“Read about religion to understand it. For a long fuckin’ time, it was an obsession. Thought it’d make all the shit I’d been through make sense. It fuckin’ didn’t. But I learned all religions stem from the same place, like rivers flowin’ into the sea. People gotta believe in good and bad, in justice, to get through life feelin’ like the hardship of it is worth it.”
“And you, you think it’s worth it knowin’ it just leads to death?”
Bea’s face was there, summoned unwittingly to the forefront of my mind. The curve of her heart-shaped face so small palmed by my thick, evil-doing hands. The sweet form of her pink mouth smiling that smile with the curled edges, barely parted lips, like an inhale of hope was travelling through them. Like she couldn’t bear the thought of me not touching her, nor could she resist being wholly overwhelmed by the feel of me on any inch of her.
If there was a God, it was there in the way that angel looked at me like I was salvation itself.
I didn’t respond to King.
He didn’t press.
The silence again, this time soft as velvet in the ink dark night. My ass was cold in the mud, Cal Mulligan’s blood drying tight on the skin of my neck, cheeks, and hands. But I could’ve sat there, maybe for hours. Before he’d left, King would’ve sat there with me for all of them.
He was just that kinda guy. He was drawn to the quiet dark of a person’s mind. Mute and me. The wild he’d pulled out of Cress like a black ribbon bound too tight around her soul that’d just been begging to unspool.
“Never really understood the phrase ‘see things as they are,’” King mused, looking like some Hollywood actor playing at rebellion, all that hair and that smile. If I hadn’t known the man since he was a preteen begging me to teach him how to yield a blade, I would’ve thought he was some kinda fraud. “People don’t see things as they are ’cause there’s no consensus on what the norm is. People see things as they are. Through the lens of their own bias.”
I didn’t say a word because I knew King. He’d eventually get to some kind of pivotal point.
He did so slanting me a clever-eyed stare. “Lotta people see Priest McKenna as a killer, as some kinda nightmarish monster. That’s their truth. But pretty little Bea Lafayette doesn’t see a monster when she looks at you, brother. She sees the man who makes her feel whole.
“We aren’t just the things we present ourselves as. In my experience, the true key to knowin’ someone is to watch what captures their attention. Bea might have this sunshiny disposition and wear those godawful heart-shaped sunglasses, but behind them, she’s watched you since the day she met you.” King shrugged as if he hadn’t just handed me some serious as fuck wisdom. “I’m thinkin’ that speaks fuckin’ volumes, man.”
“Already made ’er mine,” I admitted gruffly. “It’s done.”
“But you aren’t happy about it?”
“Don’t know what happiness is, really.” I tried to think of the times before it all when I’d been just a lad, when Ma and Pa, Danae and Keely were still alive. The images I conjured were blurry, distorted by time and worn pale by frequent handling. When I was at the church, those memories were the only things that kept me going. They’d long since lost their magic, and that happiness was less than a memory; it was only a scar I could barely remember receiving.
King chuckled, running a thumb against the gold wedding band on his left hand. It was thickset and ostentatious because he was proud as fuck to be the husband of a stand-up woman like Cress. As he fucking well should be. “There was a time years ago I had to give the definition’a happiness to my wife too. I’m gonna give a different one to you, now, ’cause sure as shit, you’re a different kinda soul than her.” His eyes cut to me, so light they seemed supernatural, glowing in the moon the same colour as its light. “Happiness is lookin’ into a woman’s eyes and seein’ the best version’a you reflected back at you.”
There was a cramp in my gut as if the emotion coursing through me was giving me indigestion. I gritted my teeth through the strange sensation and glared at the biker poet beside me.
“Anyone ever tell ya you’re wise for an eejit?” I asked dryly.
His chuckle was as familiar to me as the sound of my own breath. If I was the kinda man who had a best mate, King woulda been mine.
Until that moment, a small part of me had lived in fear that he’d returned from the dead wrong, a zombie like me at seventeen, like Wrath since Kylie.