Inked in Lies: The Fallen Men #5 Read online

  “Is that how you know Nova?” she asked. “He’s your brother?”

  “Who’s Nova?”

  She frowned and jerked her thumb at the door Jonathon had retreated behind. “Nova. The guy that was just holding your hand?”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling dumb. “I didn’t know that was his nickname. We call him Jonathon.”

  Harleigh Rose snorted, but her eyes were smiling as she shot up from the slide and moved toward me. “Nova is short for Casanova, my dad said. He also told me he’s never seen a kid get as much tail as Nova.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, and she seemed to read it on my face.

  “Tail means girls,” she explained. “Jeez, I’m really gonna have to take you under my wing and teach you our ways, aren’t I?”

  I shrugged. “Ways of what?”

  Her grin was almost evil as it split her pretty face in two. “Ways of being a biker babe. Don’t worry, we’re still kids, so we got lots of time.”

  “Okay,” I nodded slowly, happy because this girl seemed to want to be friends. “I can teach you about flowers if you want, I’m really good with them.”

  She wrinkled up her nose, but it wasn’t mean, just funny. “I’m more into music, you know? What kind do you like? Wait, let me guess,” she looked at me appraisingly. “I’d take you for a country music girl.”

  I shook my head, thinking of the music I listened to with Jonathon––Nova––and Dane when we went driving. “No, I like rock, I think.”

  Harleigh Rose hooted to the sky and grabbed my hand to drag me back over to the slide and her abandoned iPod. “Nova’s right, you’re cool. Sit down, and I’ll educate you proper on all things badass and rock’n’roll!”

  That was how they found us, Jonathon and Zeus, when they came out of the clubhouse an hour later. Harleigh Rose and me with our heads pressed cheek to cheek so we could both listen to the music pumping through the little music box, nodding our heads in tandem to the beat of “Good Times Roll” by The Cars.

  “You ready to go, Flower Child?” Jonathon called out with a smile in his voice.

  I frowned, carefully taking the earbud out and fist bumping with Harleigh Rose when she offered me her fist.

  “See you soon?” I asked, nervous suddenly.

  “Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “Nova’s gonna be part of the club now, so we’ll see each other a bunch. There’s not so many kids around, so you and me? We’re basically gonna be best friends.”

  “Oh yeah?” I asked, grinning. “I think I can manage that.”

  “Yeah?” Harleigh Rose asked, eyes crinkling with the force of her smile. “Done.”

  I nodded then walked over to Jonathon even though the man beside him looked mean enough to eat children for breakfast. I even flinched a little when he bent at the waist to put his big, craggy face level with mine.

  “’Sup, girl?” he asked in a growly, monster-like voice. “You up for stayin’ a while more? Nova’s gonna do a project for us, and I’m thinkin’ he probably needs your feminine touch.”

  I looked to Jonathon, eyes wide because this man was scary, but he also had a kind smile, so I didn’t know what to do with him.

  Those familiar brown eyes sparkled as he jerked his chin at the brick wall at the front of the building they’d emerged from then hefted up the backpack I hadn’t noticed was in his left hand. “Wanna help me tag that shit up?”

  My heart leapt into my throat, nearly choking on my excitement. “Seriously?” He’d never let me help him before because he said it was illegal, and I could get in trouble, but I’d always dreamed of helping him on day.

  “Seriously. Zeus here wants the clubhouse tagged with the logo, and obviously, I’m the man for the job,” he responded with a grin.

  “Could Harleigh Rose help?” I asked, knowing I was pushing my luck but wanting my new friend to see how absolutely cool he was.

  He looked to the man named Zeus who smiled. “Have at ’er, but if it’s ugly as fuck, you’re paintin’ over it and redoin’ it.”

  “Fuck you,” Jonathon said on laugh. “We both know everythin’ I produce is cool as shit.”

  Zeus raised an eyebrow at me, and I giggled as I shook my head.

  “One time,” I told them, “he made a spider that looked like a black blob.”

  Jonathon reached out to snag me around the neck and give me noogie. I wriggled and laughed in protest, my previous melancholy such a distant sensation it was only a tinny echo in my chest.

  And as we got to work on the massive green and black skull and tattered wing logo of The Fallen MC, aprons over H.R. and me, bandanas that smelled of motor oil and leather tied around our mouths, the man they called Nova that I knew as Jonathon teaching us how to spray the can properly, I let the gift that he’d given me sink into that crater in my chest and fill up the gap.

  Because no matter how long Dane was gone for, no matter where he went, Jonathon was showing me that he’d always be my family. And more, that whatever he had in spades was inherently mine too.

  And there was no greater gift I’d ever received in my whole life than that.

  LILA

  There were a handful of impactful moments, potent memories, that founded the basis of my relationship with Jonathon ‘Nova’ Booth like vertebrae in a spine, holding it––us––together.

  I was thirteen when I finally found the words for what he meant to me, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. It was what he did for me that night that tattooed itself onto my heart in a way that could never be erased.

  There was no moon that night, the sky spilling into the streets like an overturned ink pot coating everything in obsidian and shadow. I was in bed, but not asleep, my stomach cramped with something other than the period pains I’d been getting for a little over a year by then. I’d made a cup of dandelion tea to soothe my troubled mind and coax it to sleep, but nothing would quell that restless anxiety that seemed to turn my blood to acid.

  I could have woken Hudson. He was always up for late night shenanigans, pranking his brothers or sneaking out of the house into the fields behind our house to tip cows in old lady McLintock’s meadow.

  I could have called H.R. who was no doubt up listening to records well past the hour she should have been asleep. She was an MC princess, so she didn’t have a bedtime, but I knew she’d arrive at school the next day with deep grooves under her pretty blue eyes and a big, lopsided smile on her face because she’d just been to Old Sam’s Record Shop where she’d discovered the next best thing in music.

  I could have even gone to Molly, who would have woken the instant I opened the door, ushering me downstairs for a talk and some warm milk with honey.

  But I didn’t do anything of that because what I really wanted was to talk to Dane.

  It had been three weeks since we’d heard from him, which wasn’t unusual when he was deployed, but gave me anxiety all the same.

  I wasn’t quite an insomniac like Nova, but some nights I wouldn’t sleep, wide awake thinking about my brother overseas in hostile territory with only an armoured vest and a service rifle, his wits and his brothers in arms to protect him.

  This was his second deployment, and I knew he loved his job, but missing him stalked me closer than my shadow, never disappearing, a spectre even in the dark.

  I curled tighter into my huddled ball on the window seat in my attic bedroom and stared out into the night, letting my melancholy spill into that inky night.

  My phone buzzed on the pillow beside me, and I smiled before I could even check to see who had texted me.

  There was only one person who would bother me that late at night.

  Nova: You awake?

  Lila: No

  I smiled as the reply came in, my moroseness chased away by the light that always accompanied Nova wherever he went.

  Nova: Too bad. Can’t sleep, I need you to entertain me.

  Lila: It’s 2am, I’m a teenager, and I need my sleep.

  Nova: I’m living proof that b
eauty rest is a lie. I sleep for shit and still look fuckin’ stunnin’.

  Lila: Women like humble men, you know.

  Nova: Not in my extensive experience.

  Lila: Barf. Please refrain from being disgusting, or when I do actually sleep, I’ll have nightmares.

  Nova: We both know I’m the stuff dreams are made of, not nightmares.

  Lila: Okay, I’m going now.

  But I was laughing as I typed, waiting for his response like it was some kind of gift.

  And it was.

  Nova had moved out of the house at eighteen and never moved back. He still lived in town, on Main Street over an old stationary shop that had been out of business for the last few months. I always saw him on Sundays. Diogo eschewed many things about his Portuguese heritage, but Sundays were always family day. But otherwise, Nova was busy working at Hephaestus Auto, apprenticing in Vancouver at a locally famous tattoo shop, and doing whatever it was The Fallen motorcycle club did for fun.

  Truth be told, sometimes I missed him as much as I did Dane.

  I was just about to respond when there was a knock at the door.

  It was just a knock.

  Three short, soft raps of knuckles against the wood.

  But a violent shiver wrenched down my spine, rattling me and setting my teeth on edge.

  Lila: Nova, I think something’s wrong.

  And then Molly was pushing open the door, her Irish skin pale as I’d ever seen, so white I could see through it to the blue veins in her cheek, the pulse throbbing at her neck.

  I shivered again, so hard my teeth clanged.

  “M-Molly?” I murmured, and I realized I was shivering, teeth chattering.

  Was it cold?

  No. It was late spring, and heat had settled between the mountain tops.

  She had such large eyes, big irises the colour of blue hydrangeas. They weren’t blinking, and I thought that was weird, so I said, “Why aren’t you blinking?”

  It was such a silly thing to notice.

  But I focused on it. Why wasn’t she blinking as she stood looking hollow and pale in my doorway at two in the morning on a school night.

  “Lila,” she whispered, and it was more breath than sound, wet at the edges with tears she hadn’t yet shed.

  And then Diogo was at the door behind her, and he wasn’t blinking either as he stared at me with the same dark gaze as his sons.

  “Li girl,” he said in that same waterlogged tone.

  And I knew.

  I knew, and I realized I’d known all night. Somehow, in ways I’d never understand. Ways so metaphysical I wondered if what I’d thought as a child was true, and Dane and I shared one soul.

  My phone started to ring in my hand, vibrating my suddenly hollow bones so painfully I dropped it from my numb fingers to the floor where it broke apart with a soft pop and scattered in pieces across the floor.

  They started talking. One of them, or both, but I couldn’t hear them because I was underwater. My eyes fixed on the oceanic scene Nova had painted on the wall around the door of my bedroom, on the inky depths giving way to the turquoise middle where a sea turtle swam and a school of silver fish flashed in a zig zag over the doorframe.

  I wasn’t breathing.

  But that was okay because you had to hold your breath under water.

  And I wanted to stay there, submerged, at peace in the silence and stillness under the turbulent waves on the surface.

  I didn’t want to hear.

  I didn’t want to see anything other than the deep blue ocean on my wall.

  I didn’t want to feel anything, not even the breath through my body or the pulse of my blood.

  I wanted to die.

  Because I knew, even though I was struggling so hard not to think, that Dane, my Dane, mi hermano, was dead.

  I don’t know what happened after that.

  Apparently, Molly and Diogo tried to revive me from my stupor, but I couldn’t be reached. I sat numb, having slumped to the floor, half propped against the window seat, my eyes blank and unblinking as I stared at the wall, my limbs as limp as cooked noodles.

  I was comatose.

  Shell shocked.

  Molly became hysterical, and she ran out of the room to get Hudson.

  He was my baby brother, and maybe he could reach me, she’d thought.

  He tried.

  He wrapped himself around me, ivy around a crumbling building, trying to hold me together.

  He whispered in my ears, a few distorted words reaching me through the warbled depths.

  Love you, we got you, you’re okay.

  Then Milo and Oliver were there, and they were hugging Molly who was sobbing and arguing with Diogo who was about to call an ambulance because there was something wrong with me and they didn’t know what to do.

  I wasn’t crying.

  I wasn’t screaming.

  I was barely even breathing.

  I was nothing because I needed to be nothing, or I would shatter like my phone into small, irretrievable pieces across the floor.

  My broken phone continued to ring, and finally Hudson answered it.

  He spoke with someone.

  Minutes later, another figure appeared in the doorway.

  I knew, even underwater, who it was, and that’s when I started to float up from the depths.

  I screamed.

  Like a banshee, like a demented, lost soul haunting the moors, yearning for their loved ones long dead but unable to reach them.

  I screamed so loudly my throat went raw in minutes.

  Hudson scrambled away from me, and released from him comforting bond, I started to thrash because it felt, literally, like my body was coming apart at the seams.

  Sound shredded over my vocal chords as I flailed, and Milo, Oliver, Diogo, and Nova tried to pin me to the ground, to still me so I wouldn’t hurt myself.

  I’d find out later that I broke two of my fingers in the struggle.

  “Lila!”

  Someone was screaming, and it was a dear voice, but it wasn’t Dane’s voice.

  A voice I would never hear again.

  My screams got impossibly louder.

  Outside, a dog began to bark.

  Lights popped on in our neighbor’s houses, and the cops were called.

  “LILA!” Someone bellowed, and I could feel the word as well as hear it, the sound stuffed into my face the way we’d used to shove Dane’s face into his favourite tres leches cake on his birthdays.

  I blinked, and it felt so wrong when no one else had been blinking. When it started with Molly’s big, hydrangea blue eyes staring at mine.

  I blinked again because my eyes were so dry they stung, and then again because Nova was there, and I wasn’t sure how that had happened.

  “Nova?” I croaked, surprised that my throat hurt because I didn’t remember screaming.

  “Hey, Flower Child,” he said softly, and I realized he was speaking in Spanish. “Come back to us, okay? We’re here for you.”

  All I could think was when had Nova gotten so good at Spanish?

  I knew Dane had tried to teach him for years, but I couldn’t remember him ever saying more than a few words.

  Dane.

  His name reverberated around my suddenly aching skull, and reality rushed back to me with the force of a derailed train. My breath whooshed out my body on impact, and suddenly I was pitching forward into Nova, hands tearing at his shirt, at his hair, painfully pulling and ripping at cloth and scratching into flesh as I half-attacked him half-hugged him.

  “Nova!” I screamed again, and I knew it wasn’t my first time because I could taste the metallic tang of blood at the back of my tongue. “Nova!”

  “Hush,” he demanded firmly, stroking my back with strong hands even as he let me molest him. “Quiet, Li, that’s enough yellin’. Hush, I’m here. We’re here. We’ve all got you, okay? We’ve all got you.”

  But I couldn’t stop, not now that I’d started. I cried so hard I couldn’t breath
, and the sobs ripped through my chest so brutally they set my whole body to aching. My tears saturated Nova’s shirt from collar to belly button, and I tore holes all across his back, shredding it as if I had claws.

  But he held me. He cradled me in his lap and stroked me without flinching as I hurt him, and then he rocked me, soothing, humming nonsensically into my ear as I ran out of tears to shed, and my body started to crumble with exhaustion.

  The yelling turned to whimpers, strange, curling mewls like a kitten in distress, lost without its mother.

  “Let’s get her into bed,” Molly whispered at some point.

  Vaguely, I was aware that Diogo had disappeared a while ago to answer a knock at the door I’d later find out was the police. Distractedly, I also realized when the sun was breaking over the crust of the horizon, spilling milky light into my bedroom, that it was hours later.

  Nova didn’t put me in my small twin bed in the attic.

  Carefully, he gathered my overcooked limbs into his arms and descended the stairs to take me to Molly and Diogo’s big bedroom. He waited beside the bed as Hudson carefully rolled thick socks over my frozen feet, as Molly gently replaced my soaked tee with a clean, dry one of Diogo’s, as Milo and Oliver turned down the bed, and I crawled in.

  Nova set his knees onto the bed then walked across the mattress that way until we hit the center of the mattress before he settled in, me between his long arms, inked now for real, wrapped tightly around me like the harness of a rollercoaster ride.

  Him holding me close grounded me slightly, enough to start trying to breathe properly again.

  Then Milo curved into me on one side and Oliver on the other, their hands twining gently with my own so that the grooves between our fingers were linked and pressed tight.

  Hudson crawled onto the bed with a wet face cloth and kneeled between my legs so that he could gently mop my flushed face with the cool fabric.

  Finally, Diogo and Molly got into bed after closing the blinds tightly and grabbing more pillows. They bracketed us all, their entire family tucked away in the bed around the girl they’d made their own.