was true. Lex herself didn't frighten him. The thought of how quickly she could come to hate him, though... "Not scared. Cautious."

"Caution is smart. Admirable."

"Could you sound a little less convinced?"

"Probably not, though I could try."

Dallas sighed and drove a nail into the side of the crate. "You're a lousy jester. All of the truth, none of the jokes."

Bren shrugged. "I have no sense of humor--isn't that what everyone says?"

Everyone except Jas, who never failed to comment on Bren's twisted idea of what was funny. Dallas had always thought it was a lot simpler. "You haven't had much to laugh about of late."

"No one has, right?" Bren reached out and plucked the hammer from Dallas's hand. "I tried to collar Lex once. Did she ever tell you?"

Dallas's fist clenched around empty air, and Bren was too clever by half. Not that Dallas would have swung a hammer at one of his own men--probably--but the impulse alone was enough to give him pause. "No, she never mentioned it."

"I'm not surprised."

Dallas fought to keep his voice even. "So. You tried."

"I was still new," Bren explained with a shrug. "I didn't know yet."

A leading sort of statement. Its own trap, the kind meant to make him ask, Know what? As if the answer wasn't hanging in the air--everyone thought Lex was as good as his, and Dallas didn't bother to correct them. Neither did she, God bless her.

Most of the time, anyway.

With the thought of Lex's two suitors threatening to rear its head again, Dallas forced the conversation in a new direction. "How's the girl doing? Six? She getting her head around trusting us yet?"

"Nah." Bren held out the hammer. "It's a little soon for that, I think. She's still half convinced we're going for the long con. Maximum mental anguish."

Dallas raised an eyebrow. "Is that what Trent did to her?"

"Yeah. Maybe the worst thing he did."

It was sophisticated for someone like Trent, a vicious game that required patience and an ability to lie that Dallas had assumed was beyond the bastard. Or maybe it had never been a lie for him--maybe he'd just been that fucking childish. A kid who cherished his favorite toy until he got bored, then shattered it so no one else could play with it.

There was probably a lesson in there, an intensely personal one that Dallas didn't want to ponder too closely. "She must trust you, at least a little."

"Getting there." Bren flipped the crate over and laid strips of wood across the bottom.

Dallas abandoned the pretense of building and moved to the far wall, where Bren had already stoked the fire they kept banked in the massive hearth. Maddox had spent a year perfecting an electric heating element for the O'Kane branding irons, but Dallas preferred the old-fashioned way. The electricity they leached from Eden's power grid was far more reliable now than it had been in earlier years, but there were still failures and blackouts. Work had to go on, even when the lights were out.

He selected the two largest irons and set them into the flames. "Let me know when you think it's safe to loosen the girl's leash. I'm not ready to give her free run of the place, but she doesn't need to stay locked up all the time."

Bren hammered the last nail into place. "I'll let you know when I think you can turn her over to Lex."

He couldn't hold back his snort. "I don't think Lex is looking for another playmate. She's pretty well enamored of Noelle."

Bren pulled up short and eyed Dallas with a shake of his head, then returned to the task at hand with an unintelligible mutter. This time, Dallas didn't feel like poking for an answer he didn't want to hear. He knew what it would be.

Turn her over to Lex.

Like Lex was his damned queen. Like she wasn't off screwing a couple of street brawlers just to remind him that he could own her allegiance, but he could never own her body. The harder he closed his hands around her, the more she'd slip away...and the thought of losing her for good made him want to wrap her in chains.

Maybe he should. He could use the excuse of Trent to slap that collar around her throat and show her how good it would be.

If she'd take it. If it would be enough.

No, no use pretending, even to himself. It would never be enough. Not a collar, not a mark. He wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than all of her--mind, body and soul--and Lex would never give up that much control. They'd destroy each other. He'd destroy her, and that was the one thing he couldn't bear. Better to take what he could get and leave them both whole.

Mostly.