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 fuck 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 fucking 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 pussy, 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 fucked 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