King
* * *
“Can you believe I’m fuckin’ nervous?”
Nova scoffed as he adjusted The Fallen custom cufflinks I had made and gave to the groomsmen for the wedding. “Like hell you are. Never known a man more set and willin’ to wear the noose.”
“That’s the thing, isn’t it?” I admitted, leg bouncin’ with nerves as I waited beneath the arch of blossoms and ivy at the end of a walkway strewn with white petals in our backyard. “Wanted this since I was eight and don’t care if it makes me sound like a fuckin’ girl. Always knew if I could only find the woman for me, I’d love her fiercely and forever.”
“So what’s the problem?”
I let out a sound halfway between a sigh and a growl as I raked my hands through my hair. “It’s just, fuck…can you tell me you’ve never wanted somethin’ so much that when you actually got it, the prospect didn’t fuckin’ terrify you?”
Nova stopped his fussin’ and locked eyes with himself in the mirror. A strange expression seized him, one I’d never seen before, somethin’ like yearnin’ muddied up by regret.
“Nah,” he admitted softly. “Can’t say I have.”
“I know it,” Lion Danner said even though he’d pretended not to be listenin’ as he strummed his guitar, practicin’ the song he’d sing for Cress as she walked down the aisle. “Honest to God, I feel it every day bein’ with Rosie.”
“Afraid to lose them?” Ares asked from the front row of seats where he sat and pumped his legs back and forth while he read from Paradise Lost, tryin’ to get the passage he wanted to recite perfectly memorized.
“No,” I said slowly as the pieces shifted and settled in my chest. “It’s not fear of losin’ her. That’s a fear we all got about everyone we love. It’s the fear of happiness itself. What happens to the dreamer after the dream becomes reality? Does it go on bein’ a dream forever, or do you inevitably fuck it up?”
Nova rolled his eyes and slapped me on the shoulder. “Bro, seriously, only you would get so damn melancholy and philosophic on your weddin’ day.”
I shrugged under his hand because it was true, though I wasn’t melancholy, not exactly. How could you not be contemplative on a day like today? I thought of the night before, the creative stupor I’d been in as I feverishly covered Cress from breast to feet in ink. There was somethin’ eatin’ at me that had nothin’ to do with the weddin’ and everythin’ to do with finally bein’ king of The Fallen and knowin’ what leadership and loyalty really meant.
“You mean like what happened to Adam and Eve after the fall?” Ares asked, his eyebrows screwed up as he considered my quandary.
“Yeah, bud, kinda like that.”
“I think,” he said carefully. “They lived happily ever after.”
Nova snorted, and Ares scowled at him as if mortally wounded by his lack of belief.
“Happily ever after doesn’t hafta mean nothin’ ever goes wrong,” he argued, small fists clenched. “It means you love each other through everything, the good and the bad.” He paused, hesitatin’ before looking at me. “Just like what it means to be family, right?”
Fuck, but I felt my heart in my throat as I stared at the little man with the old soul sittin’ there in a black suit with a patch on the breast that said “Best Man.” Mute would’a stood up with me in that role, and I was hesitant to ask anybody to fill it if I couldn’t have him.
But in strange ways, I thought fate had given us Ares to help ease the loss of Mute in our lives. We all needed someone with a slow-ticking, somber soul like those two to keep us honest and grounded.
Just as the eight-year-old did for a group of grown-ass men now.
“Yeah, exactly like that,” I agreed.
“I was a dick,” Nova admitted with a grimace. “Seems sometimes I don’t know how to stop. Sorry, bro.”
“No need,” I assured. “But you might wanna do some thinkin’ in that pretty head of yours, Booth, and see why it is you’re a dick more often than not. Seems to me, a happy man would have a harder time actin’ like an ass.”
“Oh, fuck off,” he muttered, and I laughed at him because it was impossible not to.
There was a rough throat clearing behind me, and I turned my head to see Wrath Marsden at the edge of the stage, hands shoved in his pockets, lookin’ like he’d lost about forty pounds since his accident, since Kylie’s murder, but the fact that he was actually outside the trailer we’d got for him to convalesce in was enough of a miracle for one day.
“Hey, man.” I walked to the edge of the stage and offered him my hand to hoist him up. “You gonna join us?”