“Get up,” I ordered, avoiding his eyes as he sat up and dragged his ass through the dirt to sit at my side.
Silence descended, the faintly buzzing static of a television with a lost signal. I propped my forearms on my raised knees and stared at the tombstone tatts on my fingers. King’s name caught my eye, etched in black on the thumb of my right hand. The ink was still fresh, so clear it jumped from my flesh like a declaration.
The King is dead.
My throat burned with that long-lost fire that had cracked through the concrete foundation I’d laid in my gut a very long time ago. It had been boiling and roiling beneath the surface since that kiss with Bea in Purgatory Motel, growing in force every single day thereafter.
Truthfully, I missed being made of fucking ice.
“Ya know, bein’ dead was no cakewalk for me either,” King finally said.
The guy couldn’t stay quiet for long.
I made a kinda grunt in my throat that wasn’t affirmation or rejection.
King chuckled slightly. “Yeah, yeah. Listen, I made the decision; I gotta live with the fallout.” He paused, turning his head to look out over the freshly sown fields of wheat. The fingers of icy wind lifted his pretty boy hair and tangled it over the stub of a pencil he wore behind one ear. “Never gonna forget the look on my old man’s face when I came back. Thought I’d been torn straight down the fuckin’ middle by the agony on his face. Gotta son now, so I can guess better what kinda fresh hell Dad was livin’ every day I was lost to ’im.”
Yeah. There was no gettin’ past the nightmarish months King’d been lost to Z and the club. Z had Harleigh Rose, Ares, Angel, and Monster, and his Loulou to keep him going, but he’d been haunted by the ghost of his firstborn in a way that made even me believe in fucking ghosts.
King dropped his head back against the bike and looked up at the heavens. The night was dark and cloud-strewn, but here and there, a glimmer of starlight pushed through its small, anaemic light.
“Missed my sister like a hole in the gut too. Missed out on the twins’ first months’a livin’, and that aches. Missed my friends. Fuckin’ longed for my brothers.” He paused, rolling his head against my bike in a way that made me want to snarl at him to take care, but the words turned to ash on my tongue when he tipped his bruising chin at me. “Missed you, Priest.”
My teeth clamped together against the surge of something rising up my throat. I tried to clear with a hard swallow and a short cough, but the feeling remained. It was as if the cancer of missing him I’d never really realized had infected me was purging itself from my body.
I fought it, angry for feeling anything, then angrier for heaping more emotion on top of that.
Then I opened my mouth, conceding defeat, and spat it out. “Feck off.”
King laughed. It was the Garro laugh, the sound that had roused me out of my stupor when I’d climbed off that freighter onto Canada soil and followed Zeus Garro for a coffee. It was that full-bellied, head lifted to the sky sound like it was some kinda offering to God, that made me realize even at seventeen, even neck-deep in trauma, that this was the kinda man anyone would follow.
His son had that laugh, and hearing it then was the final straw. I scowled at him as he laughed and flipped open my switchblade with a practiced flick of my wrist.
“I’ll gut ya, you keep laughin’ like that. ’S givin’ me a bloody headache,” I grunted.
The bastard laughed harder.
I ignored him, mostly, looking up at the stars, counting the few that sparkled in the dark. But that sound was a ribbon of silk in my bloodstream.
“Not a crime to love someone, ya know,” King said through his dissipating laughter. “Some say it’s the reason for livin’ at all.”
“We live to die.” There was no deviating from the truth of that.
“It’s not religious to think otherwise,” King poked at me.
“Religion isn’t the fuckin’ enemy,” I said, reluctant to share but irritated enough to do so anyway.
King arched a brow. “Coulda fuckin’ fooled me with the way you talk sometimes.”
“It’s the organized shit that gets me,” I muttered, staring at the edge of the blade between my hands, the way the moonlight made it iridescent like Bea’s eyes. “That shit’s been used way too fuckin’ much for evil ends. Believin’ or not believin’ in a higher power isn’t reason enough to ruin people’s lives.”
King blinked.
His shock made me seethe with bad-temperedness. Not at him, but with myself. When was the last bloody time I talked about any of this shit? The words I needed to articulate it were slow moving in my brain and thick on my tongue.