After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  “Promise?” she said, a hairline fraction in her mammoth control.

  “For us, babe…” She shuddered at the use of the endearment King has so often given her, but I forged on. “King’ll never die.”

  Cressida

  * * *

  It was a gorgeous summer day. The sky was cerulean blue over the brilliant green of the frequently watered grass, and the air smelled of freshly churned earth and the sweetness of damp flowers. The late summer blooms were just starting to disintegrate, littering the streets with pale masses of sunburnt petals that gathered like snow drifts. One spiraled through the air over my head as I scanned the masses and masses of black-clad gatherers collected at First Light Church cemetery to celebrate the life of King Kyle Garro.

  There were over twenty chapters of The Fallen, from all over North America and as far as the United Kingdom, who had come out to mourn the loss of the prodigal heir to The Fallen MC empire and not a one of them seemed unaffected by his passing. There were even some clubs represented that were technically unaffiliated with The Fallen—but shared no bad blood with the club—and had come to show solidarity over losing a brother and high-ranking member of the organization.

  It should have given me comfort, the sheer amount of human lives King had positively impacted, to see how well they grieved for him. It was unfair, and I tried to focus on that, but I had never felt so possessive of anything in my life. My grief was all I had left of him. I didn’t want anyone to empathise with me. It was wrong, but I hated them for their attempts to do so because there was no possible way they could understand what it was like to lose the very essence of my soul. I’d handed my heart to King and let our love mold my life like clay into something so much more than it had been before.

  Now, I was left a hollow, broken vase with nothing to fill it.

  How could anyone understand that?

  I could only withstand the comfort of Lou and Zeus, because they had lost Mute, and Harleigh Rose, because she had nearly killed her own love in order to save him. Ares too, because though he had never divulged his secrets to me, there was a great and terrifying turmoil in his young gaze, and Wrath, who was still so mired in mourning over Kylie that I wondered if he would ever recover. It wasn’t often people were given priceless gifts to know how it felt when they were irrevocably lost. I both pitied and treasured those of them who understood. It was my one small comfort.

  It was Lysander who stood at my side like a sentry, massive body inflated in a physical threat for anyone who came to pay their respects not to fuck with me. He didn’t offer me grief because he hadn’t really known King, not properly, but he offered me the kind of raw tenderness only a brother can gift, constant physical affection and knowledge that he might not know how to voice it, but he’d be there for me until the end of time.

  Rainbow, Benny, Carson, and Tayline were in a little half-moon at my back, not talking or touching, just standing in a bracket of support that made my heart ache a little less fiercely.

  The brothers made a tight circle around the gaping hole in the ground where King’s empty casket would be laid to rest, as if guarding it from the eyes of people there not privileged enough to see it. As if that wound in the earth stood for a wound at the center of all of us. And the brothers were animals in that way, in the way of not wanting their vulnerabilities exposed least someone think it stood for weakness.

  They stood with mere inches between them, silent and dry-eyed, but they were mere echoes of their normal selves; their bodies wan and aching with stillness, their features smaller and more refined when separated from their usual grins and glowers. It wasn’t raining, but they all seemed waterlogged with grief, bloated with the tears they’d never shed in front of others.

  These were men who were not unused to suffering, and they bore the way soldiers did, stiff lipped and tightly coiled around the emotions that threatened to overtake them.

  I loved them acutely as I looked on them, wishing King was there to take their emotional baggage on the way he had a knack for doing. Wishing he would climb out of that hollow casket and sling an arm around Bat as he teased Nova about his latest conquest. How those bleak expressions on their faces would break open like sunlight after a storm.

  But King’s magic was dead, gone with him to the grave, and I had no sunlight to offer them in his stead.

  Zeus did his level best to break through the heavy crush of silence and morbidity hanging over our heads when he took the podium. I tried to listen to his speech through the rush of blood in my ears, to focus on his beloved face and not that horrible wound in the ground where King’s casket lay, and finally his words sank in.

  “King would’a wanted it sunny,” Zeus started, smiling with his mouth and not his eyes. “He wouldn’a wanted it like this because he was a man who saw everything good in the world. Born with rose-tinted glasses, that kid, lovin’ life and everyone he met till they proved ’im wrong, and then if they did, he just cut ’em out and went on his merry fuckin’ way. He…” He paused and looked down at his empty hands, trying to find words there for the enormity of the emotions in his big heart. “He was just the best’a us. Can’t even take the credit really; kid basically raised ’imself and his sister, grew to be a man ’fore he could even grow facial hair.” Everyone laughed, but the sound was bruised, misshapen.

  “Grateful to everyone for comin’, for sharin’ in this with us, ’cause we got a metric fuck ton of grief, and it needs help carryin’. That said, I’m glad to carry the weight’a it for the rest of my life ’cause King was so fuckin’ worth lovin’ and knowin’. Feels like anyone who didn’t know ’im was robbed, so good a man he was, so fuckin’ beautiful, I gotta say, to have in your life.

  Not gonna stand ’ere and lie to ya. The death of a son? Not somethin’ I’ll ever recover from. Death’a two sons? I’ll be walkin’ half-dead till the reaper comes callin’ for me one day. I got my Lou and my babies, my Harleigh Rose, and my brothers and the rest of our family to get me through, but I also got this, and I wanna share it with you so maybe you can breathe a little easier…”

  Zeus looked up and directly into my eyes, his silver gaze pinning me like stakes to the ground. I couldn’t move or speak for the power of emotion shining in his rugged face.

  “Whole life, King only wanted one fuckin’ thing, kid you not, an eight-year-old with intent, he was. He wanted one thing, and that one thing was the love of a good fuckin’ woman. Well, we can breathe easier knowin’ King found that in his wife, Cressida.” His voice cracked and rumbled like the ground about to break open during a quake. A sob bubbled up in my throat and lodged behind my voice box as he thumped his chest over his heart. “He found what he loved, and I gotta believe, he’d go easier knowin’ he’d had near on five fuckin’ wonderful years livin’ out that dream with her. And I’m ’ere to say to ’im, if he can hear me in heaven or wherever the fuck only the very best’a people go, that all’a us are gonna take care of that woman, of his life purpose, until the day we all join him in the afterlife.”

  Z ripped his rage from mine like tearing off a bandage, and I flinched at the loss of his balm over my torn heart. He stepped out from the podium and moved slowly, achingly, over to the table holding the coins Bat made for Fallen funerals, big silver dollars stamped with the Fallen symbol on one side and a reaper on the other. They were payment to the ferrymen or God or Satan, whichever deity might need paying in the afterlife to ensure their brother got safely to his resting place.

  Z picked one up, held it aloft for everyone to see, and called, “King Kyle fuckin’ Garro, may the best of us rest in peace.”

  “King Kyle fuckin’ Garro,” everyone echoed, a rough roar of mostly male voices so loud they seemed to tremble the earth.

  He tossed the coin atop the coffin and then moved to me, standing so tall I had to crank my neck back to maintain eye contact. I kept it, though, because these days, my eyes said more than I was capable of communicating with words. It seemed King had owned all the good ones
, and now he was gone, so was my love of language.

  “You ready to get up there, teach?” he asked softly, not touching me because he respected how fragile I was.

  I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to speak, to purge even an ounce of the feeling inside me because sharing it seemed somehow like setting it free, and I wanted to hoard every single ounce of King I could bear to hold inside me.

  But it was King who’d taught me how to be strong and part of that was tending to the souls who cared for your own. The people swathed in black who congregated in the cemetery like a murder of ravens deserved to hear me speak about King, the person who’d loved him best and pledged to love him forever.

  So, I nodded curtly, accepted the touches on my back from the friends who supported me and let Sander and Wrath escort me to the podium and flank my sides as if I was the president of the United States with her security detail.

  Honestly, it felt good to have such pillars of strength beside me.

  “King brought me to life.” I laughed weakly, having prepared a speech but unable to remember a lick of it even though I’d been a teacher for years, and I was used to public speaking. I shrugged weakly and went with it. “It sounds so trite, but it’s true. I saw him across the parking lot of Mac’s Grocer, and my entire universe shifted, my perspective radically rearranged and suddenly I was someone else. No, not even some else…it was like finally, I was me. All the bullshit of my life, the social mores and puritanical values forced on me by my family were purged by the sight of a man-boy leaning on a motorcycle like it was his throne and the blacktop his kingdom. I knew at that moment that I would give anything to rule by his side, but I never could have known that dream would come true. I never could have known just how many times I would be called to pay the price for it.”

  I opened by palms to the group, the red web of scar tissue in the center of each hand like painted bull’s-eyes.

  “I never could have known that loving would make me strong enough to withstand anything that came for us and so much did. I gave up everything I’d ever known for him, and in exchange, he gave me an entirely new world. One we would rule over together. In the end, only death could tear us apart, and even then…” I choked on my sob and tried to block out the tears that broke through the crowd like rain from storm clouds at the provocation of my words. “Even now, King will never be dead to me because he lives inside me so vividly. King Kyle Garro was so alive that he could bring even my dead soul to life just as I know he brought life and joy and so much happiness to the broken souls of so many people gathered here for him today.”

  My hands shook as I took the folded piece of paper from my pocket, and it was only when I leaned over the podium to smooth it open and wet landed on the page that I realized I was crying despite my best efforts.

  “King was such a dichotomy. He was goodness and sin, sharp and sweet, a dream and a nightmare all wrapped up in this gorgeous package. Sometimes, I think, the depth of his own mind and heart confounded even him, and he would have to spend long hours sussing it out in his journal. He was a beautiful poet even though he didn’t share his words with most people. I want him to live on for you all just as vibrantly as he will live on for me, so I had his poems printed into books.” I paused as Harleigh Rose and Ares moved through the crowd handing out copies of the black-covered book embossed with a crown. “I called it King of Iron Hearts because King might not have been Prez of the Fallen, but he was the emotional sovereign of this group. And I’m no poet, not like him, but I added some of my own words to it because I needed a way to express just how irrevocably and unequivocally I loved my husband.”

  I sucked in a deep breath and made eye contact with Z who tipped his chin up at me, lending me his strength so I could go on.

  “I, well, I want to read you one of those poems now because there is no more poignant way to express exactly how I feel having to say goodbye to the man who made my existence a life worth living.

  No Goodbye

  * * *

  You never said goodbye

  And you always did before

  At the door to our house before

  Work with a kiss I felt in my toes.

  * * *

  You never said goodbye

  And you promised me you would

  When the day came that we went

  To sleep holding hands

  Knowing

  That we would not wake up again.

  * * *

  You never said goodbye

  And now I can’t help feeling

  That this isn’t a goodbye for good.

  * * *

  That one day when I am sitting in the kitchen

  You will come in carrying apples and tell me to

  Bake you a pie like I did that very first day

  We were in love

  I’ll have flour in my hair and juice on my cheek

  That you’ll lick off with laughing lips

  And everything will have been

  As it was before

  When you were still here.”

  * * *

  I looked up at the crowd, but there were tears so thick in my eyes they obscured my vision like funhouse mirrors. Taking a deep breath, I dashed the back of my hand over my eyes and blinked to clear my sight.

  I needed to see them as I said this last goodbye. I needed witnesses to bear the weight of the sorrow in my bones as I stepped away from the podium and walked to the edge of the grave where King’s chrome casket sat inside the earth.

  I collected one of the coins in the basket on a table beside me and flipped it between my fingers as I stared down at the empty casket and wished, just for a moment, that I would be buried there too.

  “‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven,”” I quoted from Paradise Lost. “But it was you who made this place a heaven on earth, and it will never be the same now that you’ve fallen.”

  I tossed the coin into the pit, watched as it tumbled over the smooth surface and then fell into the dark soil.

  Lou and Harleigh Rose were beside me in the next instant, wrapping their arms around me as they collected their own coins and prepared to drop them in.

  “You were king of my heart long before you were anyone else’s,” H.R. whispered as she white-knuckled the coin and stared with unseeing eyes into the pitted earth. “You kept me safe even when I didn’t want to let you. Love you, big bro.”

  Lou leaned into my side heavily as she breathed deeply through her pretty tears. “This is the second man I love who I’ve put in this earth…my only consolation is that now they’re together.”

  She tossed the coin in and then pressed a kiss to my head before going to Z, who stood off to the side looking hollow and dazed with grief.

  One by one, the brothers stepped up to toss their own coins and say words about their fallen brother. Then family went. Lila cried so hard Nova had to step forward to take her under his arm and usher her away from the grave, and Bea held her mother’s hand so tightly, it was a wonder she didn’t break bones.

  I watched them and their grief gather like a great wave off in the distance, and as more and more people emptied their sorrow into the grave, I felt it loom over me, threatening to consume me.

  “You’re stronger than you know,” Sander told me, somehow sensing I was about to break.

  “We’re almost there, Queenie,” Wrath said, stepping close so his hulking shoulder pressed into my side. “Give it a few more minutes and then it will all stop.”

  God, but I wanted it to stop.

  Witnessing how many people loved my man was not soothing. It was like a thousand javelins all impaled through my chest, fixing me to this spot even as I bled out all over my feet.

  Slowly, finally, the ceremony was over, and Zeus stepped up to invite everyone back to the clubhouse for the reception.

  I didn’t move, and no one made me. A few of the brothers rounded out the circle of loved ones barring me from well-wishers, and
they finally all dissipated. Only then did the club leave, each brother touching me in some way, trying to fill the emptiness in me with their love.

  “Gotta say it,” Buck grunted as he clamped a meaty hand over my shoulder and dipped his head down to look me in the face. “We had a bad go of it the past few months with Z locked up, butted heads ’cause I’m an old dog not likin’ new tricks…but fuck me, Cress, I loved that kid like he was my own. You gotta know how sorry I am that he might’a died not knowin’ that.”

  “Oh honey,” I said, overcoming my own selfishness for long enough to wrap the burly older man in a tight hug. He smelled of gasoline and leather, and I was thrown back to those early days of loving King when he’d gotten Buck to drive me to and from work on his huge Harley. “Whatever your issues lately, there wasn’t a day that passed that King didn’t love and respect you. He just…he just wasn’t the kind to take an intellectual difference personally. You have to know he loved you.”

  Buck cleared his throat compulsively a few times, trying to clear the tears. “Yeah, yeah, I guess I knew that. Just needed someone to say it, yeah know?”

  “I know,” I said because I did. King had loved me with everything he had, but now he wasn’t here, so I had no one to tell me that. No matter what, knowing something and having that same thing said to you were two very different things.

  “Come on, old man,” Nova said with a watered-down version of his signature movie star smile as he collected Buck and moved him away. “Let’s drink away our pain.”

  “Only thing to do,” Buck agreed as they walked away over to the last dozen bikes parked on the grass beside the street.

  “I’ll take the rest with me,” Zeus offered as he stepped close to my side and palmed the back of my head in one big hand in order to curl me into his chest for a hug. “You still ’ere as long as ya want, yeah?”