Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men 5)

I groaned again, this time a replete, shuddering sound like an engine out of gas.

He chuckled lightly and kiss my temple where my head lay tucked against his neck and shoulder.

“I knew,” he murmured, as if continuing a conversation we had just abandoned. “I knew about the barbed wire heart you hid in the graffiti outside the shop. At first, thought it’d be kinda funny to hide messages in the art I inked on your body too. A tongue-in-cheek kinda humor only for me. Over the years, I spent hours thinkin’ about what I’d hide next.” His fingers skittered over the peonies on my thigh, swirling over the blooms. “Hid a quote by Nabokov just here, the words makin’ up the edge of the petals. ‘she always nursed a small, mad hope,’” he quoted softly, and I felt my heart clench so painfully I wondered if it might burst.

“You knew,” I accused in a hushed voice, as if we were in a museum of memories and loud noise might get us kicked out. “You knew how I felt.”

He grinned and shrugged a shoulder that was quilted with muscle and stamped with a demonic cupid. “I knew we had a connection, somethin’ special. That you might think it was romantic ’cause you were young.”

I hit him. “Look who ended up wrong in the end.”

His chuckle was heady as pot smoke curling between us, going straight to my head. “Maybe.”

“What else?” I asked, leaning back to give him access to my entire front. “What other secrets did you hide?”

“The butterfly here.” He pressed a kiss to the purple butterfly on my right hip then licked down the line of the bone through my skin so I squirmed. “There’s really two, one hidden just behind and to the left of the first. One butterfly symbolizes strength through struggle, which you obviously know, but two?” His nose brushed over the delicate skin making me shiver. “Two means two souls together in love.”

“I just got that one last year,” I breathed, turned on by his touch, wrecked by his words.

“I loved you last year,” Nova told me with such raw honesty I flinched. “I’ve loved you since the day you stole my skateboard and bailed tryin’ to do a kickflip trick. Just somewhere along the line, probably around the time I tattooed this,” his palm slid up my belly to cover the lotus between my breasts, “that love changed, grew petals and turned into somethin’ a helluva lot bigger than brotherly affection.”

I pressed my hand over his on my sternum and blinked away the tears in my eyes.

“I love you too,” I said simply, maybe stupidly because of course, he already knew.

“I know,” he said, eyes warm like sunlight on tree bark. “Your love’s been the backbone’a my life for a long time now.”

Then he kissed me, hand splayed over my heart, lips clinging to mine, tongue plundering, and I felt flowers bloom in my chest just as I had every time he looked me, touched me, loved me in anyway over the years.

But this time I knew, Nova would never let the garden he planted in my soul go untended ever again.

LILA

There was no soft denouement after the arrest of Irina Ventura’s higher-level staff at Wet Works Production. News crews camped out in Entrance for a month, stalking Javier for answers about his missing wife. Of course, he found a way to spin it, because he was not just some thug in a suit. Javier was smart and psychotic, he had an edge over the rest of us because he was willing to go places none of The Fallen would even consider entering. Including lying about his wife being set up by her co-workers to take the fall for the sex-trafficking ring we’d busted.

Still, there seemed to be a détente between the club and the cartel. I wondered sometimes, late at night when I couldn’t sleep from the trauma cluttering my thoughts, if that détente had anything to do with me. If, perhaps, there was some kernel of truth to Irina’s heinous claims.

That maybe Javier and Ellie had been lovers for a very, very long time.

But it was a thought Nova wouldn’t let me entertain. Even if he was sleeping, which he did a lot of now that I spent every night in his bed, he stirred, woken by the energy rolling off me like an incoming storm off the ocean. He’d roll into me, settle that sweet, heavy weight between my legs and do things with his tongue that always made me forget everything, even my own name.

Then there was Dane.

He was back.

Back in Entrance, back in our lives, but not.

Bat told me it was severe PTSD from his time as a prisoner of war in Afghanistan, that it was natural he would struggle to adjust to civilian life, that he himself had struggled for years.