After the Fall (The Fallen Men 4)

“Oh honey,” I said, overcoming my own selfishness for long enough to wrap the burly older man in a tight hug. He smelled of gasoline and leather, and I was thrown back to those early days of loving King when he’d gotten Buck to drive me to and from work on his huge Harley. “Whatever your issues lately, there wasn’t a day that passed that King didn’t love and respect you. He just…he just wasn’t the kind to take an intellectual difference personally. You have to know he loved you.”

Buck cleared his throat compulsively a few times, trying to clear the tears. “Yeah, yeah, I guess I knew that. Just needed someone to say it, yeah know?”

“I know,” I said because I did. King had loved me with everything he had, but now he wasn’t here, so I had no one to tell me that. No matter what, knowing something and having that same thing said to you were two very different things.

“Come on, old man,” Nova said with a watered-down version of his signature movie star smile as he collected Buck and moved him away. “Let’s drink away our pain.”

“Only thing to do,” Buck agreed as they walked away over to the last dozen bikes parked on the grass beside the street.

“I’ll take the rest with me,” Zeus offered as he stepped close to my side and palmed the back of my head in one big hand in order to curl me into his chest for a hug. “You still ’ere as long as ya want, yeah?”

“I’m staying,” Ares pipped up, crossing his arms and planting his feet like a little general.

I’d forgot the mechanics of a smile, but I would have, seeing that, if I’d had it in me to try.

So Ares stayed as well as Benny, Carson, Nova, Wrath, Lysander, and Priest. They stayed as I sat at the edge of King’s grave and watched with bowed heads as I watered the wound in the earth with my tears. When I was done, eyes swollen so painfully I could barely blink, they didn’t say anything as I rounded the pit and grabbed the shovel pinned into the excess dirt. They didn’t even blink when I started digging, tossing the black soil onto the metal casket, wincing then sobbing at the hollow thwack it made against the empty coffin.

Instead, Sander disappeared for a while and then returned with more shovels, and together, the eight of us laid King to rest in his grave.

When it was done and covered, I collapsed on the soft surface, exhausted because I hadn’t slept or eaten much in weeks but relieved because I’d been the one to see his death through to the end.

One by one, the men lay with me, heads angled inward so we fanned out like a wheel. Each one of them touched me somehow—Ares with his hand in my hair, Nova with a leg draped over mine, and Benny the other, Carson with his head pressed to mine, Sander with his hand cupped under my head, and even Priest, unloving, unfeeling though they said he was, reached over his head to gently palm my cheek.

I wasn’t sure how long we laid there for, only that it grew dark and so cold I shuddered, only that Sander had to pick me up and carry me to Benny’s car to take me home.

Only that a patient, lingering photog captured a shot of us like that and printed it in the next day’s Globe & Mail with a title that went viral, “Even rebels mourn the fall of a King.”

Cressida

* * *

Life went on, but it did so with a limp, an obvious lopsidedness to everything in my life. Nothing was the same after the fall of King. For the third time in my life, I felt colossally changed, my DNA altered by the tragedy, so I felt like an entirely new human being. Loving him was the backbone of my existence.

How could I ever move on from that?

I still worked at Paradise Found with Benny and our small crew of staff every weekday, drinking my dirty chai lattes and gabbing with people over books. I still lived in my little cabin even though it echoed with a silence that rang in my ears at all hours of the day and night. I still listened to Elvis just to feel the pain flare open again in my chest, until the tears that had stopped flowing freely ran down my cheeks and purged enough of my sadness to breathe a little easier each day.

But I did not go to The Fallen compound.

Hephaestus Auto was the home of too many memories—King striding toward me in a bright white tee and grease-smeared jeans, smile wicked, confidence cocked like a weapon aimed at my heart.

The clubhouse and his bedroom where he’d first told me he loved me. That he’d rip apart the world if it wronged me.