Welcome to the Dark Side (The Fallen Men 2)

As soon as they left, I took a step toward Zeus, eager to thank him, wanting to touch him.

He took a huge step away from me before I could gain any ground and spun to face me. “I’m lettin’ you stay on because at least here I can keep an eye on your crazy ass, you get me? This is what you get when you flirt with dangerous men, little girl. You’re too fuckin’ young to know what you’re dealin’ with here and honest to Christ, I wish you’d go back to your pretty, ordered little world and stay the fuck outta mine.”

“Zeus,” I breathed with what little air was left in my compressed lungs.

“Got two kids already, Louise, you think I got time for a third?” he asked with a cruel raise of one scarred eyebrow.

I opened my mouth to say something but there was no air left in me, only hot blood that coursed through my veins like flames. It was impossible to believe that my saviour could so suddenly have turned into a demon.

“Believe it,” he whispered darkly, and I wasn’t sure if I’d spoken aloud or if he’d read the disillusion fragmenting the dreams at the backs of my eyes.

I watched in mute horror as he turned and walked away from me.

By the end of sixth period the next day, my hurt had calcified into something else, harder and offensive. I was spitting mad and righteous with it. If Zeus Garro thought he could just flick me away like a fucking bug, he was sorely mistaken. I wasn’t a little girl anymore and I’d made it my mandate since my diagnosis that absolutely no one could tell me what to do.

Not even my guardian monster.

Especially when he was being a fucking prick.

“You got fire in your eyes,” Reece noticed, leaning away from his position at my side so that he could push my hair behind my ear and peer at me. “What’s up?”

I chewed at my lower lip as shame swirled in my belly.

Reece and I had never talked about whether or not we were “dating”. It wasn’t so simple as that these days when there was a spectrum of togetherness that ranged from one-night stands, hook-ups, friends with benefits and “seeing each other” to the more serious stuff. I figured Reece and I were the latter of those options but seeing as how we had never rubber stamped it, I tried not to feel too guilty that I’d spent the past few weeks consumed with thoughts of another man.

“Just thinking about how excited I am for the Winter Hoops tournament next week,” I told him with a huge fake smile.

He frowned slightly because he had a good bullshit meter but talk of basketball always distracted him enough for me to get away with it. “Yeah, scouts are coming from U of T, Western and UBC.”

“That’s so great,” I said genuinely.

Reece was an amazing player and honest-to-God, the kind of boy I knew I should want. He was handsome and smart, moneyed and going somewhere bright but with that bit of an edge that made him interesting. He liked to party on Saturday nights and golf hung-over but functioning on Sundays with his father.

He was the kind of cool a normal teenage girl could hanker after safely.

Too bad I was the kind of teenage girl who dreamed of men who could murder with their bare hands, who swore like it was essential to the English language and believed in brotherhood more than the law.

Eh, everyone had their crosses to bear and I figured that was mine.

“Louise,” he called again, squeezing my bare thigh under the hem of my kilt.

“Distracted, sorry,” I murmured.

Instantly, his handsome face softened with empathy. “How’re you feeling?”

I bit my lip so hard it drew blood because his question shouldn’t have annoyed me but it did. I didn’t need or want the constant reminders, which was why I kept Loulou cancer-free. People didn’t want me to be honest about my response. Did they want to hear that it was hard to get out of bed in the morning because my body felt wrong, broken then mended in a way that meant I looked fine but couldn’t breathe right or pirouette in dance class anymore because my world didn’t stop spinning when I did?

The symptoms weren’t that bad at the moment. The one round of chemo I’d had during the summer had slowed the progress of the cancer but not stopped it, not reversed it. I was due for another, more intense, round in December and I knew it would be worse then. The shortness of breath, the itchy skin and constant weariness would be magnified by endless nausea and bone-deep aches.

So, for now, I was okay physically. I was fighting, feeling optimistic about it because that was the only way you could feel if you had a hope in hell of surviving.