After the Fall: The Fallen Men, #4 Read online

  Copyright 2020 Giana Darling

  Published by Giana Darling

  Edited by Kim Book Junkie and Jenny Sims

  Cover Design by Najla Qamber

  Cover Model Christopher Mason

  Cover Photographer Jorden Keith

  Contents

  License Notes

  Introduction

  Playlist

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Epilogue

  Welcome to the Dark Side Preview

  Welcome to the Dark Side Excerpt

  Thanks, Etc

  Other Books By Giana Darling

  About Giana Darling

  License Notes

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  * * *

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  To my sister, Gracie.

  For always believing I’d have a book published to dedicate to her one day.

  “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to the light.”

  ––John Milton, Paradise Lost

  A note to my readers:

  Please trust me to take you on this journey. It will be rough waters and placid calm in equal parts, but I promise I will get you to shore safely, if a little worse for wear in the end.

  As you know, there is much beauty to be found in pain.

  “My Babe”––Whitehorse

  “From Eden”––Hozier

  “House of the Rising Sun”––The Animals

  “Won’t Go Down Easy”––Jaxon Gamble

  “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You”––Elvis Presley

  “Good Times Roll”––The Cars

  “Dangerous”––Royal Deluxe

  “Devil’s Backbone”––The Civil Wars

  “East of Eden”––Zella Day

  “Glitter & Gold”––Barns Country

  “This Is My World”––Esterly ft. Austin Jenckes

  “Prisoner”––The Weeknd

  “Stairway to Heaven”––Led Zepplin

  “I Will Follow You Into The Dark”––Death Cab For Cutie

  “All Right Now”––Free

  “Heavy Is The Head”––Zac Brown Band ft. Chris Cornell

  “The One”–– Kodaline

  “Love Me Tender”––Elvis acoustic

  “Reasons Not To Die”––Ryn Weaver

  “Black Sea”––Natasha Blume

  “When The Pary’s Over”–– Lewis Capoldi

  “Where’s My Love”––SYML

  “I miss you”––mxmtoon

  “Brother”––Kodaline

  “Lost Without You”––Freya Ridings

  “Sense of Home”–– Harrison Storm

  “You And I”––Barns Country

  “To Be Alone With You”––Sufjan Stevens

  “Only Love”––Ben Howard

  King

  * * *

  Never thought much about dyin’. I was still a young man by anyone’s standards, only twenty-three and healthy with it, but my lack of curiosity about death stemmed more from my lifelong exposure to it than anything else. Had a father who killed his uncle in a church parkin’ lot when I was a kid, sent to the clinker for half a dime. There were guns in my house, in the clubhouse that was home to my dad’s motorcycle club, The Fallen, and guns worn on the hips of the men who hung there. Learned to shoot when I was five, how to defend myself usin’ the stick limbs of a twelve-year-old boy’s body, and how to use a knife like a fuckin’ extension of myself when Priest rolled into my life and taught me his deadly craft. Mostly, I knew death because it stole my best friend, my fuckin’ brother in everythin’ but blood, when we were still kids, still filled with hope and piss and a shit ton of vinegar.

  So yeah, I knew death, but not for myself. Never thought of it until now, but to be fuckin’ honest, I never could have known I’d be facin’ down death’s door with no chance to escape it. Suppose some would argue there was a choice; that there was choice to be had in all things.

  Only, I’d counter there was no other decision to be made for me. Dyin’ meant my dad would be free, my girl would be safe, and my family would be whole.

  How could I do anythin’ else, but die for that?

  For them?

  Yeah, that’s exactly right.

  So, I stood on the edge of that cliff that had been my place, a kinda special settin’ for so many of the greatest moments of my life, and I stared down the craggy wall of rock into the sharp rocks and churnin’ ocean below, and I braced.

  There was pure evil at my back, and only a chasm that represented an empty future without any of the people I loved before me.

  Should’ve been a sad moment, maybe, somethin’ like a tragedy. But as I heard the cock of the gun and the hard spit of the bullet from the chamber somewhere behind me, I couldn’t muster up a tear because I was only filled with hope.

  Hope that my sacrifice would ensure the happily ever after I’d once promised my woman.

  King

  * * *

  I saw her in the parking lot five years ago when I was sellin’ drugs to preppy college kids. Not the most poetic place for love at first sight, but I believed enough in fate to know you can’t choose these things.

  She was standin’ across the asphalt like a mirage in the heatwaves of the midday, late summer sun. The shine caught the long tumble of hair streamin’ down her back and turned it to burnished gold, threads of copper glintin’ in the curlin’ mass of it as if each strand was semi-precious metal. Instantly, I wanted to sink my hands into that silken cloud, fist the locks between my fingers, and tug so that those nearly purple red lips, stained like a bruised plum, would bloom open for me to pluck at and plunder. I knew how she would taste just lookin’ at her, somethin’ hot and heady, potent like whiskey.

  Even thinkin’ this, I knew she wasn’t the kinda woman to succumb to just any man’s flashy desires. She walked with a prim elegance across the lot to Mac’s Grocer as if she was a debutante about to be presented for her social inauguration, her gait liquid and posture naturally straight. There was a haughtiness to the tip of her chin, a cultivated class to her sweet, tight pencil skirt, and a blouse that should’ve been a male deterrent but wasn’t because the material was just sheer enough to promise a glimpse of the dark lace bra beneath.

  She was buttoned up, but the promise of more, of what would happen if a man like me got his hands on her and trust from her, stretched me taut as an overextended coil about to snap back.

  I wan
ted that. Her body and, almost inexplicably, her trust.

  I knew instinctively with a woman of her calibre that I couldn’t have one without the other.

  It was her I was thinkin’ about when Mute drew my attention to the yuppie as fuck college kids rollin’ outta their mint Mustang convertible and strollin’ over to buy some weed. I was thinkin’ about her, so I knew somehow when the hairs at the back of my neck stood on end that she had spotted me.

  She watched.

  She watched as I dealt with the punks who wanted a cheaper deal on grade fuckin’ A marijuana, and she watched as Mute and I waited for them to leave before we bust a gut laughin’ at their fear. We were barely eighteen, but we’d been grown in the manner of men since we were boys. We knew how to intimidate, but more, we knew how not to be intimidated, especially by things that didn’t matter like those guys’ generic, expensive ride and college educations.

  We’d been taught young about what really mattered in life.

  Family, brotherhood, loyalty, freedom.

  And love.

  Maybe none of the men who’d raised me said it explicit, but that’s what they’d taught me. It was love that made Axe-Man leave his old chapter of The Fallen MC over in Calgary and move to Entrance, B.C., and love that made Bat give up his military career to get home to his wife (even though she ended up bein’ a bitch). It was love that made my dad go to jail for years when he shoulda been raisin’ my little sister, Harleigh Rose, and me.

  Love made people do things.

  I wondered as I stared across the asphalt when I was done laughin’ and locked eyes with a waif of a woman with a fuck ton of just gorgeous hair if it was love that made me wanna cross that lot and claim her for my own.

  Name unknown, characteristics unchartered.

  I knew just by the look of her that she was it for me.

  The one.

  Romantic thoughts for an eighteen-year-old son of a notorious outlaw motorcycle club Prez, but not unusual for me.

  Born that way. Romantic as hell and desperate for a time when the girls ’round me weren’t just vapid or clingy bitches to be enjoyed for mutual pleasure before I shoved them off. Desperate for a time when I’d find the right kinda woman and know in my bones I had to make her mine.

  And I felt it, my skeleton hot and too heavy in my body, weighted with lust and words like destiny that I’d never before understood.

  Lookin’ at Cressida Irons, the woman who would become my woman despite all the obstacles, I knew she would always be fuckin’ mine.

  And me, irrevocably, fuckin’ ecstatically, hers.

  Four years after that fateful day in a grocery store parkin’ lot and I still felt electrified with my love for that woman.

  But watchin’ the professor of American Lit pace back and forth in a short tweed skirt over swayin’ hips that drew male eyes like a hypnotist’s pendulum, I found myself intrigued with her too.

  She was short, slight, but woman in all the ways that counted. The pert breasts pushin’ against the cotton button-up would perfectly fill my big hands, just as the little waist would fit under the bracket of my palms like they were made to frame them. I liked this woman’s confidence as she spoke about allegory and verisimilitude as if they were literary diamonds she wanted to collect and polish and ache over. I even liked the way she bit the edge of her lip as she listened to a student’s response to her question, as if she had to hold back her excitement physically or it would froth over like uncorked champagne.

  She was bright and intelligent and so magnetic with passion for her subject that every single student in the room was enraptured by her.

  I sat in the back row of the lecture hall with my heavy boots propped on the seat below me, a pen between my teeth to satisfy my urge to take her between my teeth, and I watched her for the entire three-hour class. When it was over, I wasn’t the only one who lingered to speak with her. There were four guys, all muscle and bravado like your typical university hotshots, and an overeager girl who swarmed the professor like moths to a flame.

  Still, I waited.

  I was good at it. A patient man since birth, which was fuckin’ good ’cause I had a sister who would try the patience of a saint and a family who regularly got up in each other’s shit in a way that could be irritatin’ as fuck.

  But I was a man who was born wanting to meet his soulmate now, and I’d waited years for that, so I could wait a while more for this professor with the prim skirt and dirty girl big hair.

  At least, I could wait until one of the punk ass kids got too close to her and smiled an inch down into her face.

  I was up outta my chair, eating up the stairs between the stage and me like they were nothin’, and then I was there, between the idiot and her.

  Her.

  My woman.

  The one I’d dreamt about since I was a fuckin’ kid but never really believed was real, because how could God or the universe or anything like it create someone so breathtakingly perfect for someone else.

  The moment I stepped into play, the air between us went electric with tension. It took strength to decide to scare off the punk ass college kid instead’a takin’ the woman I’d been lustin’ after for the past three hours into my arms in a ravagin’ embrace.

  Then I decided, what better way to stake a claim someone like that idiot would understand than to do exactly as I wanted to.

  So I stepped closer, watched her pupils blow wide and black as I slipped an arm around that little waist, and then I hauled her up against my chest so I could smile down into her face.

  “Hey, teach,” I said just to watch that blush flare up over her cheeks, but then I was done with teasin’, and my mouth was over hers.

  She was stiff at first, that split-second hesitation that lingered even after four years of livin’ a different kind of life than she had before with a totally different kinda man. The truth was, I fuckin’ loved that little hiccough of doubt, of prudishness that would never die. It was like suckin’ on an ice cube; at first, it stuck to your mouth, intractable as hell, but a second later came the melt.

  That was how it happened, the kiss then, and the kiss always, in public. She went hard, then soft in my arms, her breasts pressing against my chest, her hips curving into mine, and her hands sliding up into the back of my hair where they loved to tangle and pull me closer.

  She lost herself in me, in the texture of my hot mouth sealing over hers, in the way our bodies fit together and ignited like perfectly stacked tinder to a flame.

  You ask any man, they’ll tell you, nothin’ fuckin’ headier than that.

  When I finally pulled away, her eyes were still closed, long lashes like fans over her pink cheeks, lips damp and parted, invitin’ further plunder.

  I refrained even though I wanted to bend her over that podium and fuck her until her moans echoed in the auditorium.

  Instead, I cupped the side of her face in my big palm and grinned at her until she swam up from lusty depths and once again realized where we were. When the awareness came, she frowned puckishly at me, then shoved me away with her little hand.

  I laughed, but followed her unspoken order and put distance between us, perchin’ my ass against her desk with my arms and legs folded as I stared down the four crestfallen assholes lustin’ after my girl.

  “Whoa,” the only other girl murmured, her eyes wide and glitterin’ behind her glasses as she looked back and forth between the prof and me. “Is that your boyfriend?”

  The woman I’d just kissed senseless scrunched up her nose in an absurd and adorable expression of displeasure. She waved a hand my way and shrugged. “That’s King.”

  “Like the King?” one of the idiots asked, shootin’ me a confused glance.

  “Drake,” she reprimanded kindly. “Does he look like an aristocrat?”

  I grinned wolfishly at them and waggled my ring burdened hand at them. “At your fuckin’ service.”

  She flipped her long, thick mane of hair over her shoulder to shoot me an eye
roll, but there was a smile on her lips.

  Cressida Irons had changed in a lotta ways over the past half-decade, but she had not lost one ounce of her sass.

  “I think that’s enough for today, boys and girl. If you have any questions, you can email me or visit me during office hours, but I think you are all as prepared as you can be for finals.”

  “But I had some questions––”

  “Professor Irons said enough,” I said casually, leanin’ back on my hands so that the muscles in my arms popped into relief. “Think you’d better get goin’. Unlike you, apparently, your prof has a life outside the classroom.”

  The guy stuttered, then swallowed his pride and turned with his friends to shuffle up the stairs and out of the room. Only the girl remained, cute but way too young. She looked up at Cress like she was some kind of superhero.

  It was cute as hell, mostly because my girl was worthy of such adulation, but my patience was at its end.

  “Got an appointment we better get to,” I urged Cress.

  She cocked a hip and planted a fist on it. My cock twitched at the sight of her so prim and proper like that, buttoned up and polished as if she wasn’t secretly the dirtiest girl I knew.

  “What kind of appointment?” she demanded with a secret smile that said she was enjoying calling me on my bullshit.

  “One with our bed. Maybe the kitchen floor if we can’t make it up the stairs in a timely fuckin’ fashion.”