After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4

by Darling, Giana

* * *

  It wasn’t about creating something pretty, so I didn’t care to cast a critical eye to the verse. I just needed to get it down on paper, to make it a tangible thing I could touch because maybe then, I could find a way to conquer it.

  I cocked my arm with the bottle in my hand back and then hurled it with all my might out into the sea and watched as it dropped, spinning, tumbling, green in the yellow sunlight over the blue waves. I’d assumed it would crash on the sharp teeth of rocks jutting up at the base of the cliffs, but it landed much farther out, settling with minimal fanfare in the waves.

  I paused, mind suspended like a sprinter set before the race, braced to explode into movement.

  And then, dangerously, I wondered.

  I thought back to the wedding after everyone had left but The Fallen and family, trying to recall who was there, searching people frantically in my mind’s eyes, grateful that years of teaching had given me a gift for remembering faces.

  No Eugene.

  King’s uncle, Kylie’s keeper, Fallen secret harbourer.

  I knew Buck, Cyclops, and Axe-Man had arrived at the bluff minutes before Danner shot King. They were testifying in court next week, and they’d all been altered by the experience, muted somehow.

  But Eugene hadn’t been with them.

  My heart started racing and I broke out in a cold, prickly sweat that made me itch from nose to toes.

  I fumbled with my phone until I found his number and pressed go.

  “Cressida?” he asked immediately, probably surprised to hear from me because we hadn’t been tight since King passed, and I was starting to question why.

  “Eugene, I decided to go…rowing off my property, and I got stuck in a riptide that took me way too far out to sea. Could you bring your boat around and pick me up? I’m too exhausted to get back myself.”

  It was early, and Eugene owned a bar so he’d probably been sleeping, but immediately he said, “Hold tight and be careful not to get too close to those rocks. I’ll be there soon’s I can.”

  I stared at the phone long after it had been disconnected, then finally put it in my backpack and sat on the cliff to wait. My blood felt fizzy in my veins, treacherously carbonated with a hope I hadn’t felt in weeks.

  I stared down the edge of the cliff, calculated the drop was somewhere around a hundred and fifty feet, and wondered idly, if it was too far a jump to survive.

  Not so idly, I decided I didn’t care.

  When I spotted Eugene’s small powerboat rounding the point, I stood and started to take my clothes off. Not all of them, just my heavy jeans and my leather jacket.

  I waved at Eugene as he drew closer, knowing he was probably scared out of his mind seeing me at the edge of the cliff.

  Or maybe not and that just proved what I was too frightened to articulate even in my thoughts.

  I thought about the leap I’d taken when I’d decided to be with King, how much blind faith I’d had in him and my feelings for him, and how I’d been rewarded tenfold for taking the chance to fall for him.

  And I’d fall for him again.

  Any time, any place, any way I could.

  “Love you,” I murmured into the wind before I sucked a deep breath into my lungs, coating them with needed oxygen, and then…

  I jumped.

  King

  * * *

  I’d always been able to find solace in nature. It might have been my poet’s heart that found the complexities of the earth profound, echoes of my own thoughts and emotions hidden in the movement of the trees and the aching crash of waves across the shore. And I’d picked a good house, a little one, on a cliff of all places just outside Sitka, Alaska, where the trees stood as sentries at my back and the ocean unraveled like a rumpled carpet at my feet. There was beauty in so much of this place, and it was one of the reasons I’d settled on it, but it did little to soothe my desolate soul.

  The woman I loved had eyes like the forest floor, dappled in golden daylight, dark with evergreens and light with spring frost. I got lost in the woods behind my house and imagined I was getting lost in the depths of her eyes.

  The sea, the sky, and the eternal sunlight of an Alaskan summer reminded me of her too, and I wrote poem after poem about the way she haunted me, but nothin’ could purge the sorrow from me.

  So I lived. If you could call it that. Chopped woods, fed the fire at night, read book after book, always returnin’ to The Prince and Paradise Lost because she’d loved those best, and at night in the darkest hours, I thought of her while I held myself in my palm and spilled across my chest. Went to the store, bought groceries, ignored the look of the cashier with red hair who wanted me too much, and went home to do it all again.

  It was borin’ as hell, but at the moments when I almost got on the shit second-hand Harley I’d bought to fix up and headed back to Entrance, I reminded myself that Zeus would be home with his babies because of my sacrifice.

  It was only a matter of time.

  And Eugene kept me updated, sendin’ old-school postcards through the mail filled with his cramped, chicken-scratch writin’ I only had a hope of decipherin’ because I’d been makin’ furniture with him for years and knew his hand.

  Danner’d disappeared after my “murder”, but he’d turned up some days later, hog-tied and beaten to a bloody pulp on the steps leadin’ to a Vancouver police station.

  Now, seven weeks later, he was finally on trial for murder, corruption, assault, and more. I had no doubt Mr. White’s firm would put him in the metaphorical ground where he belonged.

  It wasn’t right of me or fair, but I’d been hopin’ over the last weeks that Cress would’ve made sense of the clues I’d left her and found me. With the help of Uncle Eugene, I’d left a slight trail of bread crumbs, some poems well placed, a hint on the globe, and an email in her inbox advertising a vacation in Sitka. She still wasn’t with me, and I had a feelin’ I’d done a gross disservice to her grief. Even just parted from her as I was, knowin’ she wasn’t dead, I felt half sentient without her.

  I sighed gustily, then laughed, thinkin’ of my Cress and how often she sighed dramatically, even when she didn’t mean to be passive-aggressive. Closin’ my eyes, I gave up on the poem I’d been writin’ and flopped back on the grass. The warm sun glowed tangerine behind my lids, and the soft caress of the ocean breeze moved like velvet over my cheek.

  “I imagined you in a heaven looking something like this. Warmed by the sun, easy with death, writing in your journal.”

  Fuck, but I missed her voice. It was a smooth alto that pealed like bells when she laughed. It was what I almost missed the most, her laughter and makin’ her do it while she stood in my arms and frothed over with mirth.

  “Never knew when I joined you there I’d be so angry with you as I am now.”

  I frowned because in none of my imaginings was my babe mad at me. A second later, a hot splat landed on my cheek and rolled into my ear.

  It was not raining.

  My body stilled, bloated with a hope so big it seemed I would fuckin’ burst if I so much as opened my eyes.

  But I did.

  I had to.

  And when I open them, I saw the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen in my fuckin’ life, and that included the day Cress walked to me in a dress caught like dew on her skin durin’ our wedding.

  Because she was there, gilded by the sun, dripping hot rain on my face, eyes awash with tears and pain and relief so acute I felt it like a knife in my chest.

  She was there.

  “You’re lucky I love you so goddamn much,” she whispered through the pressure of tears in her throat as she cupped my face and ran a thumb along the edge of my cheek. “You’re lucky I’ve spent the last forty-eight days begging and praying to God for even one last look at your face. You’re so lucky.” A sob rolled through her painfully thin frame. “You’re so lucky you’re alive so I can’t hate you for leaving me.”

  “Cress,” I murmured, leaning up to bring her down on top
of me and then rolling over so she was pinned to the grass and her tears ran tracks down to her ears. “My Cress, my love, my Queenie, don’t hate me. Fuck, if you hated me, it’d be worse than any kinda death.”

  “You left,” she hiccoughed. “You left. You left. You left.”

  “Do you get why?” I asked softly, ready for whatever reaction she might have because I deserved it.

  I had left her, so alone and so obviously broken. Her beauty was dimmed by the grief she wore in the bags beneath her eyes and in the awful hollow of her thin cheeks and the jut of her sharp bones beneath her skin.

  The urge to cry wrapped like a hand around my throat as I looked at what I had done to her in order for us all to survive and thrive in the long term.

  “I don’t care why,” she cried, shaking her head back and forth even as she clutched at me, knuckles white in their hold against my tee, legs locked over the backs of mine. “I don’t want to care why. I want to hate you because I thought you were dead. I thought I would never hold you like this, to touch your haloed hair, and kiss your mouth and speak our secrets forehead to forehead in the middle of the night.”

  She lost the rest of her words to tears, crying so violently I worried she would choke. I sat up and tugged her onto my lap so that she could wrap herself around me like chains and lock us up tight. She seemed to find solace in that, cheek pressed to my pulse, then kiss there and tongue, eating at the beat of my heart through my skin, needin’ to feel each movement of my blood to ascertain I was truly alive.

  “I’m here, babe. I’m here,” I chanted brokenly as she cried.

  She did it long until there were more tears in her ducts, until she was so purged of sadness she felt light, almost hollow in my arms, and completely empty.

  Vowed then and there, I would only ever fill her up with love and beauty for the rest of our long lives.

  “Made you a promise a long time ago that no matter what pain and ugliness I brought to your life, I’d bring you double that in sweetness and beauty. Know right now it seems all I’ve given you is the hurt and the bitterness, but you give me a shot at it again, Cress, babe, and I promise you, there won’t be a day that goes by you won’t feel just how much I love you. Just how much I live for you. And you know, you gotta know, I’m a man who makes a promise, I’d die before I broke it.”

  “But you did die,” she murmured tiredly as she rested on my shoulder. “You died, and I actually realized what it was like to live without you. That’s the punishment God should have given Eve, to live separate from Adam, to walk the earth alone, because that is what hell is, King. To be alone without you.”

  “Never again,” I swore, so desperate for her, I couldn’t stop touchin’ her, my hand in her thick, silky hair, lips against the satin of her cheek, kissing the faint lines forming from laughter at the edge of her big, tired eyes. “You hear me? Did what I did for you even though it doesn’t seem like it. Did it for you and our family. We were never gonna be safe with Danner stalkin’ us. Never.”

  “I know,” she whispered, finally pulling away to look me in the eyes, hers stale with old pain. “I found him. I found him and beat him for what he did to you, and when I did, I saw how little he cared about what he’d done. He wouldn’t have stopped hunting us until we were dead or in prison. I know… I know you sacrificed so that everyone else wouldn’t have to.”

  “Forced that sacrifice on you too,” I acknowledged. “Can’t tell you how sorry I am for it, babe.”

  “It was living hell,” she admitted weakly, her fingers cardin’ through my hair compulsively, almost as if she thought I’d disappear if she didn’t keep hold of it. “But you’re alive. Alive.”

  “My smart girl, findin’ the clues I left for you.”

  “Honestly, I didn’t put it all together until I was about to go on a road trip to Sitka alone and stopped off at the cliff. I tossed a bottle in the ocean, and when it didn’t shatter, all the pieces of the puzzle just clicked together. Just to make sure, I called Eugene, and he brought the boat around before I jumped.”

  “What?” I growled. “Are you fuckin’ kidding me? Why the hell did you jump?”

  “Relax,” she said with an eye roll, her sass a feast for my gluttonous soul. “I survived obviously, though Eugene about killed me himself when he pulled me into the boat.”

  “It’s a fuckin’ risky jump, Cress. It was a last resort, not a fuckin’ adrenaline sport. You’re lucky Eugene was there with the boat, or you could’ve been lost in the current to the rocks.”

  “Eugene,” she said darkly, lips twisting at the sour taste of his name. “Ultimate secret keeper. Bastard for helping you and not telling me.”

  “Babe, it happened in an instant. Wasn’t exactly sure what would go down or when, but I planned it with Wrath and Eugene just in case. No way I was gonna let Dad rot in prison for a crime he didn’t commit and let my baby sister and brother be without a father like I was for too long. No way I was gonna let that motherfucker keep threatenin’ you. Not that kinda man, babe.”

  “I know,” she pouted, so damn pretty I had to suck that lip into my mouth. “But you could have told me.”

  This was the crux of it. If she couldn’t forgive me for keepin’ her in the dark, she’d be lost to me forever.

  The thought sent my euphoria crashing through the floor of my gut.

  I sank my fingers in the thick hair over her ears and held that perfect face close to mine so all she could see was me.

  “Babe, you think I haven’t been livin’ each day in a world of pain not bein’ with you, knowin’ how much more pain you must’ve been in thinkin’ I was gone to you forever, you’d be so fuckin’ wrong. But how could I have told you quicker than I tried? No way you could’a gone through with the funeral and everythin’ convincing enough to make it true.”

  “There was a part of me that didn’t believe you were dead. You didn’t feel gone, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know, Cress.” I angled my forehead against hers and breathed her so the essence of her infused my lungs, charged through my blood, and filled me up with her light. “Can’t say I made the best choice, just the only one I saw to be taken at the time. Soon’s I could get word to you without bein’ obvious to anyone keepin’ an eye on you, I did.”

  “You did,” she agreed, so tired now that her eyes kept closin’ and takin’ too long to open again. She propped her head on my shoulder and curled up like a kitten. “I don’t know if I forgive you entirely for what you did. I’m going to wear the scars on my heart for the rest of my life, and I’m probably never going to be able to let you out of my sight again. But I love you. It seems so complicated, but when it comes down to it, I love you and I want to be with you. I don’t care in what country, on what planet, in what year, or under what circumstances. I’m yours, and you’re mine.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, voice cracked right in half by the force of her words.

  “That’s it,” she mumbled. “I’ll probably be mad in the morning again, and the morning after that, and maybe after that for a long time to come, but you’re patient, and you’ll take it so I can purge it. Eventually, all that’s left will be love and no more pain. I’ll forgive you; it’s just going to take time.”

  “How can you be so fuckin’ perfect?” I breathed, shocked and humbled by the woman I was honoured enough to call my wife.

  “Not perfect, just yours. Bone of your bone,” she said, planting a hand against my ribs. “Made from you, for you.”

  “Yeah, babe,” I agreed and then lifted her head to gently lick open her mouth and take my fill.

  When I broke away, she was smiling, eyes so soft a brown they looked velvet. “So this’ll be our home until we can go back?”

  “We always wanted to come here,” I said in answer. “Seemed a good place to hide until Danner went away for more than just my murder.”

  “Anyplace is good as long as you’re in it. I’m serious about never letting you out of my sight.”

  “I’m go
od with that,” I told her, kissing her again, rolling so she was on her back, and I could move my hands over her body, feel the form I’d only been able to have in my dreams.

  When my hand skirted up her sweater over her stomach, she stopped me, pressing my palm flat to the slight curve.

  I watched as her eyes filled with tears again, and she whispered, “Was going to name him King if you were really gone, but now, we’re back to Prince.”

  Happiness like nothin’ I’d never known carbonated my blood and kicked like adrenaline through my heart.

  “It’s not the same as being at home,” she admitted with a warbled smile, “but I brought some family with me.”

  I kissed her before the last word was even fully formed, eating it off her tongue, holdin’ her so tight she could feel my bones through my skin, the race of my heart against her breasts, the relief and sadness and euphoria moving through me.

  “Love you more than my life,” I said against her mouth.

  “Yeah, honey, I think you proved that.”

  And then, like I hadn’t done in months, like I hadn’t done since I’d last seen her glorious fuckin’ face, I threw my head back and laughed.

  And Cress?

  She did it with me.

  * * *

  The end.

  Thank you so much for reading AFTER THE FALL!

  * * *

  Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men, #5) is coming next!

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  If you loved King’s poetry, check out King of Iron Hearts, the poetry collection I wrote in the voice of Kyle Kyle Garro!