After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  At least now I knew it was a price I wasn’t willing to pay.

  “No,” I said slowly, rubbing at the sore spot in my chest. “I’m not exactly sure what I thought, but I wanted to reach out to tell you something.”

  “Unless it’s that you’ve finally overcome this midlife crisis, boy-toy phase you are in, then I doubt I want to hear it.”

  I winced, ignoring Benny who frowned over at the cash register as he helped a customer gift wrap one of our special editions. If he knew who I was talking to, sweet, passivist Benny Benito would rip the phone from my hands and stomp on it if it meant getting me out of this toxic conversation.

  “It’s not a phase. I’m only thirty. And King is the farthest thing from a boy toy you could ever imagine. He graduated from UBC with honours, and he’s the kindest man I’ve ever known.”

  Mum––or Phoebe, really, not Mum anymore––laughed her classy, tinkling laugh, being a bitch the way women like her were; passive aggressive, backstabbing, and manipulative.

  I found I much preferred biker bitches. They said it outright, fought about it hard (sometimes with fists), and then let sleeping dogs lie after it was aired properly.

  “He’s a good-looking boy you took advantage of as his teacher. I’m honestly surprised you weren’t prosecuted properly for it.”

  Freaking frack, but it hurt to have my mother think I was some scheming seductress, and it hurt even more she refused to see my relationship for what it was. Anger sparked in my belly and the savageness that normally lay dormant like a sleeping dragon in the pit of my gut stirred slowly into wakefulness.

  “Well, Mother, you should know that good-looking man has asked me to marry him, and I’ve agreed. We’re getting married in two months, and for one crazy moment, I thought I should let you know.”

  The plans had come together like a dream. King and I weren’t flashy people; we didn’t need an orchestra or fancy food and a ton of bling to make our wedding special. Instead, we were having a massive potluck with all the Old Ladies bringing the food, Eugene playing the piano for the processional, and then Curtains DJing the reception. We would get married on our property, amid the hundreds-year-old trees thick as castle spires and just as magical.

  Two months. It was a quick engagement, but honestly, I would have married him tomorrow at Vancouver’s city hall. I’d even stopped taking birth control because we wanted babies, and we wanted a lot of them. I was only thirty, but I wanted to be a young mum, and King was only too happy to spend countless hours in bed with me endeavouring to give me exactly that. Those babies would probably never know their maternal grandparents and that thought did strange alchemy to my feelings about Phoebe and Peter Garrison. It changed my guilt-ridden disappointment into calcified anger.

  “I hope you aren’t expecting your father and me to attend.” Phoebe’s voice was filled with mild revulsion, and I could picture her as she was, standing with her hand on her chest like some 18th century ingénue who had been shocked to her core by a scandal. “He just received an award at the university, you know, for his commitment to education, and it would not do to have his name associated with those…animals.”

  “I guess it depends on your definition of animal, doesn’t it?” I asked, tone saccharine, belly burning. “To me, an animal is someone without the intelligence to discern right from wrong, truth from fiction. Someone who is unevolved and cruel for the sake of cruelty. Someone like you.”

  “Are we quite done?” Phoebe asked with a wan sigh as if I was a ridiculous teenager acting out because she wouldn’t extend my curfew.

  “Yeah,” I said, suddenly filled with a bone-deep weariness because I knew whatever love she’d harboured for me was based on a sense of societal obligation—the way she felt a mother must love a daughter—and not on anything real like who I was as a person. “Yeah, Phoebe, we’re done. I won’t bother you again.”

  “I’d prefer it. We both consider ourselves childless now. It’s for the best.”

  Agony blew straight through me like a cold wind off the coastal cliffs, and I shivered violently as I hung up the phone and tossed it, a little too forcefully, to the window seat beside me. I closed my eyes, hugged my knees to my chest, and let my head drop back against the wall, trying to breathe through the pain as I compartmentalized it.

  I took a moment to text King, who was working at Hephaestus Auto that day, to tell him what happened, and in typical fashion, he sent me back something both simple and profound.

  King: Family isn’t in the blood.

  It’s the echo of each name

  That sounds with the beat of your heart.

  I closed my eyes again, clutching that poem on my phone to my chest as I exhaled all the poison my mother had sown in my mind so I could replace it with the beauty of King and his words.

  “Appreciate now’s a fuckin’ bad moment, but I’ve been waitin’ a while, and I can’t stand here and watch her do that to you without makin’ myself known.”

  Instantly, my eyes flared open because I would recognize that voice even at a rock concert, even in gale force winds.

  My brother.

  A sob bloomed in my bruised heart and clogged my throat.

  I hadn’t seen him in ages, and he looked so much the same.

  Lysander had always been so handsome, almost too handsome once, but the time and prison had worn away that edge like waves on rock so he seemed weathered now, smoothed into something manlier than pretty. He was even bigger than he’d been after getting out of prison, so wide across the chest I doubted I could wrap my arms around him if I tried. The muscles bulging out of his tight grey tee were tatted from shoulder to fingertips in a series of images I knew depicted Greek myths, our favourites like Apollo and Adonis, Paris with his gold apple and the three goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite, and Artemis. I’d helped him pick each one, once upon a time, and to see them again made the duality of my reaction all the more intense.

  I missed him acutely. He had been my one constant growing up with my parents and William, the one person who always tried to put me first even when he wasn’t in a position to do so. He cared for me so much that he’d even gone to prison for me after killing the man who’d tried to rape me.

  He’d been my hero and my saviour until he wasn’t. Until he’d gotten in so deep with the Nightstalkers MC that he’d used my position with King to get an in with The Fallen in order to inform on them to the rival club. Until his actions had perpetuated my abduction by that club and my torture at their hands. The center of my palms still burned sometimes when I remembered the agony of being impaled by inch wide nails.

  Yes, he’d helped save me in the end.

  Yes, a year later, he’d shown up out of the blue and helped save Loulou, Bea, and Harleigh Rose from an ambush.

  But there was so much water under the bridge, the structure had collapsed, and I wasn’t sure it could ever be rebuilt.

  “Sander,” I said, noting the way he shoved a hand through his masses of hair the same honeyed brown as my own. “What are you doing here?”

  “I come here.” He cleared his throat awkwardly and shifted from one big foot to the other in a way I didn’t want to think was adorable, but was. “Come here a lot since you opened, but I try to stay outta the way.”

  “So…you stalk me?”

  “No, fuck!” His eyes, green swirled through the brown, widened comically. “Jesus, Cress, I just wanted to see ya. It’s been years, and now that I’m back in town, I couldn’t resist.”

  “Back in town?” I couldn’t help my curiosity. “You got a job?”

  His lips twisted in his short beard, and I knew it was the kind of job that didn’t require a resume. The same kind of job he’d always had.

  “Somethin’ like that. Listen, I just came because I heard about the engagement, and I wanted to say congrats. Like King a helluva lot more than that fucker William, and I’m glad as fuck you got a man like that at your side.”

  “A man like what?” I was being combative and wasp
ish, but I was tired of judgment and disappointment after speaking with my mother, and I didn’t need more family drama to get me through the day.

  “A man who’d lay down his life ’fore he ever let somethin’ happen to ya.”

  This was true. King wouldn’t let a bee sting me if he could help it, and that overprotective, alpha instinct was one of the many reasons I loved him.

  I bit my lip, studying Sander closely, noting the strain beside his eyes and the slack skin beneath them that said he didn’t sleep much or very well.

  “How are you?” I inquired. I was nervous, afraid to give him an inch when my heart yearned for a mile, and my brain knew better than to give him either.

  He seemed just as disconcerted by my kindness, and I was reminded by how utterly sweet Lysander could be beneath all that gruff and toughness.

  He perched his ass on the edge the coffee table so there was still a decent distance between us and braced his arms on his thighs. “I’m doin’ better. Sober for five years now. It’s been…a weird year. Got into some stuff I never thought I’d enjoy or even be good at, but guess life’s good that way. At surprisin’ ya when you least expect it.”

  “Preach,” I agreed, and a small part of me knew it was just to see him grin at me. “Can you tell me about it? Is it…legal?”

  His lips twisted, and I knew that even though he wanted to answer me, he wouldn’t.

  “Never mind.” I held up a hand. “I would rather you not lie.”

  “Okay.”

  We were quiet for a moment, and my eye caught on a rare shade of reddish blond hair the colour of melted down rose gold. It niggled something in the back of my memory, before the girl in question scuttled closer down the A-C fiction aisle, and I realized it was Honey Yves.

  King and H.R.’s half-sister.

  I stood before I could think and followed her, Sander behind me. She was in a dark corner at the end of the row slipping a book into the back waistband of her jeans.

  Stealing from me.

  Before I could do anything about it, Sander was striding past me, straight to her. She let out a truncated scream as he caught her arm and wrenched the book from its hiding place. He was so much bigger than her, dark and foreboding, whereas Honey was slight and utterly feminine. I was worried for one terrible moment that he would hit her.

  And then to my shock, after a moment of locked eyes, she hit him. A hard punch straight to the solar plexus that expelled a loud grunt from his chest, and then she was turning, running toward me, hair flying like a pennant in her haste for escape.

  “Wait,” I called, trying to catch her arm only to have her fling me off.

  In the light at the end of the row spilling in from the windows, I could see the bruising crawling up the side of her left cheek and jaw up into her hairline.

  Someone was clearly abusing her.

  “Wait!” I yelled after her. “Please, wait. You can have the book. Just please come back.”

  She didn’t stop to listen to me.

  In fact, she tore through the front doors too blindly, she almost ran over the two cops strolling in as if they owned the place.

  They shouted at her to watch herself, but she was gone before they could even finish their sentences.

  “Freak,” I faux-cursed under my breath, dragging a hand through my waves to try to settle myself from the calamity of the day before I faced the officers. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”

  Officer Ormand and a cop I’d never met but knew to be Officer Peters ambled over to me in tandem. I wondered idly, cruelly, if they practiced that.

  “Just checking out your new place of business,” Ormand drawled as he picked up The Prince by Machiavelli from the Recommendations display and flipped through it before deliberately dropping it to the floor.

  There was a lot I could forgive. I was a loving person, an understanding person now, if not before I’d met King, and I allowed for a lot of wrongdoings before I drew the line.

  But I could not and would not ever forgive flagrantly desecrating a book.

  I crossed my arms, cocked my hip, and raised a brow. “Well, here it is. My little corner of the literary world.”

  “Yeah.” Ormand sniffed and scratched at the razor burn on his neck as he surveyed it, noting Benny working behind the cash desk and two customers quietly talking in a corner near the cookbooks. “Your idea to start this, was it?”

  “Yes, whose else would it be?”

  I could feel Sander at my back, lingering hidden in the shelves, and noticed Benny frantically texting on his phone, knowing he was calling in the guys.

  If the cops were here, it couldn’t be good.

  “The Garros, maybe?” he suggested as Peters made his way around the store, sliding books off their shelves so they tumbled to the ground, cracking spines and bending pages.

  I started forward to stop him, but suddenly, Ormand was in my space, an iron hand shackled around my wrist.

  “He’s just doing his job. You wouldn’t want to obstruct justice now, would you, Miz Irons?” He sneered. “See, I was thinking, if this wasn’t your idea, it’d be a damn good way for The Fallen to launder money. Lots of cash moving through a quaint little bookstore like this, huh?”

  “We only just opened. It’s too soon to tell,” I said stiffly, not giving him the satisfaction of my struggle. “I assume you brought a warrant if you’re going to search the premise?”

  “Sure, sure.” He nodded and dragged me to the front desk. He leaned over to rip off a piece of paper from the receipt machine and then grabbed a pen.

  I watched as he wrote ‘WARRANT’ in block letters across the paper and then tucked it quickly into my cleavage.

  “Fuck you,” I growled, about to launch myself at him because how dare he invade my space and bully me like that.

  Only Sander was there, his hand planting in Ormand’s chest and shoving so hard he fell back against the desk.

  “Fuck off, Jon,” he snapped, looming over him. “This ain’t right, and you know it.”

  “I know shit all about it,” Ormand retorted, shoving off the desk to stand and straighten himself. “And you’d do better to get out of here while you can. Danner won’t be happy to see his pet off the leash.”

  “Fuck you. This is my sister’s store, and I am not lettin’ you vandalize it.”

  “Vandalize? We’re the police,” Ormand yelled into his face, spittle flying.

  “Vandalize?” Peters echoed from over by the couches as he produced a Swiss Army knife and stabbed into one of the cushions, carving it open until the stuffing spilled out. “Why, we’re just doing our jobs. This place is a suspected front for a criminal gang.”

  Sander stepped forward menacingly, but Ormand only laughed. “Don’t make me collar you, Garrison.”

  I didn’t need Sander to help me anyway. Instead, I stalked to the front desk, rounded it, dropped to my ass on my high heels and opened the locked box I kept under the register. When I popped back up, it was with my Sig Sauer leveled at Ormand.

  “What’re you gonna do with that, bitch? I’m a cop.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m a Garro,” I retorted. “And if you don’t get the fuck out of my store, I’m well within my right to shoot you for trespassing because that worthless piece of paper you arrogantly shoved at me was not a legal document and will absolutely not hold up in court.”

  There was a static silence, the hum of potential energy low and throbbing in the store. I could hear the two customers breathing heavily, panicked, in the back, and Benny beside me, his own hand on a knife Carson had given him for his last birthday.

  Then Peters had the audacity to kick over an entire display and grin wickedly at me. “Oops.”

  Well, if he wanted to call my bluff, I was all too happy to prove my worth.

  I cocked the gun, aimed it high at the top box of the window on the wall across the store and fired.

  Glass shattered and rained down over the seating area. The cops looked almost comically shocked by my
action, and I pressed my advantage as soon as I heard the familiar purr of Harleys approaching.

  “Get the fuck out before I shoot you or, worse, the guys get here and deal with you their way,” I threatened.

  Ormand growled like a rabid dog denied a meal and shoved passed Lysander on his way out the door, Peters following slowly, kicking at a book he’d thrown to the floor earlier.

  “We’re watching you, all of you. Just waiting for you to make one stupid move and all the cards’ll come tumbling down,” he sneered as pushed open the door and forcibly slammed it shut behind.

  The air felt thick and impenetrable as amber; Sander, Benny, and I suspended in it like bugs for a long moment before Sander broke it by turning to face me. His expression was guarded, locked and alarmed as a safe house.

  “You okay?” he grumbled.

  “I will be if you tell me you are not working for Staff Sergeant Harold Danner,” I told him as I put the safety on my gun and started to lock it back up.

  He hesitated. “Can’t do that exactly.”

  “Then I can’t tell you I’m okay. You keep pitting yourself against my family, I can’t consider you a part of it,” I said honestly.

  His sigh was ragged as he drew both hands through his shoulder-length hair and then let them drop into an open palmed shrug. “Not doin’ it to hurt you. Never do anythin’ to hurt you, and honest to Christ, Cress, I’ve only ever tried to save you.”

  “I get that you mean well…and I miss you, Sander,” I promised. “Something changes, you know where I am. But I will not associate with a man who’s actively against The Fallen.”

  “Glad you got that,” he said over the increased roar of motorbike engines pulling out in front of the store, parking illegally in their haste to get to me and make sure everything was okay.

  “Sorry you don’t,” I said softly as I turned my back on him and ran out the store toward King who was running toward me, face creased with worry and anger, arms open for me to jump into without hesitation when I started for him.

  When I thought to look around for Lysander again after kissing King and explaining what had happened to Zeus, Nova, and Bat, he was gone.