After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  Maja and Hannah on Thursday sometimes along with Cleo and Lila, trying to make me laugh, but if a funny bone could break, mine had, and I never did.

  Zeus on Saturday; every Saturday, I’d go to him for the full length of his visiting hours, all three of them. He’d talk and talk about King, and it was the only day I really spoke and remembered what the sound of my own voice felt like in my ears. We talked about King as if he was alive, and it was the only good I found in any days that followed his passing.

  The brothers took turns too, less organized, one or more of them “poppin’ by” because they were bored, in the neighbourhood, or had nothing to do. I didn’t believe them, and they didn’t care, even when I didn’t talk. They just put old movies they knew I loved on the TV and read to me, badly, aloud from books they’d never once read.

  But like I said, a month went by in a blink of an eye, and all I was, all I remember of that time, was sorrow.

  Zeus

  * * *

  Prison’s not somethin’ a person gets used to. Doesn’t matter how many years ya spend there—not how many times a man’s in or outta the place—prison weighs on the body always in strange ways, like the air against your skin durin’ an electrical storm. At all hours you could feel the wrongness of bein’ imprisoned in a six and a half square metre concrete cell with hundreds of other men who’ve committed any number of despicable crimes for a variety of honourable and dishonourable reasons.

  You felt like cattle, the kind kept on the massive ranches in the southern United States where it’s cheaper to let ’em die of heat stroke than install air conditioning in the barns. It felt industrial and animal in a strange tandem that just equalled something wrong.

  I hated that wrongness and the feel of it on me like I could never get clean of it.

  Took years after I got out the first time to rid myself of that current on my skin, and only when I met Lou did it truly disappear.

  There was worry, as I let the guards strip search me one more fuckin’ time and collected my meager belongings, that the wrongness would haunt me again on the outside. That I’d meet my babies for the first time and the connection wouldn’t sink in my heart ’cause the electromagnetic pulse of prison would cancel it out. That I’d hold my woman and love my woman and somehow not be enough ’cause there I was, a demon fresh outta hell, and she was everything angel.

  I carried that worry like a fuckin’ boulder on my shoulders as I waited for the gates to open so I could walk out into the lot and greet my family, save one beautiful, irreplaceable soul. There was nothin’ in the world more important to me than bein’ there for my family through our hardest time, yet I’d been sequestered outta reach, unable to offer the comfort and support they needed.

  It fuckin’ killed me, and with that pain came shame. I was ashamed even though I’d done nothing’ wrong ’cause I hadn’t laid a hand on Riley Gibson. That was somethin’ else prison was good at doin’ to you, rapin’ your soul so all you felt was guilt and shame and wrongfulness even when it wasn’t warranted.

  So, I was worried as the concrete doors parted to reveal a hoard’a people clustered in the parking lot around a dozen cars and even more Harleys.

  And then, eyes sweeping, sweeping over faces so fuckin’ dear to me, my gaze settled on the pair of true-blue eyes I’d been yearnin’ for, and everything––the guilt, the shame, the sorrow, and the wrongfulness––just fell away dead at my feet.

  Couldn’t even move with the force of it all moving through me. I just stood there while my Lou started forward, breakin’ into a sprint the way she had as a girl in a parking lot full’a bikers shootin’ at each other, just bookin’ it toward me like I was the only thing that could save her.

  And fuck, but I knew she was the only one who could save me.

  My arms opened on instinct, and I caught her easily as she hurtled through the air to wrap her entire body around mine like vines around a tree.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  I braced as emotions crashed through me with the force of tsunami waves.

  Relief, joy, and love so fuckin’ big in my chest I thought I would burst as I planted my face in all of Lou’s thick, fragrant silk hair and just fought to breathe through the mess of emotions raging through me.

  Her hands clutched at me, moving over my hair, my neck and back, up over my cheeks until she pulled my face outta her neck and held me still to rake her wet velvet gaze all over my features. Tears streamed down her cheeks; ’er eyes so blue against the flushed cheeks they looked otherworldly.

  I fisted a hand in the back’a her moonbeam hair and planted my forehead against hers just to feel ’er sweet breath against my face.

  “My Lou,” I said, voice mangled and rough with tears I wouldn’t shed.

  “Zeus,” she breathed, then choked on a sob that set her entire body to shaking. “Oh God, Z, my love, my monster, my man.”

  I sealed my mouth over hers, unable to last a moment more without ’er taste on my tongue. She cried hard into the kiss, but her arms squeezed me as tight as she could, her breasts so soft against my chest, her tears wet and salty over my lips. I wanted every inch’a her against every inch’a me because I knew she was the only fuckin’ thing that would rid every particle of that prison cell from my skin.

  “Love you so much,” she mumbled against my mouth, one hand brushin’ over my beard, then over my mouth as if she could memorize the feel of me. “Love you so much more than any words I could think to say to you.”

  “You don’t gotta say anythin’,” I assured her, tucking her head against my neck so I could hug her tight. “I got you just like I always got you, and I’m not fuckin’ leavin’ ever again. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” she muttered between pressin’ kisses to my neck. “I’ve always heard you.”

  “I know, little girl,” I said because I did. The kinda connection we shared wasn’t something that could be put into a box with words. It lived in us just as it had lived in us since I saved her as a kid, and it would live with us until the day we died.

  “The babies,” I said to her, my eyes moving over her hair to the crowd giving us a moment a few yards away. My gaze found them quick, two bright blond heads’a hair, one held by my girl Harleigh Rose, and the other by their Aunt Bea. “Fuck me, they’re big.”

  Lou laughed through her tears as she pulled herself out of my neck and smiled into my face. She’d never looked so goddamn beautiful as she did then, beamin’ into my face like I was her fuckin’ hero. “You’ll never believe how gorgeous they are, Z. Just like their Daddy.”

  “If they’re beautiful, it’s all you,” I said as I started forward, eyes pinned on my kids. “Can’t wait to meet them.”

  “I tell them about you every day,” she promised. “Their big, badass daddy with a heart purer than gold.”

  I just squeezed her closer under my arm, my voice robbed by the sight of the babies I’d been robbed of seeing for the first four months of their lives.

  It was obvious who was who, even as identical as they were. Walker was decked out in miniature biker fashion, a black AC/DC shirt worn under a leather jacket and little boots on his feet. He was silent, massive blue eyes already pale like mine or King’s, wide and watchful as I approached him. His sister, on the other hand, babbled away in a high, bright voice, one plump hand fisted in Harleigh Rose’s tee and the other reaching out for her mama and me. She had a scowl on her gorgeous face, and her darker blue eyes flashed like the inside of a flame as if she was irritated with us for taking so long to get to her.

  My heart rocketed against my ribs, threatenin’ to break them.

  “Fuck me, but they’re fuckin’ perfect,” I said as we stopped before them. My voice was ragged and torn with the emotion cloggin’ up my throat, but no one called me on it.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Harleigh Rose greeted softly, almost as if she was afraid I’d disappear if she shouted. “We missed you something crazy.”

  I opened my other arm so she could slot he
rself into my side and breathed in a deep drag’a that floral scent of hers, remembering how that very fragrance had gotten me through my first stint in the can.

  “Missed my baby girl,” I told her as I kissed her forehead. “Missed ya more ’an I can say.”

  I tried not to focus on the obvious lack of my son in the group, but I could feel it in the lopsided beat of my overfull heart. Still, I had to be strong for ’em all, at least in this first reunion.

  Later, alone with my woman and my kids, I would suffer.

  Annoyed with her lack of attention, Angel let out a shrill shriek and hit me in the chest with her little fist.

  I burst out laughing.

  When I recovered, tears gathered in the corners of my eyes, all three of my girls were lookin’ up at me with straight-up adoration that felt like a shot of Canadian whiskey to my gut, warm and fuckin’ heady.

  “Got another impatient little miss on my hands, don’t I?” I asked Angel as I ran my rough, scarred knuckle over the petal soft curve of her cheek.

  Never seen a more beautiful baby and that was the truth. Harleigh Rose’d been cute as fuckin’ could be, but there was sheer perfection in the red, curvy mouth and the huge, long lashed eyes of this golden curly-haired baby girl. I felt my heart contract as we made eye contact, and I realized my future would include being wrapped around her tiny, dimpled finger.

  “Goner just at the sight of you,” Lou murmured, fingering a lock of Angel’s golden hair. “Just like her mama.”

  “She’s a smart girl, so it went without saying she’d love you right off,” H.R. reasoned as she pressed her nose into my chest and cuddled closer. “She knows she’s got the best damn dad in the whole fuckin’ world.”

  “Could film this shit and sell it to the Hallmark Channel,” Nova called out as he pushed off the side of Lila’s VW bug and sauntered forward, snagging Walker from Bea as he did so. “’Bout cried watchin’ you guys. Really, I did. But I think it’s time to bro down for the men here who’re too insecure to shed some manly fuckin’ tears.”

  Lou and H.R. laughed somewhat wetly as they struggled through their tears, but Nova’s typical nonchalance broke the heavy silence in the lot, and everyone rushed forward to exchange hugs and backslaps with me. I tucked Walker under one arm and Angel under the other, Lou stuck to my side like a tattoo I’d never remove as I talked to my brothers, their women, and the rest of our family.

  Only when everyone was casually crowded around me, talking over each other and moving around each other in that way we did, did I notice the one person who hadn’t come forward yet.

  She stood off to the very left of the lot, her ass on the hood of her modified pink Honda Civic, arms wrapped around her legs, chin to her knees. It was a posture I’d never seen her in, bent and broken like it was a permanent thing. Her normally glossy thicket’a golden brown hair was lank and pulled into a messy bun, her clothes swallowing her both ’cause they were obviously King’s and because she’d lost a fuck ton’a weight she didn’t have to lose in the first place. Ares was with ’er, standing in front and to the side’a her like a miniature sentry. The sight of him like that reminded me of Mute, reminded me of King, the two fuckin’ incredible souls we’d lost that would’a done exactly that for that woman.

  Lou caught me looking and sighed. “I don’t know what to do anymore, Z. She just…she just can’t get it together anymore.”

  “Can’t blame her,” Harleigh Rose said from the circle of Danner’s arms, tipping her chin to say her next words to the man holding ’er. “I wouldn’t get over you, not ever.”

  Danner dipped to press a kiss to her upside-down mouth, and I blinked away the image as I looked away, not needin’ to see my baby girl in the arms of a cop, even if he was one’a the good ones.

  “How bad?” I asked.

  Lou bit her lip, and it was Priest, lingering to our right with Bea and her mum, who surprised me by sayin’, “Me bad, brother. Me when I first came to ya.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered, closing my eyes against the memory of Priest, barely a man, cut up like someone tried to make him into ribbons, eyes more haunted than the battlefield’a the Somme.

  He’d wanted to die, that boy.

  And now, apparently, Cress did too.

  I kissed Angel and blew a raspberry on Walker’s neck that resulted in a husky giggle before I passed them off to Loulou who propped them on either hip like a fuckin’ natural.

  “I got ’er.”

  She smiled at me, that secret kinda smile that was like a hand reaching through my chest to clutch at my heart and remind me it beat just for her. “I know it.”

  Tipped my chin up her and took off across the asphalt. None’a the brothers tried to stop me, which let me know just how fuckin’ bad Cress must’ve been.

  When I was a few feet out, Cress still hadn’t raised her head, but Ares stepped forward, forehead creased and arms crossed.

  It was a physical warning to be gentle with her, to treat her with care or I’d have him to answer to.

  Fuck me, but no grown man should be so moved to fuckin’ tears that many times in under an hour.

  I cleared my throat and offered him a grin. “Ares, buddy, you gonna give your ole man a hug?”

  He hesitated, eyes flickerin’ as he tried to decide between bein’ a kid or a man at that moment. But he was only nine, he had a whack’a time to grow up and not a whole lotta time left to give into the tenderness of youth, so I made the decision for ’im when I dropped to one knee and opened my arms.

  He was in ’em in three seconds, little body wrapped up tight around my own.

  I clasped the back’a his head and held on tight. When Ares gave ya affection, it wasn’t somethin’ to squander.

  “They missed you,” he whispered in my air, his thick Spanish accent somethin’ I hadn’t even realized I’d craved until I heard it again. Seemed to me, I’d left five kids on the outside, Ares included.

  “Missed them. Missed you,” I admitted.

  “Were you scared?”

  “Nah, not of anyone inside. They were all scared’a the big, bad Zeus Garro,” I teased as I pulled back to look at his face.

  He grinned slightly. “Everyone should be scared of you.”

  “Not you,” I reminded ’im. “Not them.” I indicated the family gathered in the parking lot of the prison like it was an average fuckin’ family reunion.

  “Nah,” he agreed. “You’re a teddy bear for us.”

  The laughter felt good in my throat after months of disuse, so I laughed even harder just to feel it move through me. “Yeah, kid.” I ruffled his hair and stood. “Great big teddy, that’s fuckin’ me.”

  His big grin faded as I looked over him at Cressida and he said quietly, in a voice more fearful than I’d ever heard from ’im and that included when he found ’im lost and alone squatting in my cabin. “Please, help her.”

  I tipped my chin at him and squeezed his shoulder as I moved passed and finally arrived in front’a my son’s girl.

  She stirred, liftin’ her head so those long lashed, pretty as hell brown eyes met mine. They weren’t so pretty then. In fact, they were fuckin’ dead.

  “Z,” she said on a tremblin’ breath. “Don’t touch me.”

  I cocked my head. “Gotta give my girl a hug.”

  “You touch me now,” she warned. “I’ll shatter like a glass in your hands, I swear.”

  “Teach,” I said gently, but she shook her head.

  “I’m not a teacher anymore,” she reminded me as she always did. Then she opened her palms and looked down at them as if surprised to see them empty but for the scars Fallen enemies had put there. “I’m not anything anymore.”

  “You fuckin’ are,” I growled. “You’re my daughter-in-law, my wife and oldest daughter’s best friend, you’re the owner of the best fuckin’ bookshop in the nation, and one’a the best fuckin’ woman I’ve ever known. You’re everythin’ and just ’cause my boy isn’t ’ere anymore to fuckin’ prove it to
you every single fuckin’ day in the way only he could doesn’t make it any less true, yeah?”

  Ares moved closer, takin’ up Cress’s hand and shootin’ me a look that said he wasn’t hot on my aggressive stance.

  “You remember when Loulou was sick? How crushed up inside you felt? How you felt like you couldn’t even breathe?” she asked. “I can’t breathe, Z. I can’t fucking breathe without him. Do you get me? I. Cannot. Breathe.”

  She started gaspin’, tryin’ to swallow back the tears that permanently haunted her.

  “I’m touchin’ ya,” I warned as I reached out to pull her into a hug.

  I could feel the bones in her body, achingly close to the skin and I wondered how much she was eatin’, sleepin’, then decided she’d be livin’ with Lou and me until we could get her properly sorted out.

  Despite her warnin’, she didn’t cry when I held her. Instead, in a voice of pure agony, she whispered, “I’m so angry, Zeus. So angry, I can’t breathe. So sad, I can’t breathe. Air doesn’t do anything for me anymore except make me cry every time I take it in.”

  “So cry,” I said. “Cry as much as you fuckin’ want, Cress. We got arms enough to hold ya and hands enough to dry your face when’re you done. King didn’t just give ya his heart, you get me? He gave you all’a ours too, and there’s a no-return policy. You gotta let us love you now even when the thought’a love makes you want to wail in agony. You gotta let us do that, yeah?”

  She sniffed and held perfectly still, not embracin’ me, not even breathin’ for so long I almost shook her, and then she moved. Slowly, like a newborn calf discoverin’ its legs, Cress moved her body around mine and hugged me.

  Felt the tears soak into my shirt and let out a breath that rattled my fuckin’ lungs with relief. “We can mourn ’im together, you hear?”

  “I won’t ever get over it,” she said with such spiritual certainty I wondered if mournin’ King might become her religion.

  “Me neither. We can mourn ’im together every day for the rest of forever.”