Inked in Lies: The Fallen Men #5 Read online

  I started crying again, painfully leaking out the last tears in my body as I closed my eyes and whimpered.

  But these were different tears, no less painful, but oddly cleansing.

  Because I knew that where Dane was now, this was what he had given me before he left.

  A family that would never leave me.

  A family that would protect me and love me as hard as they could for the rest of forever.

  But that fact meant nothing in that moment. Nothing compared to the colossal, all-encompassing loss of the man who had been my father, my brother, my protector and best friend.

  Nothing compared to losing the best man I would ever know.

  The man with the curls he’d let me slot my fingers into, the one with the eyes as blue and clear as Lost Lake on a sunny summer day.

  The man who had been my everything for so long until he’d found a way to give me even more, a whole community to love and be loved by.

  But it was something I would remember and cherish for the rest of my life, and it was enough, in that moment, to lull me into a disquieted slumber.

  * * *

  * * *

  It took me two weeks to get out of the house. When I got older, it embarrassed me a little, as if I should have been more ashamed of my grief, hid it better, swallowed it easier. People didn’t know what to do with me when they visited to pay their respects to the Booths, to me. I just sat there in the kitchen and stared at the drawings Nova had done in the wooden kitchen table, tracing my fingers over the curling slope of Hudson’s name stylized in graffiti on the surface or the small version of Milo and Oliver fighting in cartoon form with boxing gloves.

  I couldn’t stand myself because I was a stranger in my own mind and body. Who was I without Dane?

  I barely responded to questions, and even then it was mostly one-word answers. Harleigh Rose stayed over most nights, and the ones she didn’t, Hudson slept in my bed, or Molly, or Milo and Oliver.

  I was loved. I was so loved, and somehow that made me hurt worse.

  Because it highlighted the way I would never be loved again by Dane who had always loved me best.

  I didn’t understand how I could possibly get over losing him. It consumed me, possessed me. I was turning into someone I didn’t know and didn’t like.

  Then one day, Nova was there in the kitchen, taking my hands out of the bowl of flour and water I was churning into dough to accompany Diogo’s cod fish stew. He didn’t say a word as Molly questioned what he was doing, and no one tried to stop him when he wrapped a hand around one of mine and drew me out the door.

  I stalled, looking at the gleaming chrome and black motorbike that rested on the curb.

  “No,” I asserted. “No way.”

  Nova stared at me as he picked up his helmet and the spare for me. Then he shrugged, ran a hand through his hair, and swung onto the bike in a smooth move that said this was not the first time he’d ridden a motorcycle.

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” he asked in a cold, cruel voice. “You could die? You don’t seem to mind that idea much anymore.”

  I blinked at the design on the back of his leather jacket. The same ragged wings and skull design we’d once graffitied on the side of The Fallen MC clubhouse.

  “You got patched in,” I said dully.

  “I did,” he nodded. “The day Dane went missin’.”

  I nodded, cracking my knuckles as I stared at the bike.

  It annoyed me that people kept saying Dane had ‘gone missing.’ When someone couldn’t be accounted for when they were at war overseas they called it ‘missing in action’ as if we all didn’t know they were most probably dead in a ditch somewhere blown up by an IED.

  We couldn’t have a funeral because it wasn’t official.

  I’d read in my research that sometimes it never was.

  Someone just disappeared, and that was that.

  “C’mon, Lila,” Nova coaxed, handing me the black helmet. “Get on, and go for a ride with me.”

  I stared at the helmet, struggling with the onset of emotions that had broken through the careful barricade I had constructed around my mind. For some reason, tears pooled in the backs of my eyes.

  “Lila,” Nova called, drawing my gaze to his face to find him staring at me with his mouth so soft and his eyes so filled with love. “C’mon, gorgeous girl, get on the bike.”

  I sucked in a deep breath through my teeth and snatched the helmet, plunking it on my head before I swung a leg over the bike. It was surprisingly comfortable to press my groin against his ass, my chest to his back, my arms a natural latch around his narrow waist. He smelled of leather, smoke, and spice, and I pressed my nose to the leather to breathe it deeper.

  “Hold on tight,” he ordered before shoving down the kickstand and revving the deep, growling engine of the Harley.

  When we took off down the street, I squeaked as the hair tie flew off the end of my braid, and my hair unraveled into the wind. He went fast but not dangerously so, laughing as we took low, curving corners, hollering as he gunned it down a straight stretch of road before he hit Main street.

  I liked it.

  The rush, the freedom, the wind’s demanding fingers tugging at my hair like the kinda lover I imagined one day having for my own.

  It reminded me of a part of myself that had nearly died with Dane.

  I loved the wind and the earth and the rain.

  I loved freedom and a smidge of chaos. I loved taking off on an adventure without any clue where I was going.

  Dane hadn’t liked that much, the spontaneity. He was steadfast and calm, I was reckless and wild.

  We weren’t the same.

  I hadn’t lost that part of me just because I’d lost him.

  It hurt me to realize that, aching in my chest like a reviving withered organ, but by the time we pulled in front of the abandoned stationary store below Nova’s apartment on Main Street I was smiling.

  It was small. Lips pressed tight, mouth barely curved.

  But it was there.

  For the first time in two weeks.

  And Nova saw it as he waited for me to swing off the bike. He grinned back at me, roguish as hell with the wind whipping through his wavy hair, his sunglasses pushed back into it, face tanned and made even more handsome by the smile printed on his bright mouth.

  “Hey,” he said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

  I frowned at him instantly, but he only chuckled softly and slung an arm around my shoulders to usher me to the front door of the shop. He opened it with a key attached to a skull chain on his jeans then pushed me into the dark interior.

  I coughed as I sucked up dust into my mouth then gasped as he flicked the lights on, and the old stationary shop came into focus.

  Only, it wasn’t a stationary shop anymore.

  It had been transformed into a tattoo parlour.

  Black walls, purple accents, silver and chrome glinting here and there. I spotted five different stations, a tall, rounded receptionist desk spray painted with a logo in silver of a skull and two crossing tattoo guns.

  Street Ink Tattoo Parlour, it read.

  I gaped.

  “Pretty, isn’t she?” Nova asked smugly, arms crossed as he surveyed the shop.

  His shop.

  “This is yours,” I stated because there was no question.

  From the art on the walls to the colours of the space and its layout, this place was all Nova Booth.

  “It is,” he agreed. “When I patched in, I got a loan from the club to open this place up. We’ve been workin’ ’round the clock to get it spruced up, and now, well, it’s fuckin’ perfect if I do say so myself.”

  “It is,” I agreed instantly, trailing my hands over a coy fish painted on the black half-wall behind the reception desk. “It’s perfectly you.”

  He sighed behind me, a happy, almost relieved sound. “Needed to hear you say that more than I thought.”

  “What?” I looked over my shoulder at
him incredulously. “Like you don’t know it’s perfect, you just said so yourself.”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Now Dane’s gone… no one knows me better than you. Woulda brought you both here, cracked a bottle’a champagne,” I wrinkled my nose because I hated the sweet stuff, and he laughed. “Or maybe a beer, and we would’a made our first memory in here together. Los tres Caballeros.”

  I smiled thinly as I moved over to a station with ‘Casanova’ in stylized like graffiti on the wall over the purple reclining tattoo chair.

  “Your station,” I murmured as I played my fingers over the sleek fabric of the chair. “Yeah, Dane would have thought it was perfect too. For what it’s worth.”

  “It’s worth everythin’,” he said, voice hard bitten, eyes almost mean as he lashed out to grip my arm tightly and wrench me closer. I could see the striations of black in his warm brown eyes he was so close. “You can be sad, you can wallow, you can never get over the loss’a Dane. I don’t give a fuck ’cause God knows I’m never gonna get over him either. What I do give a fuckin’ colossal fuck about is you. You’re still fuckin’ here, Li. You’re here, and Dane isn’t. It sucks. It’s the worst kinda thing to happen to a girl who already had tragic eyes at six. But it happened, and you. Are. Here. You wanna cherish Dane and respect his memory? You live for both of you. You like the life of freedom and joy you deserved but never got. You do it for the both of you ’cause you guys were always a package deal, and you still are. You can still love him and live for him just like you did before.

  Don’t give up, Li. Don’t die with him. Don’t take both of you away from mum and Dad, Milo, Oliver, Hudson, and me. Not when we fought so hard to get you both, and we’ve lost Dane too.”

  I was arrested by his speech, both because Nova wasn’t the kinda guy that gave into seriousness for long, and also because it hurt to hear how selfish I’d been in my grief. Faintly, I’d been aware of Molly crying when I entered a room only to stop and force a smile onto her face. Distantly, I’d been aware of Hudson clinging to me while I slept like he was afraid to lose me too. Then a single memory of Diogo, staring blankly at his wall of tools in the garage. I’d asked him what he was doing, but he hadn’t heard me. He just stood there and stared blankly at the wall, rubbing at his heart as if it pained him. I’d left him there, and when he’d finally come inside for dinner an hour later, I hadn’t really noticed his eyes were shot through with red.

  God, we’d all lost Dane and his considerable light.

  I wasn’t the only one struggling through the sudden darkness.

  The sigh that left me felt like a tsunami wave of ugly, selfish mourning expelled from my lungs.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him, eyes locked because I wanted him to read my sincerity there.

  “You’re thirteen,” he replied. “You’re just a girl still. I’m not mad at you. I’m tryin’ to remind you that Milo, Oliver, and Hudson are just boys who lost a brother. Molly and Diogo are just parents that lost a son. I’m just a man who lost his best friend and brother, the first one I ever made by choice. We’re all in it together, and we’re all gonna get through it together, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed even though I wasn’t sure exactly how to get past it. “Okay.”

  “Good,” he nodded curtly then grinned rakishly. “Now you ready for why I really brought you here?”

  As if on cue, a huge, leather clad biker opened a door toward the back of the shop and stalked through it. I recognized him because he had a daughter around H.R. and my age named Cleo.

  Axe-Man trudged forward and sat down heavily on a stool at the station beside Nova’s. “Sit,” he ordered.

  I watched as Nova moved over to his chair, peeled off his shirt, and dropped onto it. He winked at me as he raised his arms above his head and tilted his chin to the ceiling.

  “Gettin’ somethin’ done for Dane,” he explained as Axe-Man pulled over a wheeled table topped with tattooing tools to his side and started prepping. “Thought you should be here.”

  I nodded, struck dumb by the sight of Nova spread out over the chair like that, shirtless and easy with his half-nakedness.

  He had a long torso with broad shoulders and a waist defined by hard rows of sculpted muscle I would have loved to trace with a pen. He had ink on both arms now, sleeves done up in a myriad of seemingly random art that I knew he’d drawn himself. Flowers, skulls, a pair of brass knuckles over a heavy fist, an anatomical heart shot through with an arrow fired by a demonic cupid sitting up on his shoulder. The art was beautiful and made his already extraordinary body almost sinfully handsome.

  I touched my fingertips to my gaping mouth, and they came away slightly damp with drool.

  Staring at him, heat rushed from the top of my scalp down to my heels as if a bucket of scalding water had been dumped over my head. My skin tingled with heat, my heart beating faster against the onslaught.

  Desire. The first stirrings of it so recklessly ignited by my foster brother laid out on a table to be inked with the memory of my lost brother.

  It was a foreign sensation, and I rubbed my thighs together in my jeans to try to alleviate the odd tightening I felt in my groin.

  So this was it, I thought, this was what it felt like to want someone.

  “Li?” Nova said, jerking me roughly out of my salacious daydream. “Pull up a stool, and watch a master at work. Axe-Man’s almost as good as me.”

  The big, blond Viking of a man only grunted as he leaned forward to place a stencil at the base of Nova’s throat.

  “Isn’t that going to hurt?” I asked, touching my own neck.

  “Hell yeah,” he said easily with a laugh. “But beauty is painful.”

  “Why don’t you get it somewhere less painful?” I asked as I rolled a stool to his free side and sat down close enough to be able to count the dark hairs sprouting from his naval down into the edge of his blue jeans.

  My mouth went dry as I stared at the straight, oddly erotic trail and thought about tugging it between my teeth.

  Sweat beaded on my brow.

  “’Cause I wanna be able to see it, to remember Dane, whenever I look in the mirror no matter what I’m wearin’, and the throat is always visible,” he explained.

  A lump lodged in my throat, and no matter how hard I swallowed, I couldn’t get it down. “You really loved him. Did you ever tell him?”

  Nova’s lips flatlined for a second. “Not much in the habit’a sayin’ shit like that out loud. But there’s lotsa ways to let someone know you love them. This is one’a mine.”

  He held still while Axe-Man traced the outline of the design.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, he waited for Axe-Man to pull away and hand him a hand-held mirror so he could see the image on his throat.

  It was a lotus, bulbous and resplendent, unfolding slightly right at the base of his throat.

  “A lotus,” I breathed, leaning forward unconsciously to reach out for the design, my fingers hovering over it. “A symbol of overcoming obstacles, of rebirth.”

  “Of something beautiful created from something ugly,” Nova agreed. “Dane was born in a stinkin’ fuckin’ mire just like you in that place with Ignacio, but he was the purest, best man I’ll ever know.”

  “Yeah,” I wheezed through the expanding mass in my throat. “Yeah, he was.”

  Nova nodded and leaned back to close his eyes, reaching for my hand with the one closest to me. I watched as his big hand, the back of it inked with a skull, enfolded my own.

  “It’s gonna take a while, but when he’s done, we’re gonna tag the same thing in the alleyway on the side of the shop together, yeah? That way everyone comin’ to the shop’ll see our tribute to Dane. What do you think’a that?”

  “I think,” I said, feeling something turn over in my chest. “I think that’s perfect.”

  His big, warm hand, veined and lined with callouses, gave mine a squeeze.

  And I realized what had turned over in
my chest.

  My heart.

  Because grief had shifted the prism of the lens I used to view Nova Booth through and turned it into something more than love for a brother or a friend.

  It had amplified him, multiplied him like a kaleidoscope into so much more.

  And that was it, the moment when I found the words for what that man was to me and what he would always mean to me.

  I loved him.

  Unintentionally, but irrevocably.

  And when the tattoo was finished, raw and red, white petals tinged pink at the base and sides, Dane’s named scrawled in cursive beneath as a last-minute addition he’d added in my careful, somewhat shaky handwriting, I knew it for sure.

  I was meant to be with him.

  Despite the age difference, despite our foster family relationship, despite Dane being gone and all the other things stacked so high against us.

  He was it for me.

  So, when we went out back to work together on a huge depiction of a lotus blossom with Dane’s name beneath on the exterior wall of the shop, I added my own small design tucked away in the folds of the flower.

  JB + LM surrounded in a barbed wire heart.

  Barbed because it would protect us. Because I would protect us, our friendship, until it could bloom like the lotus into something so much more.

  Until I was grown and beautiful like the women that lingered around Nova like bees to honey, and he would notice how much he loved me too.

  It was the first lie I ever inked and the last one I would ever do myself.

  Nova, it turned out, would do the rest.

  LILA

  By the time I was a teenager, I was an expert on unrequited love, but it wasn’t until I hit my mid-twenties that I truly understood how deeply the roots wrapped symbiotically around my heart could hurt me.

  It would have been easy to turn brittle, for the pieces calcified by a lifetime of loving a man who would never love me back to crumble with age and crack off so I became less and less of the person I’d once been. That didn’t happen because I guarded my tenderness fiercely, like a knight set to defend the crown. I didn’t want to lose what made me me just because someone had chosen not love those things.