Welcome to the Dark Side (The Fallen Men 2)

“Thought you were in a rush.”

“The day I can’t take a minute to appreciate something of beauty is the day I don’t want to be alive,” I told him primly before turning on my heel and skipping into the bathroom.

His laughter followed me.

The air smelled like sweat and popcorn, sweet and salty on my tongue as I set my voice to the chant rising over the crowd.

Griffins, Griffins, Griffins!

It was the Winter Hoops tournament; the biggest sporting event at EBA and one of the biggest in the entire province so everyone and I mean everyone was there, even my absentee parents who held court in their own private section of the stands, and my so-called boyfriend, who was the star of the show.

I shook my pom-poms along with the rest of the squad when Reece knifed into the air to intercept the opposing team’s pass and sprinted down the court, the orange ball a blur of movement under his palm. When he reared up to slam-dunk in a version of athletic poetry that took my breath away with only three seconds left on the clock before halftime, the crowd erupted into ear-splitting wails and cheers of Reece, Reece, Reece!

We sports fans weren’t a creative bunch, but we had enthusiasm.

Reece clapped hands and backs with his teammates then turned toward the stands and I knew he was coming for me.

My palms sweat against my pompoms.

It had been a week since I’d lost my cherry to the Prez of The Fallen MC.

A week of spending each night with him in his bed in a cabin he built with his own bare hands. When he’d told me that, I’d made him take off his shirt in the cold late November air and chop wood for me. I’d goaded him into it by saying I didn’t believe he’d do such a menial task himself, but really, what girl didn’t want to see her man sweaty and bare-chested chopping wood?

The cabin was more than that though. It was a chapter in the life of Zeus that I’d never known about, one that my little girl self wouldn’t have understood no matter how precocious I’d been.

It seemed my man had shit parents. Not shit like Benjamin and Phillipa with their neglect and superficiality. Shit parents like a dad who drank himself silly, couldn’t hold down a job and stole money from his mother who, on her bad days, beat her own son because she was so far past the end of her rope.

The fact that someone had beat on little boy Z made my gut churn like a violent sea and if he hadn’t assured me that they were already dead, I would have used my newly acquired gun skills to hunt them down and use them for target practice.

His uncle Crux had takin’ him in as much as a terminal bachelor VP of an outlaw motorcycle club could take a kid in. Crux, it turns out, was Eugene’s dad, which explained the similarity in size and gruff handsomeness between Zeus and the bar owner. When Zeus was old enough to move out of his parents’ house, Crux had given him the supplies and told a teenage Zeus Garro that the only way to make something out of yourself was to do it with your own bare hands.

So, Zeus had built himself a house and then he’d prospected The Fallen MC just like his uncle.

No one but Eugene and Zeus knew about the little cabin, so even though it was rustic in the extreme, three rooms with a bathroom that was seriously lacking in amenities, I loved spending my nights there.

But between spending late nights and early mornings with Zeus at the cabin, my last week of ballet classes before I’d have to stop for chemo, hanging out with Sammy and Mute, and studying for end of term finals, I hadn’t had time to see Reece.

Which meant that I’d been an ex-virgin for a week and my boyfriend still didn’t know it.

“Fucking epic, right?” he asked me with a wide, boyish grin as he scooped me into his arms and pressed a self-congratulatory kiss on my lips.

“Epic,” I breathed, because through my guilt I also felt something dangerous hit my radar.

Surreptitiously, I looked around the crowded gym over my shoulder as shivers chased themselves across my skin.

“Babe, be ready for a wild after-party when I bring this home for the team,” Reece panted in my ear before squeezing my hip and taking off after his team into the change rooms for a team chat.

I watched him go but that feeling of wrongness remained and before Cassidy, my cheer captain, could rally us for the halftime show, I ducked away into the crowds of people going to the washroom and concession.

I scanned the bleachers, trying to discern a face amid the sea of green and yellow colours supporting EBA and the red and white on Entrance Public High School’s side but nothing jumped out at me.