After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  King

  * * *

  “It was the fuckin’ pigs,” Skell shouted, leanin’ over the table in The Fallen Chapel, yellin’ like everyone had been yellin’ since Church commenced an hour ago.

  It was two days after my baby bro and sister had been born, and Zeus was still in custody.

  White had been down there for hours, tryin’ to get him out on bail, but because he was an ex-con with one murder charge already on his rap sheet, the judge wouldn’t set bail.

  It was like a bomb had gone off in that hospital, a landmine explodin’ underfoot just when we’d thought we were safe, blowin’ off limbs and tearing us to bloody pieces.

  The women went to work instantly, led by Cress and Maja, to be there for Lou and the babies. Loulou, needless to fuckin’ say, was not doin’ so good. She was pissed as a caged wild cat, unable to do anythin’ but care for those babies and wait. There were a lotta tears and shoutin’, a vase thrown against a wall, but through the meltdown, she was still a new mum and a good one. Walker and Angel were never far from her, always tended to with a gentleness that was so at odds with the fire in her eyes that wouldn’t die, not until Z was free.

  And the men, we were tryin’ to get our shit tight, because our Prez had just been incarcerated for the second fuckin’ time, and there was a fuck ton of crap that needed to be worked through. But goddamn, it was like herdin’ cats.

  Everyone was alpha, everyone was mad as a hatter at the injustice of it all, and the meetin’ had gone to hell because of it.

  “Of course, it’s the goddamn cops,” I growled, shoving back from my chair so violently, it tipped over. The brothers’ eyes went to me, shocked because I wasn’t one for shoutin’ or outbursts. “We know the why of it, brothers. Staff Sergeant Danner got tired of waitin’ for a legit reason to take us down, so he created one. He had to know Gibson’d been helpin’ us out, and that he’d been at the party that night. Only answer to the fuckin’ question. So, let’s be smart enough to move on and ask another. What the hell are we gonna do about it?”

  Short silence came outta habit because normally, Zeus would be the one to stand up and say somethin’.

  Finally, Buck leaned forward and slammed a meaty fist on the table. “First things first. We gotta vote.”

  My skin itched, too hot and tight. It was the anger barely contained in me but also the desire to step up into the vacant place and be interim Prez while my dad was in the clink. No way would it happen. I’d been fully patched in for a hot fuckin’ second, and there was a hierarchy to the club. It was the way it’d always worked.

  Buck was VP, so naturally, we’d vote him in as leader.

  “Before we vote, what’s the plan exactly?” Nova asked, eyein’ down Buck.

  “Drive-by shootin’, scare that motherfucker outta his skin with fear. Show them The Fallen won’t be fucked with or intimidated.”

  “They’ll arrest some of us on reasonable suspicion,” I pointed out even though I’d known he’d say it.

  “So fuckin’ be it,” he declared, slappin’ the table again.

  I hesitated, but the rage had blown the lid off my reservations. “My mind, we don’t need more brothers behind bars. We need to be smart about this, or they’ll pick us off one by one. Might be better to let ’em think we’re crushed by the blow and need time to lick our wounds. Instead, we get a plan to take that fucker down.”

  “Kill him? Yeah, fuck yeah, I’m down,” Lab-Rat growled.

  “Can’t kill him,” I said and watched every single brother scowl. “You want Zeus outta jail, we can’t kill the man who knows how Gibson was done in or maybe who even did the deed himself. We figure this out, then we fuck him.”

  “How the fuck are we gonna do that?” Heckler demanded. “We’re not fuckin’ pigs.”

  “Man has a point, King,” Axe-Man said, calm and slow as he always did. “Not investigators.”

  “No, but we’re goddamn criminals. We can pick a lot, intimidate someone into confessing, stalk a copper to find out his filthy secrets and blackmail him into tellin’ us more. I’m tellin’ ya, we got options. Smarts ones if we rein in the fury.”

  “Not reinin’ in shit, and I’m shocked as hell you’d be such a fuckin’ pansy about the shit when it’s not just your Prez, but your dad locked away,” Wiseguy grunted.

  “Hey, man, not cool,” Bat chastised, but I was already seein’ red.

  I leaned over the table so far, my boots almost left the ground, a snarl affixed to my face as I stared Wiseguy down. “You think I’m not about to go apeshit, you’re fuckin’ wrong. Got a dad better than damn man now locked away for the second time? New babies at home, tender wife goin’ through that shit alone, and he didn’t even do anything? I’m fuckin’ livid, Wiseguy, and you say shit about it again, I’ll knock your teeth in. I’m tryin’ to be smart here so we can get him the fuck outta there.”

  “Somethin’ needs to be done now to show that motherfucker who he’s dealin’ with,” Skell shouted.

  “They know who they’re dealin’ with. He’s made it his life’s mission to take down the club. You don’t think he’s bracin’ for attack and makin’ plans to fire back at us? Listen, Machiavelli said, ‘if you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear there vengeance.’” I pounded my fist against the table. “‘If you do them minor damage, they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them, there is nothing they can do.’”

  “Pretty words,” Heckler spat. “Don’t mean shit.”

  “You’re not listenin’. Danner did this? We need to end him. I’m just sayin’ we need to end him in a way he doesn’t come back and rip apart more lives. Got a woman I’m about to marry, you think I want to spend my honeymoon in the hole? Bat, you got kids, you want them growin’ up without a father? Buck, you want Maja growin’ old without ya?” The silence was precarious, each brother a stick of dynamite held perilously over a fire. “We target the cops separately, see if we can get one of them to flip. Doubt Hutchinson knows anythin’ that could help, seein’ as he’s been in our pocket for years. Take them in pairs, bring them in, let Priest have his special way with them and see what we can’t get on Danner and the rest.”

  “Zeus was fuckin’ framed for murder,” Buck said, and as soon as he did, I knew it was over for my tactic before it’d even begun. “Danner needs to feel the wrath of biker fury, and he needs to feel it now.”

  “Hear, fuckin’ hear!” a few of the brothers shouted.

  Nova kicked his foot against mine under the table like an apology.

  “Let’s get to the vote,” Buck ordered.

  And it was no surprise, twenty minutes later, when Buck was announced interim Prez.

  Cress was asleep in my bed at the clubhouse, passed out after another day lendin’ her services to Loulou. Wanted to join here there, get sunk deep in the oblivion of sleep, but Boner, Lab-Rat, and Heckler were out on a ride by Danner’s house, doin’ that drive-by Buck’d been so hot on.

  Didn’t sit right with me. Felt like walking straight into a trap Danner’d spent months makin’ just right. He knew bikers enough, watched us enough over the years, to know how we’d react. He’d want exactly that.

  I sighed into my Blue Buck before suckin’ back a gulp of cold brew and knocked my fist against the hardcover of The Prince on the bar in front of me. Sometimes, there was a barrier between me and my brothers because they disregarded anythin’ they couldn’t immediately understand. There were a few exceptions, like Priest who’d memorized near every religious text he could get his hands on, and Bat who’d been in the military long enough to question things even if they’d stood for eons unchanged, but on the whole, bikers were not the kinda men who liked to be told things from a book, however worthy.

  And I was that man, exactly that man who lusted after knowledge with a palpable kinda thirst. One’a the many reasons I’d fallen for Cress so fuckin’ hard was because she had a brain like the Delian problem, a brain I’d never be able to fully un
derstand no matter how long I puzzled it over.

  Words and prose made sense to me in a way I thought if I cut open a vein, ink would run down my arm and populate a page with verse.

  So, I got The Prince and how it could apply to my life, to this situation.

  We had to be cleverer than our natures, unpredictable in a way bikers never really were. We had to be more if we wanted to get Z out of that stinkin’ fuckin’ hole and Danner dead or in there instead’a him.

  Frustration boiled in my gut, barely doused by the second beer I was slammin’ back at an alarmin’ rate.

  “You know,” Nova said as he dropped into the stool beside me. “Got your point in there.”

  I cocked a brow, too tired to play games with the club’s Casanova.

  “Serious as shit, brother, I feel ya. Buck’s been in the life a long fuckin’ time, sometimes man gets stuck in the sixties ’fore the headache and hassle’a technology made bein’ a rebel a fuckuva lot more complicated.”

  “Could still do it,” Priest said from my other side, silent as ghost creepin’ up on us. “Take them one by one and force them to give us what they know.”

  “Gotta know, brother.” Bat slapped his tattooed hands on my shoulder and squeezed, ‘Hell’ across one set of fingers and ‘Bound’ across the other. “We got your back.”

  A sigh rushed through me, then made me chuckle because I sounded like my woman. “Appreciate it, serious as fuck.”

  There was a loud screech of tires outside, alerting every single one of us, guns out of waistbands and knives in hands in a fuckin’ flash.

  Seconds later, the clubhouse door pushed open and a small figure appeared in doorframe.

  “Hello,” Susan Danner, soon-to-be Susan Hobbs again, greeted shakily as she told at the entrance to a biker club clutchin’ the string of pearls she was always wearin’. “I was wondering if King Kyle Garro might be here.”

  I was up outta my seat before she’d even finished speakin’.

  “Susan,” I said gently as I went to her and wrapped up in a hug. “What’s goin’ on? Are you confused?”

  Susan had early onset Alzheimer’s disease, and I’d seen her around town sometimes starin’ blankly into space or holdin’ a can at Mac’s Grocer as if searchin’ for the answer to life’s question. I always helped her home in those cases, but I knew they were becomin’ more and more frequent.

  Still, she had it together enough to divorce Harold Danner before she could be declared incompetent and get stuck with him the rest of her life.

  Her shakin’ hands found my back and patted at me like birds afraid to land. “King, oh, honey, are you okay?”

  I pulled back and bent at the knee to look her in the eye. This was the one woman in my life who had ever given me a modicum of maternal love and even though we’d grown distant as Lion and me over the years, I still loved her and always would.

  “Worried more about you, Suse. What brings you to here?”

  Her pretty green eyes filled with tears, and she brought her hand to her mouth as if to disguise the ugliness of her words. “I went to visit Harold because, well, it was stormy out on the ranch, and I got a bit frightened. He normally doesn’t mind because well, I think he’d like to come home to me. Anyway, well, I let myself into his apartment, and he was speaking with this woman.” She made a face of distaste. “Trashy, you know? And they were arguing very loudly so I could hear them even at the base of the stairs.”

  My heart stopped beatin’ for one long forbodin’ beat. “What’d they say?”

  Her lower lip trembled and her hands were flutterin’ through the air. “She was getting angry with him because he asked her to steal something from your father, and I suppose she didn’t know what he would do with it when she did…”

  “What did she steal?” I bit out, tryin’ to stay calm, tryin’ not to scare her even though there was a howl in my throat and the urge to run down prey rampant in my blood.

  She sucked a breath in through her teeth. “I think it was a gun.”

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  “Okay,” I said slowly, steerin’ her over the couches and movin’ an empty beer can so she could take a seat, aware that Nova, Bat, and Priest were at my back. “Did they see you?”

  “No, no. I was so, well, overwhelmed by the whole thing. You know, Harold has always been so stern about the law, but over the past few years…Well, he hasn’t been the same. I’m worried, King,” she admitted, tears fallin’ as she looked at me with the wide confused eyes of a child in an older woman’s face. “I’m worried he did something truly awful.”

  He did, I wanted to rage, he did! He put Zeus Garro in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

  “Yeah, Suse,” I said instead, surprised by the cold, calculated calm of my voice, like ice cubes slotted into a glass. “He did.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, before droppin’ her head in her hands to cry. “You always were such a good boy, and Rosie too. He just doesn’t know how to stop once he starts something. Really, I thought, well, I thought he was a good man, but…I guess I was wrong.”

  The sobs rolled through her like crashin’ waves, heavin’ her slight shoulders, explodin’ from her mouth where they spilled into her palms. I rubbed her back and winced as I comforted her, needin’ to get the brothers back into the Chapel so we could talk about this latest development.

  “Can…” she asked after a few moments. “Can I stay here with you until Lion comes home from Vancouver?”

  “Of course,” I agreed with a little smile. “You took me in once. It’s my turn to repay the favour.”

  Her smile was tremulous but pure as she looked at me, and I only wished I didn’t have to ruthlessly use the information she gave me to put a noose around her ex-husband’s neck.

  King

  * * *

  Once was one time too many for a kid to see their father in prison. The first time he’d gone down, I’d got it even as a boy. He’d killed a man to save the life of a little girl, the same girl who a decade later would be his wife. Didn’t like being stuck with Farrah, without my dad and hero, but I got it and that was important in me learnin’ how to deal with it.

  There was nothin’ to get now. Zeus hadn’t done shit all but momentarily disappear to save Harleigh Rose from a shit situation, yet once again, the hero was bein’ punished like a villain.

  He sat in the bank of phones behind warped, dirty plexiglass in an orange jumpsuit that barely fit his massive frame. The brackets around his mouth had become troughs, the creases beside his eyes heavy fans, and when he locked eyes with me, I saw the beatin’ his soul had taken from bein’ in the slammer again, this time separated from babies he didn’t even know yet.

  “Dad,” I grunted through the pressure in my chest as I took a seat and adjusted Walker on my lap. “Got your sons here to see ya.”

  Dad’s face crumpled as he looked between us, eyes chartin’ every inch of Walker’s tiny body where I held him up for observation, then switchin’ to track my own. One tatted hand reached out as if he could touch us, then dropped useless to the table.

  “My boys,” he said, voice dry and rough as gravel underfoot. “Fuck me, got the most beautiful kids on the planet.”

  My nose itched as emotion welled in my throat, but I gave him an easy grin because didn’t need to worry about me along with everythin’ else.

  “Lou says he’s already got a mouth on him,” I relayed, adjusting my baby brother so his sleepy blue eyes, already pale in a way I knew they’d go silver, were trained on his dad. “Sucks like a Hoover.”

  He laughed, not the belly rumble I was used to, but a chuckle that brightened him all the same. “Fuck me for missin’ that.”

  “You see Angel?” I asked even though I knew Lou had spent a week visiting every day with the babies.

  “Heartbreaker already,” he claimed with pride. “Gonna have my hands full with her, can already tell.”

  “If Harleigh Rose is anythin’ to go by, you breed fierc
e women, so I’m thinkin’ she’ll be okay no matter what.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Got lucky with my kids.”

  “Nah, we got lucky with you, old man.”

  His eyes flashed like light caught on the tip of a blade as an almost violent surge of love sliced across his face.

  I got that, the agony of love like that, from him.

  “Kin’a you and Cress will be lucky as fuck too,” he said, lookin’ at the way I held Walker. “Gonna make me the youngest, best lookin’ grandfather we know anytime soon?”

  I laughed with him and then laughed harder when Walker whacked me with his little fist as if my laughter offended his grumpy self.

  “Yeah, workin’ on it, old man,” I admitted, lovin’ the crazy set of his happy grin.

  “Glad to fuckin’ hear it. Like the thought’a our kids growin’ up together.”

  I shook my head at the thought, my dad and I havin’ kids the same age, but we were biker and we were Fallen, so we didn’t go in much for social mores.

  “Brothers voted Buck in,” I told him even though he’d already know.

  Zeus sat back and crossed his arms, eyes still swivelin’ from me to Walker and back every few seconds. “Thought you’d wanna talk about that.”

  I shrugged a shoulder. “It is what it is. Susan Hobbs showed up at the club the other day, said she was worried Danner’d got some bitch to steal the gun for him. Made sense seein’ as you haven’t used that piece in years.”

  “Sat in the bottom of that desk drawer for ’bout a decade,” he agreed.

  “Suse told us the alarm code to his apartment. Goin’ with some brothers tonight to see what we find.”

  “What exactly are you hopin’ to find? And if you find it, what the hell are you gonna do with it? You’re not a cop, King. You find somethin’, it won’t be admissible in court.”

  “No, but Lion’s been talking to Internal Affairs in Vancouver. They got an eye on Harold now, and if they get an anonymous tip-off, they might act on it.”