Free Beyond Jealousy by Kit Rocha

on the edge of her sofa, that she fled her room in search of distraction.
    She went to the place she knew best--the bar.
    Trix greeted her with a smile and an open bottle of beer. "You gonna help clean up?"
    "Yeah, why not?" Rachel set aside the beer and grabbed a broom.
    Zan, the regular bouncer, grinned over his shoulder as he lowered the solid wooden bar across the front door. "Chase Six around the room while you're at it. Girl's wound tighter than Dallas in a church."
    "I won't be any help with that tonight."
    Trix grinned as she turned chairs up onto the tables. "So it's true, then?"
    "Is what true?" Six came out of the back room and hopped onto the bar before waving her middle finger in Zan's direction. "And I heard that, bastard."
    He laughed, his usually gruff demeanor gone now that there were only O'Kanes in the room. "Ace and Cruz were backstage when Jas went looking for them. Backstage watching Rachel dance."
    Trix abandoned the chairs and wrapped her arms around Rachel. "I'm not teasing," she promised. "I think it's perfect."
    Perfect? Rachel barely knew what it was, and she sure as hell wasn't ready to talk about it. That moment backstage felt so fragile, as if the slightest wrong move could dissolve it all like smoke. "It's not..." Words failed her, and she tried again. "I mean, I don't--"
    "Message received." Trix gave her one last squeeze and backed off. "I get it."
    Zan leaned against the bar and wrapped a huge hand around Six's ankle, stilling the anxious bounce of her foot. "Don't even think it, girl."
    Guilt flashed through the brunette's eyes, then vanished with her scowl. "I don't know what you're talking about."
    "Sure. You're not sitting there wondering if you can give us the slip and trot over to Three to back up your boyfriend. And you can't. Hell, unless there's a fucking army there, Cruz, Bren, and Mad together are already overkill."
    True words, reassuring ones, and Rachel clung to them, even as she spoke without meaning to. "Back in Eden, on nights like this, my mother always made sure there was something going on. A big project to keep all my aunts and cousins busy. I never wanted to be there, canning vegetables or making wedding quilts. I wanted to be out there, too."
    Six's other foot stilled on its own as she studied Rachel. "Your family brewed beer, right?"
    "They still do." Rachel dragged the broom idly across the floor. "Monday night collection runs, Wednesday night deliveries. Those two are the dangerous ones."
    "Because it's illegal?" Six twisted to lean behind the bar and surfaced with a bottle of rum. "I still think that's crazy. Eden has slums. And crime . Aren't they supposed to be shiny and perfect?"
    Eden had a lot of things it professed to condemn. Men were men, whether they lived in the city or the sectors or out in the goddamn wilderness. They had desires, and forbidding those desires didn't diminish them. It just turned them into vice.
    There was good money to be made in catering to those vices--liquor and women, chief among them. Rachel's father had been content to let sector leaders supply what he considered the harder markets. He'd only allied himself with Dallas because his own products, the beer and other malts, sold to the same customers, and it made sense to work together.
    Beer. Against her mother's wishes, Rachel had been making it since she was ten years old. In the grand scheme of things, it seemed so harmless , and yet Six's words held truth. It was against the law, and that made it dangerous.
    She shook herself and set aside the useless broom. "That's how I wound up here," she told Six. "Special Tasks busted a joint shipment--Riley brew and O'Kane liquor. My father couldn't risk admitting to the partnership, because our whole damn family would have been exiled."
    "Hypocrites," Zan grumbled, folding his beefy arms over his chest. "Like those stiffs in Eden thought you were the damn ringleader. They just wanted to hit your dad hard enough to scare him into line, but