After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  There was fun stuff too because no biker party was ever boring.

  Boner got wasted in a game of Edward Fortyhands with Lab-Rat, the man who tested every single strain of weed the brothers produced and drank everything and anything that could have possibly given him an artificial high, then promptly challenged him to a game of darts. His first three tosses landed darts in the wall, a cushion, and almost in my cat’s damn tail, so I made them the only three shots he took.

  Maja challenged Hannah, Lila, Cleo, and Harleigh Rose to a dance-off, and I almost busted my gut laughing at the way Hannah twerked like a hip-hop dancer despite being sixty plus years old.

  It was good.

  It just would have been so much better with Zeus.

  Incomparable with King.

  And time was ticking on. I could feel the hands of the clock move with every beat of my truculent heart, reminding me that one, two, three hours had passed, and King still wasn’t home with me.

  No one said it was going to be okay, and I appreciated that. They knew better than I did, after years of the life, that not everyone came home.

  I hoped to God King wouldn’t go the way of Mute.

  And then a phone rang, nearly impossible to hear under the roar of the music and laughter and constant chatter, but my ears were tuned to it, any vibration or repetition of sound that might be a ringtone.

  It wasn’t my phone.

  There was something in that––in the fact that my phone wasn’t ringing––that caused my heart to turn over in my chest, the move so painful I actually gasped and clutched at my chest, thinking, maybe, momentarily, I was having a genuine heart attack.

  The room went so quiet, I could hear the buzz of the sound system under the Led Zeppelin song before someone swiftly turned it off.

  “Yeah,” Bat answered, standing up from off the ground where he’d been playing with his sons.

  I didn’t breathe; I didn’t want to move even an inch as if my suspension made a difference to the news I’d receive from that damn phone that wasn’t mine.

  Sander was beside me, hand on my shoulder, Lou to my right on the couch holding both of her babies, and Harleigh Rose between my legs on the floor. I remembered that, for some reason even though it was no solace at the time. Later on, I would think about how my family was around me, and that meant something.

  But when Bat listened to whoever was on the other end of the phone, and as if in slow motion, turned his head and looked up in my eyes, his black gaze impenetrable but his expressive mouth straight as a flatline, everything fell away.

  Because I knew.

  I knew not that King was dead, but that Bat was going to say it.

  A part of me swiftly moved into denial because I hadn’t felt his death, and it seemed important that I would have. He was the bone of my bone, an intrinsic part of my soul. If he died, shouldn’t there be a seismic shift in my universe? A crack in the crust of the earth at my feet, at the very least? A red sun, a swarm of locusts, a fucking cataclysmic apocalypse?

  Not nothing.

  Never nothing.

  But I knew.

  King was dead.

  And when Bat moved through the crowd to crouch at my side and place a hand on my knee, I didn’t even hear the words through the roar of blood in my ears. I only saw his mouth move and form the words.

  King is dead.

  And then?

  Well, I didn’t remember anything after that.

  Zeus

  * * *

  She came to me like a ghost, a spectre of herself as if she was the one who died that day. Didn’t help she still wore her gown, once fuckin’ gorgeous but now tattered at the hem and streaked with mud, the flowers in her hair as dead as the look in her eyes. Never seen misery so personified, not even in the mirror when my Lou was sick and probably dyin’, not even when I told my own daughter she was no longer any kin’a mine, not even on all the many grievin’ faces of the folks at Mute’s funeral.

  Nothin’ in all the hard years I’d spent on livin’ could’a prepared me for the sight’a Cressida Garro come to tell me our boy was dead.

  She said it straight, voice strong as cold steel.

  “King’s gone. He’s left.” As if he’d just upped and abandoned us. Seein’ my frown, she’d sucked a sharp breath in through her teeth and squared her shoulders so straight they must’a ached. “He’s dead.”

  Each word was a bullet in the chamber of her despair-slackened mouth, and they hit me with such fuckin’ force I flinched ’fore I could even begin understandin’ what the words could mean.

  ’Cause there was no way in any kinda hell that God’d take two sons from a man in a single lifetime.

  No way He would join two soulmates, give ’em a taste of bliss, then condemn one to death and the other, worse, to a life without their other fuckin’ half like some twisted version of Adam and Eve with their apple.

  But I believed it even though every cell in my body rebelled against it ’cause that was the look’a her sittin’ there across from me in a provincial penitentiary.

  The look of a woman who’d had half her soul ripped away. The look of a woman made inhuman from loss. The look of a woman, I knew in my fuckin’ bones, would never again be more than a ghost.

  “Danner Senior,” she went on in that hollow voice, each word an empty shell casing. “He did it. Lured…” Her first hiccough over his name, the name I’d given ’im in the manner I’d given ’em to my other children, a name he could grow in to. “Lured King to the cliffs and shot him in the back.”

  Rage swallowed me whole like the mouth of some great and awful beast, sharp teeth shreddin’ through my guts, crunchin’ through my bones till they dust on the back’a my numb tongue. Couldn’t move ’cause my skin would split with the force of the demolition roaring through me.

  If I moved an inch, I’d be locked behind bars for fuckin’ life ’cause the next person I saw, I’d kill out of pure black fury.

  “Danner killed my boy,” I echoed, and my voice wasn’t dead like hers ’cause my heart was temporarily shielded from the misery by the wholesomeness of my wrath. My body sent the message to my brain; I only had to find and murder Danner to right this egregious fuckin’ wrong. Like some kinda magic, Danner’s black blood on my hands, drippin’ wet to the ground, would resurrect my firstborn like Adonis from Apollo’s tears.

  “They’re going to arrest him––Danner––for what he’s done. He fled after the shooting, but every single Canadian Chapter of the club and the cops are looking for him, and when they find him, he’s done. Hutchinson tipped off the Internal Affairs Department to Danner’s previously sketchy track record, and they’ve opened an investigation into his past…including the murder of Riley Gibson. Paula Jones is willing to testify that she was the one who stole your gun from the clubhouse and a few of the cops Priest got cozy with before… well, before have also flipped on Danner.”

  She dragged in a deep breath like a drowning man, gulping it down to fill the empty void inside ’er.

  She’d been a wife for only a matter’a hours before she’d become a widow.

  The wrongness of it twisted up my guts like coiled barbed wire. I pressed my hand to the glass window ’tween us, needin’ more than anythin’ to comfort her ’cause I was already a lost cause, and I needed to do somethin’ or I’d go out of my skin.

  After a long hesitation, her glazed eyes vacant like a dead fish, she tilted forward and pressed her forehead to the glass over my hand.

  “You’re going to be free, Z. There were witnesses to the shooting, and now they’re actually doing something about Danner’s corruption, so there is no way you won’t be acquitted for Gibson’s murder. You getting free? It’s the only fuel in my tank right now. Knowing my beautiful father-in-law will get out of this horrible cage,” she whispered in a threadbare voice that fucked with my anger and set it to crumblin’. Then she turned those big, whiskey-coloured eyes my son’d always loved so fuckin’ much up to mine with her face up agains
t the plexiglass, and I lost my breath to the catastrophe of sorrow in that gaze.

  “We don’t even have his body,” she wheezed through the tight squeeze of tears in ’er throat. “He went over the cliff, and he was lost to the sea.”

  A carter opened in my chest, in the space I assumed my heart might have been, and yawned open with painful alacrity, devastatin’ my insides.

  Fuck me.

  Could life really be so fuckin’ unjust that the best man I knew would die at the hands of the worst kinda man I’d ever met?

  “He looked so beautiful,” she breathed, tears smearing against the glass and catching in her eyelashes like diamonds. “In his suit…you should have seen him, Zeus. He looked exactly like an angel cast down from heaven. All that gold hair in the morning light, it was like a halo.” A moan rumbled through her throat, pure agony. “I held that beautiful face in my hands and stared into those arctic ice eyes, and I swore I’d love him forever.”

  Her eyes fluttered closed, and a tsunami of tears erupted from the pressure of her pressed lids. The wet went streamin’ down the glass like rain.

  “That was only yesterday,” she mouthed more than said aloud. “Yesterday, I held him in my hands.”

  Her head angled down to look at the hands in question, and then she slowly raised ’em to the glass so I could see the twin scars in ’er palms, the tattoo of the queen of heart on the inside of one finger and the ring of gold around another. She offered ’em to me, the last place she’d ever touched my son, as if I could somehow feel that last touch through ’er.

  The last time I’d touched my son had been four months ago when they’d locked me in ’ere.

  So I pressed my hands over hers, and my forehead against hers on the glass, and together, just for a moment––’cause a moment was all I was gonna give myself ’fore I got my shit together and figured out how to slaughter Danner from inside this concrete hell––I closed my eyes too and cried with her.

  “He was the very best of us,” I grunted as the tears fell, so hot they scalded my cheeks and pooled like fresh wax in my beard.

  “He can’t be dead,” she begged, those dead eyes reawakening to turn crazed like Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment gone wrong. “He can’t be dead. Please, Zeus, he just…he just can’t be dead.”

  “Cress,” I said, but the word was broken. “If he’s dead, it’s only on this earth. You gotta know he’s gonna be here every day so long you and me and all the hoards’a people who knew and loved him still live.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  Fuck me, of course it wasn’t. But how was I supposed to comfort a woman with a shattered heart when my own was crumblin’ all round the edges, threatenin’ to cave in too.

  Suddenly, she shifted, pullin’ back from the glass and wiping a hand under her nose to clean herself up. I watched as brick by brick, she carefully collected herself until the Cressida I’d first met, prim and proper as a buttoned-up tweed suit, sat before me.

  It was fuckin’ scary, and I wasn’t afraid to admit it. Watchin’ her act like that reminded me of Priest after he’d come to us from his own crazy heartbreak.

  He’d never recovered genuine emotions, not really.

  “Lou is here,” she told me with an anemic smile. “I’ll send her in.”

  “Cress,” I called ’cause even though she was sittin’ right there, she’d gone again. “I got you, yeah? We all do.”

  She looked off into a distance only she could see and smiled softly, in a way that made it an expression of pain. “This time, I got you. We’ll see you out of here soon, Zeus.”

  She nodded on the glass once, then turned and walked to the door where the guard stepped up to let her out, taking her arm as he did like some macabre father leading his bride down the aisle.

  She didn’t look at me before she left, but I knew the vision’a her with dead eyes in that white dress would haunt me until my dyin’ day.

  Cressida

  * * *

  I’d insisted on going to tell Zeus myself. First, I’d suggested it, then when I was met with worried expressions, I’d demanded, and finally, when they’d protested, I had pulled on a tendril of the smoking wrath bubbling volcanically in my gut and screamed at them to take me to see Zeus fucking Garro.

  Someone, probably Lou, had called Lysander and my boys after we’d had our interviews with the police in the early mornings of my wedding night, and it was him, Benny, Carson, and Ares who had driven with me to Ford Mountain Correctional to speak with Zeus.

  It was the one solid thought in the sea of grief that threatened to suck me into its undertow, and I’d clung to it with an almost religious sort of fervor, but now I had completed the task and there was nothing left to anchor me.

  “Back home, princess?” Sander asked, his big body looking fairly ridiculous folded behind the wheel of my small Honda Civic.

  “No.” I didn’t want to go back to the home I’d shared with King. I didn’t know what I would do there, alone with my grief and the ghost of our memories stalking my every step. There was a small, not inconsiderable part of me that considered burning it down so I’d never have to step foot in it again.

  The pile of wood was no home without my King, and I knew it wouldn’t be ever again.

  Sander met my eyes in the rear-view mirror where I sat holding Ares’s hand. “Where to then? You could stand to eat. Wanna stop by Honey Bear Café and get one’a those fruity coffee drinks you like?”

  “I’m not hungry.” Though, I was. Just not hungry for food. Hungry for King, for the feel of the air in the room when he entered it, electric like the hum of live wires, and his big hands on my body, gentle and rough only when I needed them to be. I was hungry for his gorgeous face, just to see it animated again, his nostrils flaring with breath, his eyes so like ice with their beautiful cracks and fissures of pale blue colour lit from within with some secret mirth.

  It wasn’t a hunger that would ever be satisfied with anything less, and I wasn’t stupid enough to believe otherwise.

  “Where to then?” Sander tried again, sharing a look with Carson in the passenger seat.

  “The clubhouse?” Carson suggested. “Why don’t we check in on the clubhouse? Maybe start planning the funeral?”

  “No!” I snapped, doused with the icy water of that reality. “No funeral. Not now.”

  “Cress…” Sander started but stopped when I cut my glare to his in the rear-view mirror.

  “No. No funeral. We don’t even have his body.” I’d been robbed of the opportunity to stare at him even one last time, even waterlogged from the Pacific and scored through with a bullet. “Zeus is still fucking incarcerated, and I won’t have him missing King’s funeral. Not when he’s missed so much already…”

  “Okay,” Ares agreed immediately, his huge brown eyes glowing with compassion as he held my hand tightly in both of his own. “Let’s wait for Zeus.”

  I smiled woodenly at him.

  “You don’t have to smile for me,” he whispered, leaning close to tilt his head against my shoulder. “Know what it’s like to not want to smile.”

  I rolled my lips between my teeth to seal the sob that wanted to break free. Instead, I ran a shaking hand over Ares soft, springy curls and held him to me. Benny squeezed my other hand and mirrored Ares expression so that I was bracketed by the two sweetest boys I knew.

  “Let’s go to the clubhouse anyway,” Carson suggested, and I knew it was killing him that he couldn’t help me, not really. He was a man of action, not words, and there was no action to take against my grief. “Maybe there’s been news about where that motherfucking Danner Senior fled to.”

  He meant it innocuously, probably. Just venting his anger for his friend’s murder, just thinking being at the clubhouse would help me heal because it was where King grew up. He didn’t mean for it to ignite in my belly like flint struck over the kindling of my helpless fury.

  Danner.

  The fucking son of a bitch who’d murdered the best man
who had ever lived.

  He was still free. Still somewhere out there living and breathing when he should dead or at the very least, locked up forever.

  Suddenly, I had an anchor to ground me in that raging sea of grief again.

  I didn’t say anything, though. Not when we pulled through the gates and parked in the lot. Not when we all shuffled inside, heavy and slow with sadness. Not even when we pushed through the door of the clubhouse and found every single brother littered across the surfaces of the space like crumpled garbage, useless in their sorrow.

  It was only when I spotted Priest, standing in the far corner by the window alone with his arms crossed, eyes to the front lot as if prepared for an assault, that I let that excited fury brew.

  I stalked through the room, ignoring everyone else because I didn’t see anyone else, not with my tunnel vision locked on the one man who could help feed that dark hunger instead, hunger that was taking shape and name.

  Vengeance.

  Priest’s eyes immediately cut to mine, and the intent in them, the calculating, arctic rage in them made my breath catch because it nearly matched my own.

  I knew before I asked what his answer would be.

  “That piece of shit SS Danner is still free.” I planted my fists on my hips and jutted my chin in the air, daring one of the brothers to stop me. “I want to help find him, and when we do, I want to kill him.”

  “Cress.” Buck stood from his stool at the bar and frowned at me. “Woman, I know you’re grievin’ but that is straight up not how this shit works, you get me? This is club business, and we got no use for a woman in it.”

  “Fuckin’ right,” Heckler muttered.

  “Oh, fuck off,” Boner exploded, shoving up from the couch. “You really gonna stand there and tell King’s fuckin’ widow she can’t get the retribution she deserves? That motherfucker murdered her man.”