After the Fall (The Fallen Men 4)

She nodded on the glass once, then turned and walked to the door where the guard stepped up to let her out, taking her arm as he did like some macabre father leading his bride down the aisle.

She didn’t look at me before she left, but I knew the vision’a her with dead eyes in that white dress would haunt me until my dyin’ day.

Cressida

* * *

I’d insisted on going to tell Zeus myself. First, I’d suggested it, then when I was met with worried expressions, I’d demanded, and finally, when they’d protested, I had pulled on a tendril of the smoking wrath bubbling volcanically in my gut and screamed at them to take me to see Zeus fucking Garro.

Someone, probably Lou, had called Lysander and my boys after we’d had our interviews with the police in the early mornings of my wedding night, and it was him, Benny, Carson, and Ares who had driven with me to Ford Mountain Correctional to speak with Zeus.

It was the one solid thought in the sea of grief that threatened to suck me into its undertow, and I’d clung to it with an almost religious sort of fervor, but now I had completed the task and there was nothing left to anchor me.

“Back home, princess?” Sander asked, his big body looking fairly ridiculous folded behind the wheel of my small Honda Civic.

“No.” I didn’t want to go back to the home I’d shared with King. I didn’t know what I would do there, alone with my grief and the ghost of our memories stalking my every step. There was a small, not inconsiderable part of me that considered burning it down so I’d never have to step foot in it again.

The pile of wood was no home without my King, and I knew it wouldn’t be ever again.

Sander met my eyes in the rear-view mirror where I sat holding Ares’s hand. “Where to then? You could stand to eat. Wanna stop by Honey Bear Café and get one’a those fruity coffee drinks you like?”

“I’m not hungry.” Though, I was. Just not hungry for food. Hungry for King, for the feel of the air in the room when he entered it, electric like the hum of live wires, and his big hands on my body, gentle and rough only when I needed them to be. I was hungry for his gorgeous face, just to see it animated again, his nostrils flaring with breath, his eyes so like ice with their beautiful cracks and fissures of pale blue colour lit from within with some secret mirth.

It wasn’t a hunger that would ever be satisfied with anything less, and I wasn’t stupid enough to believe otherwise.

“Where to then?” Sander tried again, sharing a look with Carson in the passenger seat.

“The clubhouse?” Carson suggested. “Why don’t we check in on the clubhouse? Maybe start planning the funeral?”

“No!” I snapped, doused with the icy water of that reality. “No funeral. Not now.”

“Cress…” Sander started but stopped when I cut my glare to his in the rear-view mirror.

“No. No funeral. We don’t even have his body.” I’d been robbed of the opportunity to stare at him even one last time, even waterlogged from the Pacific and scored through with a bullet. “Zeus is still fucking incarcerated, and I won’t have him missing King’s funeral. Not when he’s missed so much already…”

“Okay,” Ares agreed immediately, his huge brown eyes glowing with compassion as he held my hand tightly in both of his own. “Let’s wait for Zeus.”

I smiled woodenly at him.

“You don’t have to smile for me,” he whispered, leaning close to tilt his head against my shoulder. “Know what it’s like to not want to smile.”

I rolled my lips between my teeth to seal the sob that wanted to break free. Instead, I ran a shaking hand over Ares soft, springy curls and held him to me. Benny squeezed my other hand and mirrored Ares expression so that I was bracketed by the two sweetest boys I knew.

“Let’s go to the clubhouse anyway,” Carson suggested, and I knew it was killing him that he couldn’t help me, not really. He was a man of action, not words, and there was no action to take against my grief. “Maybe there’s been news about where that motherfucking Danner Senior fled to.”

He meant it innocuously, probably. Just venting his anger for his friend’s murder, just thinking being at the clubhouse would help me heal because it was where King grew up. He didn’t mean for it to ignite in my belly like flint struck over the kindling of my helpless fury.

Danner.

The fucking son of a bitch who’d murdered the best man who had ever lived.

He was still free. Still somewhere out there living and breathing when he should dead or at the very least, locked up forever.