Welcome to the Dark Side (The Fallen Men 2)

I blushed fiercely and kicked Zeus’s foot as I hissed, “Z, you couldn’t have warned me that fucking Mute was, like, aware of what we were doing down there?”

He looked over his shoulder at me and laughed. “Think Mute knows about what happens between a girl looks like you and a man acts like me, Lou.”

I turned to Mute to say, “Sorry, Mute.”

His flat mouth twitched slightly as he shot me a sidelong look. “’S cool.”

Zeus pinched my ass to draw my attention to him and said, “Later, little girl. Remember why I let you come. Make sure you do it ’fore you leave here today.”

Mute cleared his throat to hide his laughter.

I glared at Z, flipped him the bird and slipped back into a line of people walking into the stands so I could rejoin my cheerleading squad. When one of the girls asked me where I’d gone, I’d told them I was feeling dizzy and needed a moment (which after that orgasm Zeus gave me, I did) and when one of my old angel friends told me she loved the shade of my new lipstick, I told her it was called Monster Red.

Zeus.

“So, who’s the girl?”

I was sittin’ in the stands pretendin’ to watch my daughter sulk in her cheerleadin’ uniform on the other side of the court, her pom-poms held in her hands like they were deadweights. She was so unimpressed with bein’ at the game but she needed extracurricular credits to graduate and it’d been too late to sign up for anything else so cheerleadin’ it was. She’d been pissed. She was a smart kid, but she wasn’t like her brother, King. She didn’t go in for books and the normal high school experience. Nah, my girl was too much like her fuckin’ mother. She liked to drink beer with men who were too old for her, make bad decisions like it was a class she was acin’ at school and disobey me at every turn.

Loved the kid, loved her more than my next fuckin’ breath, but she was a Grade-A pain in my fuckin’ ass.

Still, I was there to support ’er because that’s what Garros and The Fallen did. We went to the important things and the unimportant things because at the end of the day, the only thing you had supportin’ ya was your family and I wanted H.R. to know we had her back even when she didn’t like what she was doin’.

My boy, King, and his woman, Cressida, were with me too. I’d called King back home for Thanksgiving a few weeks before to brief him on the fuckin’ Nightstalkers but now both of ’em were on break studyin’ for university exams and they were doin’ it from Entrance. It was cool as shit that my son was the first Garro to go to university and I was proud as fuck about it but it was good to have him home. He occupied a weird space between prospectin’ the club and bein’ raised by it to be the next Prez, and things didn’t feel wholly right to me when he wasn’t a part of things.

And things were goin’ down.

So, King and Cress were back even though they’d left Entrance in a cloud of scandal, they were both back at their old stompin’ grounds supporting Harleigh Rose.

Loved ’em for it.

See, Cress had been my kid’s English and History teacher last year and they’d fallen into it together. It was complicated, as any story involvin’ a smart, mouthy woman was gonna be, but they’d ended it good and in love. Even now, King had her scarred hands in his, rubbin’ at the marks in her palms absently like he still wished he coulda changed the fact she got ’em in the first place.

So did I.

The Nightstalkers had gone after family before and it’d resulted in Cress bein’ nailed to a chair with spikes through her hands. I’d killed the motherfucker in charge of the Nightstalkers that night, stabbed him clean through the back of his fuckin’ skull. But like I’d said before, you cut off one head and three more grow back.

I was just glad as fuck that Cress was with us today, sittin’ between me and her man in ripped jeans and her signature bookish tee under a leather jacket as though she’d been born an’ raised as a biker babe.

“Zeus?” she asked, bringin’ me back to the moment. “I asked you a question.”

“You know Dad doesn’t date, Cress babe,” King said on a laugh, slingin’ an arm over her and pullin’ her even closer so she was half in his lap.

People around us watched, drawn to the leather and the confidence, the prettiness of our Cress and the fierceness of the men beside her.

People always watched and what they coveted but didn’t have the fuckin’ guts to take for themselves, they hated.