Beyond Ecstasy (Beyond #8) (10 page)

“Rum.”

“And what would we make if we had potatoes?”

“Vodka.”

“How about corn?”

On and on, drilling it into her mind, into her blood and bones. She'd learned math in ounces and cups and teaspoons. She'd learned to read by sounding out recipes long-since committed to memory. The distillery had been her schoolroom, liquor her alphabet.

A is for Apple Cider. B is for Bourbon. C is for Corn Whiskey…

That had been their first setup. Back on the ranch in Texas, before Dallas had sent for them. They'd brewed and distilled whatever they could get their hands on, because there was never enough of the right things, never enough of
anything
, but Nessa was the only person she knew who never went to bed hungry. Because booze meant forgetting, and forgetting was gold.

She was thirteen when they arrived in the sectors. Pop had been old then—old when they started out, and even older after the harrowing drive north. Too old to do more than supervise from his chair as Nessa surveyed the sorry state of Dallas O'Kane's newborn business.

That had been in the earliest days, when the warehouse that now hosted fight nights was the one thing Dallas owned. When it had been empty and echoing, filled only with the equipment that Dallas and his earliest followers had been able to scavenge and rig together. They'd been limping along for a few years, churning out rotgut from inferior supplies, just enough to let them afford one shipment of good ingredients.

Molasses. Sugar. Yeast.

The O'Kanes were famous for whiskey, but Nessa knew the truth. Molasses and her grandfather's undeniable skill were the true origin story. Under his direction, she'd prepared their first batch of quality booze, and the credits had swept in like the tide.

They founded an empire on the backs of those bottles. The rum bought the supplies they needed for more efficient distilling equipment, bigger vats, better ingredients.

Rum bought the first supply of grain fine enough to turn out a batch of whiskey that burned in all the right ways. The whiskey had cemented the O'Kane legend, but Nessa still had a weakness for rum.

She had a weakness for the aging room, too. When the loneliness got to be too much, she took the freight elevator down to the basement and savored that first moment of revelation, when the doors slid apart to reveal rack after rack of oak barrels.

Her grandfather's legacy. Her life's work.

Who needed a grand fucking romance when you had a thousand barrels of priceless liquor to keep you warm at night?

The elevator shuddered to a halt, and Nessa held her breath, waiting for the first glorious sight of her empire stretching out before her. Instead, she got a first glorious look at something else entirely.

Jas was standing in the main aisle, pointing toward one of the barrels. And the man next to him…

Oh sweet Jesus, glorious didn't cover it.

Dark brown skin. Beautiful brown eyes. Chiseled features that belonged on a pre-Flare movie star or some artist's masterwork. Even his fucking eyebrows formed a perfect arch that only enhanced all that seething, serious intensity.

He was almost as tall as Jas, but he was
built
. Like Bren, or even Hawk—except Bren and Hawk topped out at jeans and leather in the style department. This stranger was wearing a suit as casually as Jared, one that had been cut to show off his wide shoulders and lean waist.

Nessa had grown up around some of the most casually violent warriors the sectors had to offer. Her crush on Jared's sleek sophistication had been the closest thing she'd managed to teenage rebellion.

That crush had been mild. Fleeting. The sudden eruption of butterflies in her stomach and tingles in parts of her that had been sadly neglected was something far, far more serious.

God help her, she
wanted
him. And that was terrifying enough to have her praying the doors slid shut before they noticed her. If life was kind, if it was fair, she'd be back upstairs in a few minutes. She'd tuck herself away in her office until the handsome stranger was gone, and she'd be safe from temptation and this intolerable, aching
yearning
.

But this wasn't a fair life. It was Nessa's life.

Jas turned as the doors began to close. The stranger turned, as well, his gaze clashing with hers, and sudden, flustered panic made her shove her arm out. The elevator door bumped her elbow and slid open again, and there was no helping it. She could stand there gaping like a fool, or she could try to play it cool.

As if
Nessa
and
cool
had ever been within screaming distance of one another.

Still, this was her territory. So she stepped out of the elevator and let her pride of ownership stand in for confidence. “Hey, Jas. Can I help you find something?”

“Nah, I was just showing Ryder around. I'm glad you're here, though.” He held out his arm, ushering her closer. “Nessa, this is Ryder, the guy who took over Five. And this is Nessa.”

Of course he was. Of
course
he fucking was, because if her hormones were anything, they were reliably self-destructive. Why fall for a nice, boring boy loyal to Sector Four when she could get the hots for a guy Dallas still didn't entirely trust, a guy so dangerous he'd taken over Sector Five from the inside.

Touching him was out of the question. She shoved her hands in her pockets and nodded in greeting. Cool. Collected. Then she opened her mouth, and words fell out. “So you're the drug dude.”

He blinked at her. “I make them, yes. So do you, it seems.”

“What? Hell, no. I make liquor. Excellent liquor.”

He inclined his head. “Of course you do.”

Nessa couldn't tell if he was agreeing with her or humoring her, but the spike of temper was exactly what she needed. Pride overrode hormones, and she tilted her head. “I was going to check out some of the seven-year, Jas. If you're showing him around…”

Before Jasper could answer, Ryder folded his hands behind his back. “I'd like to see it.”

“Then follow me.”

She led them down the aisle and to the left, past hundreds of barrels labeled in her burned-in block letters with the date, the cask number, and her coded notes. Near the back of the room on the last few racks, the handwriting shifted to her grandfather's scrawl, legible only to the people who'd worked with him for years.

As long as these barrels were down here, she'd still have a part of him.

There was a sink against the far wall, next to a tasting table stacked high with glasses. She scooped up the whiskey thief and hauled the stepladder down the row until she found the cask she wanted.

In the old days, there'd been laws about bourbon. Hell, there'd been laws about everything, more and more every year. Her grandfather had sworn they were on the verge of another Prohibition when the Flares happened, but sometimes his stories of the life that came before sounded more like an old man's rage at a world that had fallen apart.

Pop might not have had much use for most of the old government's laws, but the sanctity of his bourbon was something else altogether. She could still remember the screaming match when he'd insisted Dallas had to find him
new
oak barrels and everything he needed to char them right.

The shit they're paying for now is practically jet fuel. They won't know the fucking difference between new and used barrels. They might not know the difference if you pissed in it.

I'll know. And a decade down the road, you'll be thanking me.

Her grandfather had gotten his barrels. He'd gotten every damn thing he ever asked for—not that it had taken a decade to make good on his promise. There was that, at least. Even though he'd died before her fifteenth birthday, he'd lived long enough to have Dallas thank him for holding the line.

And Nessa had bottled the first batch of straight bourbon without him.

Her eyes stung, and she hurried through drawing the sample and blinked away any hint of tears as she hopped back to the floor. Jas had already upended three glasses, and she watched the liquor as she distributed it between them, all too aware of Ryder's gaze on her.

“What is this?” he asked in that sinful rumble of his.

“Straight bourbon whiskey.” The flutters were back, and she fought them with facts. “Sixty-five percent corn. It's been aging seven years now, and I think it's getting close.”

“To what?”

“Perfection, obviously.” She lifted a glass and offered it to him. “You guys ever get the good stuff over in Five?”

“I wouldn't know.” He accepted the glass with a tight smile. “I don't drink very often.”

An odd stance for a man who peddled a goddamn glittering rainbow of mind-altering recreational pharmaceuticals alongside his more sedate medical offerings, but Nessa supposed she was just as much a hypocrite.

Except
her
mind-altering recreation tasted better.

She passed a glass to Jasper before raising the final one. “Well, here's to the finer things in life.”

Ryder saluted her in return, then tossed his whiskey back like a shot of cheap grain alcohol. His throat worked as he swallowed, and it would have been one of the hottest things she'd ever seen if it hadn't been so infuriating.

Offended on behalf of her liquor and her grandfather, she snatched the glass from his hand and replaced it with her own. “That is
not
how you drink good bourbon. Jesus Christ, did you even
taste
it?”

“
Nessa
.” Jas looked scandalized.

“What?” she shot back. “Where's your fucking pride?” Without waiting for a response, she curled Ryder's hand around the glass. Then, because Jas didn't deserve it if he wasn't going to stand up for her, she plucked his glass from his hand and lifted it to her lips. “Watch. Bring it up like you're going to drink it, but first you smell it. With your lips parted, like this.”

She rested the glass against her lower lip and inhaled slowly—and couldn't for the life of her tell what the hell she was smelling. Because Ryder's gaze was fixed on her mouth, and the butterflies were elephant-sized and stomping all over the place.

Oh Jesus, this was bad. “Then you drink it,” she told him, and at least she didn't sound breathless. Yet. “
Sip
it. Let it roll across your tongue. Taste it.”

He followed her instructions, his gaze locked with hers as he sipped the whiskey. Then, just when she was ready to break eye contact to save herself, he licked his lower lip. “You're right,” he murmured. “I stand corrected.”

Oh, she'd correct him. She'd climb that hard body like a tree and lick his lower lip herself, see what else he was willing to let roll across his tongue—

No. No, no,
no
.

Nessa set the glass on the table, untouched. “Good. Enjoy the rest of your tour.” She pivoted before they could stop her and disappeared between two aisles of casks, striding away so fast that she could hear the murmur of Jas's voice, but not his words.

She had rules, good ones. No men with brains. No men with power. No men who might find themselves on the opposite side of the O'Kanes for any reason that mattered. And, most especially, no men who made her feel things that might make her forget the reasons she needed those rules.

Nessa had always been the key to Dallas O'Kane's power. She was the heart of his whole empire. And once, at fifteen, she'd almost brought it crashing down because a pretty man had said all the right things to make a lonely girl grieving her dead grandfather feel like someone loved her.

Everyone else got to take big risks in the name of love. She didn't have that luxury.

If the rooftop garden was the one place in Sector Four where Hawk felt on the firmest footing, the underground tunnels were the other extreme. Cold, sterile, and lifeless, the cement walls and artificial light were enough to give him a case of claustrophobia—even without the very real possibility that he could take one wrong turn and be lost down here forever.

But the new kid was in his fucking element.

“My grandpa used to do this,” Tank told him as he used his boot knife to open a small bag of the cement mix. “Before the Flares. He helped build the factories in Eight.”

It was a common story. So many of the people who scrabbled out their lives in the sectors were descended from people who had originally come here with a dream, following the promise of a grand future. A dream of working together toward a common goal and sharing in the fruits of their labor.

A dream that had died when the lights went out.

Hawk held the mixing tub steady for Tank and watched Bren and Jas fix the frame into place in front of doors leading toward the city. Bren had already used Noah's instructions to disable the control panel next to the door, but a broken door could be fixed with enough patience. Noah himself was proof of that.

The project they were working on today was a lot more permanent. “Are you guys almost ready?”

“Just about.” Jasper tested the makeshift wooden wall with the heel of his hand and squinted when it gave just a little. “You sure this'll hold it?”

“The stuff is light.” Bren tossed his hammer aside and knelt to check the charged air compressor. “The wood'll hold.” He jerked his head toward the large black bag he'd brought. “Don't forget the putty.”

“Right.” Jas retrieved a block and pinched off a piece, working it between his fingers until it was malleable. “This expandable shit freaks me out.”

“Dallas O'Kane's right-hand man?” Tank teased. “Never.”

“It should¸” Bren said flatly. “I saw a guy get pumped full of it once. They were reinforcing the wall over by Three after it was damaged by the firebombs. Poor fucker got impaled by a nozzle—”

Jasper groaned. “Stop.”

“—and they didn't shut down the pump fast enough.”

Tank grimaced. “Get the fuck out.”

“No, really.” Bren rose. “The worst part is that this shit takes a minute to expand. Literally—sixty seconds. Longest fucking minute of my life. His too, I guess.”

Horrifying, but still fast, no matter how long that minute dragged out. “I'd take sixty seconds over what happens when you wind up on the wrong side of a tractor. You get on toward the end of harvest, with Eden breathing down your neck and everyone around you hopped up on illegal stimulants, and shit gets ugly, fast. Limbs all mangled, trapped and waiting for someone to find you…”