After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

  “I’m staying,” Ares pipped up, crossing his arms and planting his feet like a little general.

  I’d forgot the mechanics of a smile, but I would have, seeing that, if I’d had it in me to try.

  So Ares stayed as well as Benny, Carson, Nova, Wrath, Lysander, and Priest. They stayed as I sat at the edge of King’s grave and watched with bowed heads as I watered the wound in the earth with my tears. When I was done, eyes swollen so painfully I could barely blink, they didn’t say anything as I rounded the pit and grabbed the shovel pinned into the excess dirt. They didn’t even blink when I started digging, tossing the black soil onto the metal casket, wincing then sobbing at the hollow thwack it made against the empty coffin.

  Instead, Sander disappeared for a while and then returned with more shovels, and together, the eight of us laid King to rest in his grave.

  When it was done and covered, I collapsed on the soft surface, exhausted because I hadn’t slept or eaten much in weeks but relieved because I’d been the one to see his death through to the end.

  One by one, the men lay with me, heads angled inward so we fanned out like a wheel. Each one of them touched me somehow—Ares with his hand in my hair, Nova with a leg draped over mine, and Benny the other, Carson with his head pressed to mine, Sander with his hand cupped under my head, and even Priest, unloving, unfeeling though they said he was, reached over his head to gently palm my cheek.

  I wasn’t sure how long we laid there for, only that it grew dark and so cold I shuddered, only that Sander had to pick me up and carry me to Benny’s car to take me home.

  Only that a patient, lingering photog captured a shot of us like that and printed it in the next day’s Globe & Mail with a title that went viral, “Even rebels mourn the fall of a King.”

  Cressida

  * * *

  Life went on, but it did so with a limp, an obvious lopsidedness to everything in my life. Nothing was the same after the fall of King. For the third time in my life, I felt colossally changed, my DNA altered by the tragedy, so I felt like an entirely new human being. Loving him was the backbone of my existence.

  How could I ever move on from that?

  I still worked at Paradise Found with Benny and our small crew of staff every weekday, drinking my dirty chai lattes and gabbing with people over books. I still lived in my little cabin even though it echoed with a silence that rang in my ears at all hours of the day and night. I still listened to Elvis just to feel the pain flare open again in my chest, until the tears that had stopped flowing freely ran down my cheeks and purged enough of my sadness to breathe a little easier each day.

  But I did not go to The Fallen compound.

  Hephaestus Auto was the home of too many memories—King striding toward me in a bright white tee and grease-smeared jeans, smile wicked, confidence cocked like a weapon aimed at my heart.

  The clubhouse and his bedroom where he’d first told me he loved me. That he’d rip apart the world if it wronged me.

  It was too much.

  So, the brothers came to me, circling me like carrion over a carcass, always lurking and hovering. They meant well, I knew, but as the weeks turned into a month after the funeral and more time passed, their concern started to chafe.

  No amount of biker men could account for the loss of my biker poet.

  It was as simple and profound as that.

  The depth of my sorrow poisoned me like arsenic, making me wane and anemic, nauseated and unwilling to eat. I was wasting away physically, but I didn’t mean to, and I thought it was cruel of them to point it out as often as they did. How could I keep food down when my gut constantly tossed like the sea? My body was a storm in itself, chaotic with constant tension and bone-deep grief.

  I think they believed I’d kill myself, but honestly, I didn’t think about it. I was broken in a way I knew I’d never be fixed, but I didn’t want to die. Not yet.

  King had told me something profound when Mute died that stuck with me even through my darkest days. Even though he loved his brother enough to want to follow him to the other side of the veil, he knew that Mute wouldn’t accept him there if he went before his time.

  If Mute couldn’t live, King would do it for him.

  So, no suicide, and some days, I even mustered smiles and genuine conversations that felt like Band-Aids over bullet holes. It was a start, though, and I was determined to succeed.

  I was lucky to have so many people in my life who loved me, and I tried to focus on that.

  The veil of grief began to part like the winter fog banks dissipating under a spring thaw, and that was when I began to notice the details again.

  The sound of Loulou’s raspy laughter as she watched Zeus play with his babies, tucking each tiny human in either arm as if they were footballs. The way Harleigh Rose orientated herself around Lion whenever they were in the same space, even if they weren’t talking to each other. How Nova seemed unduly irritated and interested simultaneously in a newly single Lila, and how Lysander always hesitated before he touched me, even after weeks of seeing me nearly every day, like he was a stray cat worried I’d hit him just when he got comfortable in my space.

  I noticed too, painfully, little things King had left behind.

  An inscription in the copy of The Prince I’d given him when he patched into The Fallen, “‘Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception’ and what deception is too great a price to pay for freedom?”

  A guidebook I didn’t remember buying about Alaska, pages circled in red, inscriptions running up the margins in King’s cramped cursive. I spent hours reading it, running my fingers over the annotations, dreaming about visiting Sitka where we had once planned to go on our honeymoon.

  One day after I’d picked up Ares for school and he was doing his homework in the kitchen, he even pointed out the massive X King had crossed with the silver felt pen over Sitka on the old globe that sat on our sideboard.

  The fog cleared further when my thirty-first birthday rolled around, and I realized for the first time in exactly those words that I was a widow.

  I didn’t want to celebrate, but Loulou had packed up the twins and Ares and arrived with a lopsided cake she and Harleigh Rose had made themselves, their men following with tender hugs and eager smiles, Nova and Bat, Priest, Sander, and Cyclops with Tayline, and Rainbow after that. Benny and Carson were already in the house, having let themselves in through the side door so I could wake up to the smell of bacon cooking in the kitchen.

  Breakfast was nice, and the cake for lunch was ugly, but delicious, even though I couldn’t keep any of it down.

  I had just flushed the toilet, eyes burning with tears and stomach still churning when Lou appeared in the doorframe, her full lips rolled under her teeth.

  “Please, not another lecture on taking care of myself,” I moaned as I slapped the toilet seat down and washed my hands. “For the last freaking time, I’m not bulimic, and I’m not suicidal.”

  “No,” she agreed slowly. “I don’t think you’re either of those things.”

  I splashed cold water on my face, then frowned at the sight of myself in the mirror, shocked that I’d lost so much weight in my face and repulsed by the dead weight in my eyes.

  My gaze found Loulou’s in the reflection, and I felt my lip roll under into a pout I couldn’t control. “Look at me.”

  “I am,” she said softly. “I do.”

  “I can’t go on like this,” I admitted, staring down at my hands as they trembled, noticing my wedding rings were too loose around the base of my finger.

  “I know, babe.” She stepped farther into the bathroom and closed the door on the voices downstairs. “I can’t say I’ve gone through what you’re experiencing, but in some ways, I have. Zeus being locked up, yeah, but also, once, for a while, I was convinced I was dying, and that I’d have to leave Z behind. You have to know, from that point of view, from King’s, that I would never rest easy if I knew my loved one was suffering so much still living.”

/>   I nodded, a tear dropping to the basin. “Sometimes, I think I’m getting a little better…and then I don’t.”

  “It’ll take time,” she soothed, stepping up behind me and wrapping her arms around my waist, both her palms flat to my belly. Her eyes were soft, but somehow stern the way only a mother’s could be as she held my gaze in the mirror and said, “Think it’s more than mourning that’s got you in such an emotional tailspin, Cress. And I think you know it.”

  She splayed her hands open across my stomach, and I watched her, swallowing through the sudden desert in my throat.

  “How long have you known?” I croaked.

  “A few weeks. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be keeping your food down. At first maybe…when you were crying so hard you made yourself sick, but not now. Have you been to the doctor?”

  I sighed, my hands sliding over Lou’s so we both pressed against the life inside me. “Yeah. Too soon to tell the gender, but he or she is healthy.”

  “You need to take better care of yourself,” Lou scolded gently. “You’re growing life, Cress.”

  “Life after death,” I agreed. “I think it must have been the night before the wedding or even in the forest hours before he died.”

  “A parting gift from God, maybe,” she suggested, propping her face on my shoulder, rubbing her cheek against mine.

  I snorted. “I believe in Satan more than God at this point.”

  “From fate then.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I shifted my gaze up to hers again. “Have you told anyone else? Zeus?”

  She hesitated, brow furrowing as she sensed a shift in my intensity. “I wanted to make sure before I told him. He’s going to be so excited. Everyone will be.”

  I shook my head. “No, Lou, I don’t want them to know. At least, not yet. I need to go away for a spell and try to get my head on straight. If I’m going to be a single mother to King’s baby, I want to be a good one, the best one I can be. I need time away from this place before I can do that. It’s like living in a haunted house.”

  “So move,” she suggested immediately, arms tightening around me as if she physically couldn’t bear to let me go. “Come live with Z and me, or we can find you a new place closer to town.”

  “No. I need a vacation, and before you say you or H.R. or Ares or whoever will go with me, I don’t want them to.” I dragged in a deep breath and felt strong for the first time in a long freaking time as I said, “I knew you’d all come to me today, so I thought it would be as good a time as any to tell you. I’m going to take King’s Harley on a road trip up the coast to Alaska. It’s where we were supposed to take our honeymoon, and I just have this feeling I need to go there in order to get closure.”

  “A feeling?” She frowned. “Cress, I really don’t think a long road trip on a motorbike you barely know how to drive is a good idea when you’re pregnant and mourning.”

  I shrugged, but my eyes were hard on hers. “I don’t care. I’m a literature student, a book lover, and when I see signs, I believe they should be followed.”

  She sighed, closing her eyes as she hugged me tightly. “You helped me in high school when I needed a friend, so I’ll stand up for you know when the brothers try to crush this plan under their heels, but I really, really hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “For the first time since King died, I feel excited about something.”

  “Okay, then, okay.” She blew a strand of white blond hair out of her face and smiled. “You tell them that, and they won’t be able to say boo about it.”

  Oh, they said boo. Zeus stood so fast, he knocked a chair over, breaking the leg in the process, and Nova shouted so loudly, Ares had to cover his ears. Z almost demanded they call a Church meeting as a club to vote on it, but I reminded him I was a woman and not a member, not even really an Old Lady anymore.

  “You insult me again by sayin’ that, Cress, I get you’re hurtin’, but I won’t forgive you,” he’d growled, stalkin’ over to hold me by the shoulders. “Long as I’m on this earth, you’ll be loved by me and cherished by me, you hear? You’re family. Fuckin’ nothin’ changes that.”

  “Okay,” I agreed because I hadn’t meant to imply otherwise, but I’d grown clumsy with my words, not used to talking much since the accident. “But then as my family, you need to respect my decision to go. The funeral, it was…nice, but it wasn’t closure. I never got to say goodbye to him, and I need to try to find a way to do it.”

  “Yeah,” he’d finally said, searching my eyes, his own gone as soft as grey clouds after unleashing a storm. “Yeah, don’t like it, but I’ll find’a way to be at peace with it if that’s what you need.”

  “It is.”

  He’d nodded, and the rest of my friends had reluctantly followed his lead even though they each tried to sway me otherwise over the course of the evening.

  I had fun that night, though, relishing it in a way I hadn’t seen King’s loss because I knew it was my last night with them before I left. I played with a grumpy Walker, who everyone had officially started calling Monster, and a giggling Angel. I listened to Ares read to me from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald before he fell asleep in my bed, staying for a sleepover because he didn’t want me to be alone on my birthday.

  Sander didn’t say anything about my leaving even though I could feel his despair. We had just reconnected, but it was like two magnets meeting, straight back to the closeness we’d shared growing up but doubled because of the way he’d supported me through my grief. When everyone left with kisses and some tears and a dozen promises for me to call them every day, he lingered awkwardly in the door.

  So, I’d gone to him, wrapped my arms around his hard waist, and pressed my cheek to his chest. “Love you, big brother. Thank you for…everything.”

  That heart-wrenching moment of hesitation and then his big arms were around me, and he was squeezing me so tightly, I almost couldn’t breathe.

  When he spoke, it was in my hair, his lips pressed to the top of my head. “Know you gotta lotta people you can call if you need anythin’, but I hope you know, Queenie, that I’d be honoured to be the first person you reach out to for help if you need it. Nothin’ on this earth I wouldn’t do for you.”

  “You’ve never called me Queenie before,” I said, pulling back just enough to look up into his handsome, weathered face. “I thought I was your princess.”

  The green in his eyes glowed as he smiled a little, secret smile and bumped my chin lightly with his fist. “Doesn’t seem so fittin’ anymore. Woman I got in my arms is every inch a Queen.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath through my teeth to shore up the tears in my throat.

  “No one stronger than you,” he assured me. “Why do you think your man called you his Iron Queen? Gotta spine of steel, Cress; it’s held you strong through everythin’ so far, and I doubt it’ll let you down for the rest. You do what you gotta do to heal, and then you come home to us soon, yeah? You’ve got a whole fuckin’ town rootin’ for you here.”

  I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it was true. I had the Garros, and The Fallen, but I also had the citizens of Entrance, most of them at least, especially now that so many of the corrupt police were in the process of being put behind bars.

  Danner’s sentencing trial was set to begin in a week, and I wanted to be gone before then. I wasn’t a witness, so I didn’t have to testify, and I didn’t think I could survive the news crews and worried townsfolk showing up at my house again.

  So, the next morning, after making one last apple pie for breakfast, then eating it straight out of the oven with Ares, both of us blowing hard on our forks to cool the molten fruit, I dropped him off at school and made one more pitstop before I hit the road properly.

  I hadn’t been back to the cliff top since the incident. It was the sight of my nightmare come to life, and it felt cursed like the sight of some ancient burial ground.

  But I needed to see it.

  So, I swung my leg off King’s bike
and staggered as I tried to maneuver the heavy weight, still not completely used to the thing even though King had taught me to drive it countless times. The trail was dry, the flowers long dead from the sun roasting them through the summer, and there was already a nip in the air that said our Indian summer was over and fall was around the corner. I hugged my backpack to my chest to ward off the chill and held my breath as I finally entered the clearing over the bluff.

  It was gorgeous.

  I could picture King and Mute sitting on the terrifying edge, shooting the shit. Could see the exact spot we’d made love after he proposed to me, and the place we’d tussled, laughing and naked in the long grass off to one side.

  It was a location of memories, all the good crushed by the weight of a single tragedy.

  I moved slowly across the space until I stood on the precipice. The wind rushed over me with eager hands, tugging at my clothes and hair, igniting a shiver down my spine and stinging my eyes, but I kept them open. I wanted to memorize the texture of the froth-tipped ocean, the exact shade of its metallic sheen under the rising sun. I wanted to remember the exact angle over the curve in the bay and the height in metres from the top of the cliff to the rocks below.

  Eyes to the view, I dug through my bag and produced the glass bottle I’d prepared days ago. There was a poem inside, one of many I’d found myself writing just to feel a connection to King, just to purge myself of even an iota of the pain clogging up all my pores.

  * * *

  He is not dead.

  I love him and I wear him in my heart.

  So.

  He is not dead.

  I know him and I live out his days in my head.

  So.

  He is not dead.

  I am still alive, but half-formed because he is not here also.

  So.

  He is not dead.

  Because if he was, I would be too.

  The stages of grief: denial.