After the Fall (The Fallen Men 4)
“It should scare you.” Danner stepped forward, so locked on Z that he didn’t notice the way he tightened around him, a loose noose around his neck. “Limited resources in this Podunk town had me scrambling for years, but now I have real power and money at my back.”
“Javier Ventura treatin’ you good?” I asked, noticin’ the way Danner checked me out, the shock and faint disappoint he had at findin’ me fully Fallen when he’d tried so hard to influence me to be a different man when I’d briefly lived in his home. “Must give it to you good in bed, you keep crawlin’ back in there with him even after what happened to Benjamin Lafayette and the Nightstalkers.”
“Watch yourself, boy,” he growled. “I taught you to respect your elders.”
My laugh was so hard it hurt comin’ up. “You taught me dick all. Even your son doesn’t respect you. Had to leave town because he was embarrassed to work for his corrupt daddy. I learned from him and Z what it was to be a man.”
“You’re a criminal, and your sister is a biker slut who murdered her own boyfriend,” Danner barked.
And that was it.
The elastic band of tension holdin’ us all back snapped, and we flooded over him like the cops over this hill. Zeus got there first, though. Hauled Danner up by the neck with one massive hand and kept him danglin’ in the air like a human piñata for us to take a crack at.
Harleigh Rose was the hot button, especially now after weeks of silence, after Dad had returned only days ago from visitin’ her with a scowl darker than a starless night over his face claimin’ H.R. wasn’t welcome home until she got her head outta her ass and realized where her loyalties really lay.
No matter her momentary isolation from our lives, Garros didn’t let anyone say shit about their family, and The Fallen sure as fuck didn’t let somethin’ like that pass without retribution.
“You speak’a my daughter like that one more time, don’t care who you are, don’t care if I go down for the rest’a my life, I will rip you apart with my bare fuckin’ hands.”
Cops pushed the door open, weapons drawn, compelled to check on us because of Zeus’s roar, but he didn’t stop holdin’ Danner aloft, and we didn’t stand down.
“You’re filth,” Danner managed to wheeze. “To make matters worse, the underage girls you’re using for your prostitution are dying from that shit you’re getting them hooked on. Good luck living with yourself, Garro.”
Zeus squeezed once, so tight it seemed Danner’s head would pop off, clean an’ easy like a cork from a bottle. Shakin’ his head, he tossed him to the ground and loomed over him.
“Do your fuckin’ research. ’S not us leadin’ that ring, it’s your fuckin’ buddy Ventura and his wife. For once in your small, pathetic life, get your head outta your ass,” I growled, steppin’ up beside Zeus to leer down at the villain who’d somehow givin’ half his DNA to one of my heroes. “And clear out. You’ve got nothin’ here, and this is private property.”
Priest leaned down and hauled the Staff Sergeant to his feet before he could move, but Danner pushed him off as soon as he was standin’. He straightened his uniform and tipped his chin like the haughty piece of shit he was.
Only, there was a real threat in his eyes, an edge of demented anger that had no rules or boundaries. He wanted us so badly that I wondered if he wouldn’t go to new and extreme lengths to pin us with somethin’.
Ominous premonition rolled down my spine like the warnin’ of thunder before a storm.
“Enjoy your time as free men,” he said smoothly, easily, as if he knew somethin’ we didn’t. “It won’t be long now.”
Cressida
* * *
“Mum?”
I hadn’t said the word in so long that it felt foreign to me, a dead language I wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce.
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, and then Phoebe Irons cleared her throat delicately and asked her only daughter, “Who is this?”
Not a harbinger of good things to come.
But it had been weighing on me in the weeks since the proposal. Not the radio silence that had existed between my parents and I since I divorced William and took up with King, but that I was getting married again and they didn’t know. There was some lingering sense of familial obligation, of daughterly guilt, that prompted me to pick up my cell one quiet afternoon in Paradise Found and call them.
“Your daughter, Cressida.”
“Ah, well, yes…hello.”
A shocked laugh, a single ha of disappointment, burst from my lips. “Is that really all you have to say to me after four years? Hello?”
There was a weary sigh from the other line, and I was reminded where I got my predilection for that from. How odd it was to know that I shared DNA and mannerisms with a person who would never and could never understand who I truly was aside from those commonalities.