Lessons In Corruption (The Fallen Men Series Book 1)

by Giana Darling

  My intuition prickled. “You have him, don’t you?”

  King’s full lips thinned. “Yeah.”

  I nodded. “I take it he isn’t in the kitchen drinkin’ tea with the guys?”

  “No, babe, he isn’t.”

  I sighed, not sure how I felt about my brother being held at the hands of The Fallen, however badly he may have betrayed me.

  “If he hadn’t called us, I don’t know if we would have found you,” King told me as he closed the passenger door and swung me up on the hood of the car.

  He stepped between the legs I spread for him and one of his hands found its place at my neck. His thumb reached around to rub at the taped-together blade wound just under the midline of my throat.

  “He called?” I asked to pull King out of his memories and ‘what ifs.’

  He nodded. “He called just after you were taken. We knew because Benny Bonanno spotted you getting hit over the head at the gas station and called Tayline who called me. We’d barely begun to mobilize with no fuckin’ idea where to look when your fuckin’ brother calls me, tells me the Nightstalkers got you and they’re takin’ you to a warehouse off the highway behind the gas station at the base of the mountains.”

  “Why would he do that?” I asked because I didn’t have one clue how to process the information.

  “That’s what I need you to find out. We got him here, babe, for two reasons. The man’s got to pay for fuckin’ with The Fallen but more, for fuckin’ with our Queen. And we need to know what the fuck kind of game he was playing. We roughed him up but he won’t talk, he says, unless it’s to you.”

  He stared at me hard and long, his pale gaze burrowing to the heart of me. I wondered, probably because I was high on painkillers, if he found a mirror there that reflected his face back at him.

  “I’m not patchin’ in. I meant what I said to you when I was in the clink. But, babe, this is my fuckin’ world and one day, I’m gonna rule it. I need you to know what you’re getting into if you take me on.” He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to mine. “Can’t lose you, won’t lose you, but I don’t know if I can walk away from my brothers, especially after what they just did to get you home to me.”

  “I don’t want you to,” I admitted softly, pressing my own hand to the back of his neck in mimicry of his habit. “When you were lying there about to take a bullet to the head, I swore that I would kill anyone and anything that got in the way of you living, or you being in my arms every single day for the rest of our lives. It was awful but I meant it. I know I’ve told you a thousand times that I’m not the kind of woman who can deal with the MC life but I think I was wrong. Or, even if I wasn’t, I want to be that woman for you, with you. The rough and tumble Queen to your biker King.”

  His smile nearly took my sight, it was so dazzling, but I kept my eyes on it, glaring happily into the sun, uncaring if it blinded me.

  “I won’t show you anything like this again, you need to know that too. MC business is kept between brothers, and I don’t want you held accountable for anything. Unfortunately, this involves you and I need your help.”

  “I understand.”

  He pulled me fully into his arms to hug me.

  “Made from me, for me,” he murmured into my hair. “The perfect Queen.”

  I kissed him, my mouth open and soft because it hurt to kiss, but I needed to kiss him more than I cared about the pain. Gently, he pinched my chin so he could control the movement and he kissed me back.

  When we parted, I slid silently down his body and took his hand so he could lead me to the garage.

  They were in the last bay, the garage door pulled down but the industrial lights on so everything was in stark white and yellow relief. This included my brother, who was bound to a hook in the ceiling that normally hoisted cars. His hands were shackled with chains and his feet dangled just off the floor. There was blood on his face, down his throat and in the weave of his shirt. They had clearly already gone over him once or twice.

  My eyes flicked to Bat, Buck and Zeus, who stood closest to Lysander, still wearing brass knuckles that were wet with blood.

  I looked up and caught Zeus watching me, his face cruel and guarded. He was waiting for me to freak out, I realized.

  So, to prove him wrong, I turned to my brother and walked closer, aware that he watched me between the slits in his swollen face.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked simply.

  His answer was not so simple.

  “I owed them money,” he warbled through his split lip. “Lied to you about the gambling but it’s the same story. Took their money to get on my feet after getting outta the slammer and with the interest, I just couldn’t get back out from under it. I won pretty good at the races one day a while back but you needed the money for the house, so,” he tried to shrug but grimaced when the movement was cut short by the chains. “They found out you were my sister. My fault, I don’t keep much but I got that picture of you from your graduation in my wallet because I’m an idiot. They knew you were datin’ Zeus so they had an eye on you, but I was keepin’ my eye on them and they didn’t care about you in a big way.

  Then fuckin’ William. The crazy motherfucker talks to some of his fucked up clients and asks one of them to kidnap you for him. Wanted to run away with you to fucking Indonesia or some shit. The Nightstalkers heard, took the job and the ridiculous fucking payout, and decided to kill two birds with one stone. They knew you’d probably have information they could use, and if you didn’t and they ended up killing you, it would drive Zeus into making a bad mistake.”

  Wow.

  I had trouble digesting everything that he was saying, had trouble believing that my soon-be-ex-husband could ‘love’ me enough to pay for me to be kidnapped, that my brother could have kept such a massive secret double life from me.

  “Why did you need the job at Hephaestus, to spy on my friends?” I asked.

  “I told them no like six hundred times but they were having too much trouble cracking into the drug trade up here, so they got desperate and threatened me.”

  “The morning you showed up at my house,” I whispered.

  He groaned miserably. “Yeah. Decided it wasn’t worth it, involving you, but then King got involved and it was so easy. I figured I would take the job but wouldn’t give them anything important and I swear to fucking Christ, I didn’t, Cress. I would rather die than put you in danger. You know that.”

  “Do I?” I asked softly. “You killed a man for me once, Sander, but does that mean I need to forgive you for every other bad thing you ever do?”

  He was quiet. A smart move because there was nothing he could say to save himself from my condemnation.

  “They won’t kill you,” I said, gesturing to the mean looking bikers with Sander’s blood on their hands. “You’re my family and I’m theirs so they won’t kill you. What they’ll do to you otherwise, I don’t know and I don’t really care. You almost got me and the people I care about killed. I can’t—I won’t—forgive you for that. I hope you get your act together, Sander, I really do, but I don’t want to see you ever again.” I ignored the gurgle of hurt that sounded in his throat, the way he flinched so hard against his bounds that his body rocked in the air. “I’m done with people who take from me and don’t give anything back. I’ll always be thankful that you saved me, but this is goodbye.”

  Quickly, because I was aware that I was about to burst into tears, I walked forward to press a kiss to his bloody cheek. When I turned away, I moved to Zeus and wrapped him in a full body hug.

  “Thank you,” I whispered with my heart in my mouth.

  He’d stiffened at first, but at my words, his body melted slightly and a hand came around to pat me on the back. He didn’t say anything, but he was a badass biker and he didn’t have to.

  Zeus Garro had my back and now, he knew I had his.

  I didn’t look back as I collected King’s hand and walked out the door, my head held high, blood on my lips and my King at
my side.

  “A dirty Chai latte and dark roast coffee, please,” I asked the barista at Loafe Café.

  “Sure thing,” she replied with a bubbly smile.

  I returned the expression, which wasn’t difficult because these days, all I did was smile. Accepting the dark roast coffee and my change, I went to the coffee station to add cream and an unhealthy amount of sugar, then picked up my dirty Chai latte from the counter and found a table outside even though it was a cold day in late October.

  It was a gorgeous autumn afternoon in Vancouver, the grey sky the perfect backdrop to the riot of violent orange, red and yellow foliage clinging to treetops and littering the ground. The air was crisp and spiced with the sweet musk of decaying leaves that crunched underfoot. I took out my tattered copy of Paradise Lost and read while I waited.

  It wasn’t long.

  “Bone of my bone,” King murmured as his cold hands cupped my face to tilt it back for his kiss.

  I accepted his mouth with a long hum of pleasure, loving the feel of his lips on mine, loving that no one cared if I kissed him or not. Now that we were free from the chains that bound us in Entrance, I found we erred on the side of too much PDA but I didn’t really care. I’d embraced my inner biker a lot over the last six months even though, technically, King and I were not a part of The Fallen. We were just two civilian students at UBC, him in the renowned Sauder Business program and me in my Master’s English program doing my dissertation on Paradise Lost, on Satan as an untraditional hero. I drew daily inspiration from my own untraditional hero, whom I tugged closed to me by his long hair so I could deepen our kiss.

  When we broke apart, King grinned into my face. He’d grown a short beard in the time we’d been on campus and it made him look even sexier, like a lumberjack that had accidentally wandered onto campus. Women watched him wherever he went and I knew he got asked out a ton, both because he told me and because some women were ballsy enough to ask even when I was standing right next to him. If I wasn’t, King turned them down without blinking an eye. If I was, he let me sear them with my possessive wrath because my territorial behavior turned him on.

  “Good day, babe?” he asked before gently nipping my chin with his teeth.

  “Better now,” I said, shamelessly happy and unafraid to be cheesy about it.

  Like Milton once wrote about good things coming from evil, the horror of King’s arrest and my abduction had grown mild over time and the light we created together had far overcome the dark. My hands still ached when it was damp, which in Vancouver was often, but the scars had been reduced to thin pink slashes that King kissed every morning when we woke up.

  He’d obsessed over the scars until one morning that summer, he’d woken me up and dragged me to Street Ink Tattoo Parlor. Now, we had matching tattoos on the inside of our middle fingers, him a King of Hearts and me the Queen. They lined up perfectly when we linked out fingers together, which was often.

  He may have kissed the scars every morning when we woke up but his middle finger I now kissed every time after, to remind him that we were alive, free and together.

  “You ready to head out?”

  I nodded, standing up and swinging my old messenger bag over my shoulder. It was still strange to me that it held my essays and not those of my students. King caught my hand as we walked towards the parking lot and I couldn’t help myself from looking around at all the students walking by us, feeling like a child holding her first trophy. I would never get used to displaying our relationship, to holding the hand of a man who was as beautiful and magnetic as a fallen angel.

  “Did you tell Benny and Carson that we’d be back in time for their party on Sunday?” I asked when we reached his Harley.

  King nodded, handed me my helmet (a wicked cool ‘brain bucket’ that had the words ‘Property of The King’ scrawled on the back in gold script) and swung over the bike. “They know, babe.”

  “I just feel so bad that I won’t be there to help them set up,” I tried to explain as I settled behind him.

  “Babe, it’s a fuckin’ Halloween party and you already spent the last three days helpin’ ‘em decorate the house. It’s for university students, they don’t need you to set out snacks and fuckin’ fruit punch.”

  I blushed but planted my hands on my hips. “This is their first party as a couple, King. It’s important they know we support them.”

  “We see ‘em every week, babe. Think they know it.”

  Strangely, maybe, King and I had become really close with Benny and Carson, who had also moved to UBC in September to start their undergraduate degrees. They fought all the time because Carson still had a hard time being openly gay and Benny was an affectionate guy but it was clear to everyone who knew them that there was a lot of love there. They lived off campus like us, on the main level of a little bungalow with Carson’s mum living in the basement. She’d left her husband and didn’t want to be far from the son she’d neglected for the first eighteen years of his life. I was fairly close to her too, and we went to hot yoga every Sunday morning.

  I settled behind King on the bike, pressed my cheek to his chest and dragged in a deep breath of his leather, fresh air and laundry scent. We did our laundry together now and I loved the smell of that clean scent on my own clothes, but nothing was the same as taking a hit directly from the source.

  “You are such a dork,” King chuckled when he heard my deep inhale.

  “You love it.”

  “Yeup, makes me fuckin’ crazy. Don’t know what’s sexier, you in your geeky book tees or you in nothing.”

  He felt my aroused shiver against his back and laughed.

  “Dad needs us or he wouldn’ta called. Need you to be prepared for anything, yeah?” he asked after he’d sobered.

  Zeus had called in the middle of the night requesting that King come home for the weekend. It wasn’t a usual request since Zeus wasn’t a helicopter parent and he’d been really good about giving King his space from The Fallen. Still, when Zeus called, you answered. So, here we were.

  “Do you think it’s the Nightstalkers?” My scarred hands flexed involuntarily at the reminder.

  The rival MC hadn’t taken off after Luis died. They’d only regrouped, and after lying low for the summer, I had to wonder if they were making their comeback.

  “Don’t know, babe.”

  “It could just be he met a woman and he wants us to meet her?” I asked, jokingly.

  Zeus Garro did not date. Not ever.

  King snorted.

  “Maybe Harleigh Rose is dating someone and he wants us to meet him?” I hoped.

  H.R. was more beautiful every day and a fifteen-year-old girl in high school, so it would be expected for her to have a boyfriend.

  Zeus Garro did not let his little girl date. Not ever.

  “You done talkin’ crazy now, babe? Wanna get home and assess the damage myself.”

  “For now,” I muttered, but only so he would laugh again, which he did.

  “Don’t be afraid to scratch or bite,” he said, reminding me of the first time I’d climbed onto his bike, and followed him onto the Sea To Sky Highway with no idea of where he’d take me. “I’m gonna ride hard so hold on tight, Queenie, yeah?

  “Always,” I said under the roar of the engine as he pulled out of the lot.

  The End.

  See more of King and Cressida in Zeus Garro’s book, Welcome To The Dark Side, coming spring 2018.

  “Raising Hands Raising Hell Raise ‘em High”—The Wind & The Wave

  “Jailhouse Rock”—Elvis Presley

  “My Girl”—The Temptations

  “Burnin’ Love”—Elvis Presley

  “Ticking Bomb”—Aloe Blacc

  “Lovers In A Dangerous Time”—Bare Naked Ladies

  “Sail”—Awolnation

  “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked”—Cage The Elephant

  The Affair (The Evolution Of Sin #1) Excerpt

  Is a week of passion enough to warrant changing their
lives forever?

  Italian born Giselle Moore is reinventing herself for the second time in her short twenty-four years of life, trading in her bohemian artist’s life in Paris for the grit and glamour of New York City where the family she hasn’t seen in years awaits her. But before beginning her new life, she travels to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico searching for a week of relaxation and reprieve before barreling into her turbulent future.

  She never expected to meet the handsome and enigmatic Frenchman Sinclair on the plane and she certainly never would have imagined herself accepting his proposal for a week long, no-strings-attached affair. Giselle has never experienced anything as heady as Sinclair’s controlled seduction and cool yet devastatingly erotic commands and she finds herself powerless to stop the ferocity of their passions, even when she discovers he has a partner back home. The last thing she needs in her life is another complication, yet as the week wears on, she finds it surprisingly easy to relinquish control to Sinclair, a man she knows nearly nothing about. And to her horror, the one thing she promised never to submit, her battered heart, is just as easily captured in the business mogul’s unyielding hands.

  Chapter One.

  Rain pounded against the steaming tarmac and the force of the wind slapped each drop against the oval window beside my head so that the grey of the runway, the rolling clouds and the Vancouver skyline blurred into one. The rain calmed my nerves, and I closed my eyes to better hear the tap and whistle of weather outside the tin machine that had—somewhat precariously—carried me from Paris to Vancouver in just fewer than seven and a half hours. We were deplaning a third of the passengers and then refueling to make the last leg of the journey to my final destination, Los Cabos, Mexico.

  I took a deep breath and tried to focus on my happy place while the economy passengers filtered off the plane. The flight was necessary and after twenty-four years of traveling, I should have been used to the bump and grind of air travel.