After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  He wanted war, and I knew the brothers wanted to give it to him, but I hesitated.

  Even faced with the death of my loved ones, I hesitated.

  No.

  Because I was faced with the death of my loved ones, I balked at the idea of war and all its nay casualties.

  I kept comin’ back to the principles of Machiavelli in The Prince, one quote ringin’ out louder than all the rest.

  “All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”

  I knew The Fallen has the strength to suffer, we’d done it before with Zeus imprisoned, Mute murdered, and Harleigh Rose abused and nearly lost to us.

  We could do it again.

  But at what cost?

  What if there was a steeper price to pay, but only one had to pay it?

  And shouldn’t the man to pay that toll be me? The leader, however temporary, of his people?

  I sat in the back of the van and then kept relatively quiet in Church at the compound when Bat relayed the news and Priest reported, covered in other men’s blood, that the rookie and Paula had agreed to turn on Danner. I kept quiet, as the quiet man thinks, and when I went home to Cressida at the end of the night, mornin’ breachin’ the crust of the earth and spillin’ through the streets of my gorgeous home, I had the seeds of a plan sown in my soul.

  Cressida

  * * *

  There were times King couldn’t sleep for the thoughts in his head. I would wake up in the dead of night to an empty bed knowing King was downstairs at the kitchen table, poetry-filled pages littered across the surface and the floor and ink staining the tips of his fingers and his mouth where he pulled at his lower lips as he thought.

  He’d once explained to me that poetry wasn’t an art to him, but more like a compulsion, more like breathing than anything else, a necessary extension of himself. If he let those words build up, they congealed like soup in a cold bowl, thick and gelatinous in his head, stopping up all movement. It was only when he sat with a pen in his hand, blank paper beneath, that the words heated and flowed, spilling out the tip of the pen like blood from a vein.

  I watched him from the base of the stairs the night before our wedding, back bowed, head tipped so his face was obscured by the thick, rumpled curtain of his hair.

  “Can feel you in the room with me,” he muttered after a while, extending his left hand to me as he continued to furiously write. “Come here.”

  I went to him, padding across the cool floor naked but for the shadows moving over my skin like silks.

  Four years ago, I never would have walked naked through my house alone, let alone with my partner in it, and I never would have hopped up on the table, ass to King’s poetry, legs spread so I could prop the balls of my feet on his knees, exposed and aroused by it.

  He was beautiful in the dark, illuminated only by the round, full moon beaming silver light through the windows to gild the ridges of his steep features in metallics. I traced a finger over his prominent cheekbone and tipped my head to the side.

  “What keeps my poet up tonight?”

  He stayed quiet, intensity brimming from him like a frayed electric wire. So, I picked up one of the sheaves of paper instead and softy read it aloud.

  * * *

  “I was born to the demons that hounded me.

  They wanted my submission to their corruption like blood ink on paper signed with my name.

  I could have run,

  But where is the power in that?

  Instead, I became a demon myself in order to master them all.

  * * *

  Own your demons.”

  * * *

  I looked up from the page, my heart burning like a coal stuck in the cavity of my throat.

  “What’s going on, honey?” I asked again, threading my fingers through the curls and cowlicks of his golden hair.

  I need to know the problem because whatever was stalking him, I would eviscerate. I wasn’t the woman I’d been before him, and I wasn’t the woman I was now just because of him. He was the flint that ignited the spark my soul needed to come into its own. I was strong enough now, if he needed me, to take on his burden, to fight those demons he spoke of in his poem. If he gave me the chance, I would fight and die for King…I just had to make sure if one of us ever had to be the sacrifice, it would be me and not him.

  “Talk to me,” I urged softly, tugging at his hair.

  But he didn’t speak. If anything, the static in the air increased, crackling over my skin, vibrating in the air between us.

  He planted a hand in my sternum right between my breasts and up over my heart as he dipped his head to write another poem slanted across the bottom of a page already filled with verse. I read it upside down as he wrote and tried not to cry.

  * * *

  In whatever planes of existence there are

  On any star or parallel planet

  You and I are together

  Infinitely

  Inevitably

  Because nothing makes sense

  In any language or any place

  Without our love to decode life’s purpose

  * * *

  There was some fierce formation moving through him, a weather system that could only be withstood and not evaded. He was an artist, a poet, a soul so tender and overfull with emotion that sometimes the only thing that could soothe it was a cleansing tempest rain.

  So I stopped asking questions and only offered myself, my body and my spirit, to him by lying back on the poems scattered like dry leaves across the tabletop. He moved instantly, so powerfully I was almost frightened by his verve.

  Not because he would physically harm me, but because there was such exquisite beauty to the words that spilled from the wounds he opened up within himself that I felt almost afraid of their grandness, fearful the way an acolyte might be facing their God.

  He started at the base of my collarbones, the felt tip of his silver pen soft and ticklish against my skin as he swirled the words across my flesh. I fought to keep still and silent as he owned me with his prose. He punctuated the completion of each poem with a kiss to the place he ended it, lips pressed to the underside of one breast and the tip of the other, the hollow cast beside the peak of my hip bones and the jut of my pubis before it gave way to my sex.

  I was his canvas, his muse, both helpless lying prostrate over the table and endlessly powerful because all that creative beauty was bound up in a gorgeous man who was bound up, somehow, in me.

  He didn’t stop when my front was covered from breasts to toes, a poem written across my arch and tucked up under my heel. Instead, he stepped back, breathing heavy, almost panting and painfully aroused, his cock dipping into his belly button where precum pooled like ink.

  But his arousal and my own, pooling between my thighs and staining the page beneath my bottom, smearing the ink with my wet, were inconsequential next to the raging authority of his muse.

  He caught me by an ankle, locked pale eyes with my own, and then flipped. I spun with the momentum, levering myself onto my belly so that my back and ass were exposed to his pen.

  A poem down my spine, verses caught on each vertebra, the rest branching out from my shoulder blades like wings formed by words. I felt divine, exalted by him, elevated by his worship and the ways he used words to pin down those elusive feelings that moved like midnight shadows over my soul.

  By the time he crested the twin hills of my bottom, his verve had lessened, the strokes of the pen languid, almost tired as he wrung the last droplets of passion from his heart and spilled them across my flesh.

  Abruptly, after an hour of feverish writing, he was done.

  He slumped in the chair and let his forehead fall to my thighs, his breath hot against my sensitive skin. We waited there, in the wake of magic as it slowly waned, and when he moved again, I knew
it wasn’t the muse that moved him, but the lust left in its stead.

  He tugged my ankles again, shifting me across the pages until my knees hit his thighs and my ass was canted up over the side of the table, my core exposed to his burning gaze.

  His nose went first, drawing a line from the crease of my cheek to the folds of my sex and then again on the other side. The same path followed with his thumb and then again with his tongue.

  There was no haste, only slumberous, heavy desire that pulled us deeper like a net trolling the floor of the sea.

  I gasped as he parted my wet folds with his tongue, as he sucked at my lips and swirled his tongue over my asshole. He stilled my quivering with both big palms on my cheeks, pulling me further apart for his delving tongue and industrious nose.

  When I came, I didn’t groan or thrash. It felt like sliding into warm water as it rolled through me like a curling wave. I gasped and softly breathed his name.

  It was his name that woke him up again, and he cleaned me with renewed urgency before flipping me back over. I slithered down from the table like spilled honey into his lap and braced my hands on his shoulders as he fitted me on top of his thick cock.

  The ache of him sliding inside me felt so right, the edge of pain just enough to heighten the incredible current stemming from the connection.

  I rode him softly, steadily. So slowly at first it was barely a movement, just a tilt of my hips under his hands, and then faster, rocking then crashing into the shore of his hips, my pussy leaving damp trails in the sandy hair over his groin.

  And the whole time we watched each other, caught up in the visual tangle. I watched his pupils blow wide, obliterating the normally icy blue gone liquid with lust. How his lids grew heavy and his cheeks went flush as I churned faster and faster, wringing my own pleasure from him.

  And just when I felt the crest of climax lapping at my hips, he crushed my breasts against his chest, a hand pressing me faster over his cock, the other wrapped around the back of my neck so he could haul me close and kiss me.

  “She tastes like fresh brine,” he murmured against my lips as I moved faster and faster still. “Like sea water. I’ll ride her softly, rocking, like an incoming tide.” He paused to sink his teeth into my neck, and I broke apart, shaking and gasping over him, clutching his mouth to me with a hand on his neck and the other twined deep in his hair. I felt the kick of his cock inside me, then the hot spill of cum against the entrance to my womb, and I cried out finally at the intensity of our shared climax.

  As I rode it out, he whispered the rest in my ear, “And even when she ebbs after the crest, I know she’ll flow back to me again.”

  He pulled away, framing my face in his big, strong hands, his own suffused with aching tenderness. “The sea always returns to kiss the shore.”

  He kissed me then, lips soft, tongue a lullaby soothing me from the ecstasy of my orgasm.

  I wanted to ask him what was haunting him, what demons lurked in his soul and stole his sleep, but there was something so fragile in the big, strong man who loved me that I didn’t push it. Instead, when he stood, our mouths still fused, I wrapped myself under him and let him carry me to our bed where he made love to me until the earliest hours of the morning, and then he finally fell into a deep sleep with a small smile on his gorgeous face.

  * * *

  It was strange, maybe, to visit a prison on your wedding day, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The girls, Benny, and I spent the morning in the cabin getting ready, drinking champagne and laughing about the antics of our men, but the levity flattened like stale beer when we got in the car to visit Ford Mountain Correctional.

  I wore my dress.

  Rainbow and Benny begged me not to because they feared the visit would ruin it, but Loulou and Harleigh Rose had been particularly quiet about it either way. I knew it was because they understood why I wanted to wear it, and they approved, but they didn’t want to pressure me because it was my day.

  What Rainbow and Benny didn’t understand because they couldn’t as non-members of The Fallen was that it wasn’t just my day.

  It was King’s too.

  And The Fallen’s.

  I was, after nearly five years, finally, legally and spiritually, becoming a member of their family.

  So I wore the dress even though the prison guards gave me odd looks, and I had to carefully traverse the dank halls holding the train of the gown aloft.

  It was worth it just to see Zeus Garro’s face when they opened the door for me, and I walked into the telephone bank.

  He was unutterably handsome but not at all like King’s perfectly carved and symmetrical beauty. Instead, Zeus was rough hewn and textured, made of wood instead of his son’s granite, warm and alive in a way that begged touching and holding. That great, beautiful face grew even more beautiful as he took me in standing there in the dress I would wear to marry his son.

  It was entirely lace; a thin, gauzy material that was sheer enough to cast the hint of my body beneath it but covered me from mid-shoulder to my feet where it ended in a small but whimsical train. It made me look, I thought, as if I’d wandered through an enchanted forest and got caught up in silken webbing like some ethereal being, some fairy goddess. With my hair done up in waves and braids with a gold clip like a wreath of ivy sitting at my crown, I hoped I looked as magical as King’s love made me feel.

  “Fuck me,” Zeus mouthed at me, eyes shining more than just silver, wet with happiness.

  I beamed at him, a smile so wide it hurt but still I pinned it to my face so he would know just how much it meant to me that he approved.

  When I sat down and lifted the phone, the first thing he said was, “Lookin’ at you like that makes me wish I’d been patient ’nough to get Lou a proper walk down the aisle. Women like you two were meant to be seen like this.”

  “When you get out,” I suggested. “You could have a vow renewal and do it up properly?”

  He laughed, but it was broken and bruised. “Wanna spend time with my babies and woman when I’m outta ’ere. Don’t need anythin’ distractin’ more from them. It was just nice to imagine for a second.”

  “I’m sorry you’re missing this,” I said, cutting through the fat to the heart of it. “I’m so sorry that I could cry. I really wanted to do this with you there. I wanted it with my whole heart.”

  His smile was weighted with sad appreciation. “Yeah, Cress, I know it. Thing is, and you hold this closer than your bouquet when you walk down that aisle, I’m with you there even if I’m locked up here, yeah? I’m gonna lie in my bunk, close my eyes, and I’ll picture it all as it goes down. You in that fuckin’ stunner of a dress, King lookin’ like some kind of biker prince waitin’ for you with a smile that could light up the dark, and all our family there smilin’ like loons, high on all that love in the air… Yeah, you can bet I’m there with you even if I’m locked up here.”

  Tears warmed the backs of my eyes like elements on a stove as I struggled not to lose it at the beauty of those words.

  “You know, King’s the poet in this family, but he got his enormous heart from you,” I told him. “Never known two men kinder or lovelier than you.”

  “Don’t get spreadin’ that ’round; we got reputations to uphold,” he teased.

  I rolled my eyes. “All anyone’s got to do is take one look at your behemoth self, and they’ll run terrified, don’t you worry. Anyway, I’m happy to keep the secret. It makes me feel even luckier to be one of the only souls who knows the truth.”

  We looked at each other for a long minute, but the silence felt like velvet between us. This man had looked out for me since the moment his son took an interest. He’d been my fake boyfriend, my best friend, my mentor, and now, he would be my father-in-law. It was difficult to give words to the kind of relationship I had with him because we were a modern family of jumbled ages and roles to play, but when it came down to it, Zeus meant more to me than I could ever say.

  I tried to convey that throu
gh my eyes as they glazed with tears, tried to write all those emotions in words on the screens of my irises so that he might read them and understand.

  “Yeah,” he muttered, seeing them there, getting it as he seemed to have gotten me from the very start, even when I didn’t get me. “Yeah, Cress, I know it. I gotta love for you that’s pure as your good heart, and I gotta say, for my boy? No one less than you would fuckin’ do.”

  A sob ripped like torn Velcro from the lining of my throat.

  “Gonna mess your face up,” he warned me, but he was smiling because I was too.

  “I can fix it. Honestly, I’m barely wearing any makeup because we all knew I’d cry.” I sucked in a deep breath like a drowning man given one last chance at life, trying to settle the chaos of emotions in my belly. “I just wanted to say one thing, and then I’ll go. Lou’s outside waiting for a minute to talk before we head home, but this, right now, is what I really wanted to say to you.”

  I breathed deep through the crush of feelings threatening to cave in my throat, and when I could find my voice again, I said, “I thought about asking my parents to the wedding. It was…hard not to even though I hadn’t spoken to them in years. I even reached out, you know, just to see how they were and what they thought about me getting married again.” I laughed wetly. “They weren’t thrilled, to say the least. But it was good, in a way, because I got closure. I realized that even if I had them in my life, they would be a pale imitation of the real family I’ve found with The Fallen. It’s not my dad that I wish could walk me down the aisle to the man of my dreams that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with. It’s you.”

  Zeus’s head dropped between his shoulders, his gaze trained on the linoleum counter as if it was infinitely interesting. But I heard the hiccough in his breathing, the wetness at the back of his throat as he tried to swallow his tears.