Lessons In Corruption: A Student/Teacher Romance (The Fallen Men Book 1)

The pain woke me up.

It seared through the center of my palms like concentrated wildfire. Before I was even fully conscious, I tried to move my hands away from the heat but they were stuck deep in the flames. My eyes flew open and even though my vision was blurry, I could make out the sight of one of my hands affixed to the wooden arms of the chair I sat in. It was nailed there with a thick metal spike that you’d find on a construction site. My mind dissociated from the pain enough to note that it was at least three inches thick and quite long. And it went right through the middle of my hand. Same thing with my other hand.

Someone had knocked me out, dragged me to some kind of warehouse and nailed me to a wooden chair.

A sob rose in my throat but I swallowed it down, focusing on the hellacious burn to keep my mind sharp. I took stock of my body, noting the drumbeat of pain at the back of my skull from where the man had clocked me with something hard, the soreness at my wrists and ankles from where they were wrapped tightly in damp rope. There was dirt across my entire left side, which made me think they’d dragged me across the ground before placing me in the chair. Worst of all, my jeans were undone and my underwear was pulled uncomfortably tight over my sex. Someone had checked me out down there while I was passed out.

Another sob crawled up my throat. I thought I might throw up all over myself.

“Comfortable?”

My head snapped back, hitting the exact same place that I’d been struck, and stars exploded in front of my eyes. Through the black spots and colorful flurries, I made out a short, stocky Hispanic man. He stood in front of me, swathed in shadows like a grim reaper.

“No,” I croaked, noticing that my mouth tasted like ash and blood.

His pockmarked face creased in a bland smile. “What a shame.”

Something made a noise behind me. Fear saturated me, yellow and acrid like being doused in urine. I couldn’t turn my head enough because my torso was tied to the chair, but I knew someone lingered at my back.

“Aren’t you going to ask who I am?” the man in front of me asked, taking a step closer. “Yell ‘why me’ or start crying? I have to admit, it’s my favorite part of this whole thing.”

“The whole abducting innocent women thing?” I asked, dredging up the sass that lay deep inside me, under the fear and the pain, lower even than my sense of self-preservation.

I refused to allow this man to scare me. It was the only thing I could focus on through the haze of pain that threatened to take me under again.

My captor laughed his hyena laugh. “Look at her, boys, look how she talks back!” Suddenly, his laughter died and he lunged towards me with bared teeth. “You’re nailed to a chair, puta, not a throne. Be grateful I’ve kept you fucking breathing.”

“Fuck you,” I said with cold calm.

Inside, my body fired like an overheating furnace, sheer terror building the flames too high. I was in overdrive, desperate to flee but literally stuck to the chair. My hands kept trying to jerk away from the pain but it only ripped them open wider.

“Fuck me?” His laugh was like tearing sheet metal. “Fuck me? You are the one tied to a chair. One of my men already tried to have a go at your sweet white pussy. You want me to let him back in?”

I glared at him. I knew who he was, Luis Elizondo, the President of the Nightstalkers MC, and I knew what he wanted, information about The Fallen. This knowledge comforted me because it gave me an edge. He didn’t expect me to know him just as he wouldn’t expect me to stand up to him. He wanted my submission, but I’d become the kind of woman who only gave that gift to one man. If Luis wanted King, wanted the men of The Fallen MC, he’d have to go through me to get to them.

My bravado faltered when Luis lost his patience with me and snarled, an inhumane sound that echoed through the mostly empty warehouse. “Shut the fuck up. Sander, muzzle the bitch.”

The fire inside me roared, then died altogether. Ice water flooded my veins as a new kind of terror descended on me.

The body waiting patiently behind my chair stepped closer.

Ice crawled quickly over my skin, inside my ears, nose and gaping mouth to invade my brain, to stop the thoughts that led to only one conclusion.

Huge familiar hands gently appeared at the edges of my vision, a thick length of rope stretched between them. Before I could close my mouth, they jerked the rope into my mouth, pressed it tightly to the corners of my mouth so I was semi-swallowing the thick fibers. I gagged at the stress it put on my tongue. The rope was knotted behind my head and the person stepped back.

“Why don’t you come show this bitch your face?” the horrible man in front of me ordered.

No.

No, no, no.

As long as I didn’t see him, I could stay frozen and numb to the truth.

I squeezed my eyes shut as the heavy thud of booted feet rounded my chair and made their way to the man who spoke.

“Open your eyes, puta.”

No, no, no.

“Victor,” he barked at someone off to the left.

Someone moved out of the shadows. I whimpered when cruel hands gripped my hair and wrenched my head back. The cold, sharp edge of a knife pressed into my throat.

“Open. Your. Eyes.” Victor hissed in my ear.

His mordant breath activated my gag reflex. As I shuttled forward with the force of my dry heaves, the knife bit into my neck and a thin trail of blood slipped down to pool wetly in my right collarbone.

“Open your eyes,” he ordered again, wiggling the blade against the scratch until it opened wider, spilled more blood down my front.

I opened my eyes.

Even though I’d known who would stand before me, I nearly threw up at the sight of Lysander. He stood beside Luis with his hands behind his back, his posture straight and sure like a soldier before his commander.

“You recognize your brother, of course,” Luis began conversationally as he patted Lysander on the back. “He’s been a good little informant for me the past few weeks.”

I closed my eyes again on a sob but the man holding my hair gave me a little shake, so I peeled them open again.

Lysander stared at me vacantly.

I wanted to scream at him, tear out his hair and slam his head repeatedly against the concrete floor until it busted open and spilled all his secrets across the ground for me to shift through.

My hands tried to fist with rage but pain had me rocking back in the chair.

Fuck, I’d never felt so helpless in my life.

I wished fervently that King and the boys were looking for me. There was no doubt in my mind that if I didn’t give Luis what he wanted, he’d kill me. Seeing as I didn’t know anything about The Fallen’s criminal side, I had nothing to give him. Therefore, I’d be dead sooner rather than later. I just had to give King time to find me.

“Now, maybe, you understand just how serious I am about taking over The Fallen’s distribution network. I’m going to get Victor to take that rope out of your mouth and you’re going to tell me all about Zeus’ operation, aren’t you?”

I didn’t react but he nodded for Victor to undo the tie. When he did, I spat it into my lap.

“I don’t know anything about that, you moron. Old ladies aren’t privy to that kind of information and you know it,” I rasped through my sore, parched throat.

“I know a man’s feeling good after takin’ his bitch, he isn’t afraid to share things with her,” he said.

Fuck, of course he thought that I was with Zeus. Everyone outside of the MC did. What didn’t add up was that Lysander knew for a fact that I was with King and not his father. Why would he keep that from his ‘boss’ or whatever Luis was to him?

My eyes darted his way but he was staring through me as if I wasn’t even there.

Luis stepped closer and another man materialized out of the shadows to join him. The newcomer cracked his knuckles and smiled at me as Luis said, “We’re going to play a game where you tell me what I want to know and Harp here doesn’t beat your pretty face in, si?”

I closed my eyes, wishing I had the gag in my mouth again. I tried to find a safe place to rest inside myself, as I couldn’t answer question after question and Harp’s fists kept coming. There was no such place. But I found that I could let the pain carry me away on dark clouds so that I drifted from ache to ache in mental purgatory. Anything was better than clueing back into reality.

So, it took me a long time to recognize the sound of gunfire even though it ricocheted so close to my head. Through blurry eyes, I watched Harp drop to the ground, half his face blown off by a bullet. Then men were everywhere, wearing the Nightstalkers colors of red, black and green, and some others, others wearing my favorite colors in the whole entire world. Green, black and white.

The Fallen men had arrived.

Through my delirium, I spotted Nova crouched down by one of the doors, covering for King, Zeus and Priest as they ran inside, crouched low and each wielding guns in their hands. Blackness narrowed my vision like a camera filter and I kept dipping in and out of unconsciousness so I saw only flashes. Zeus rugby tackling Luis as he tried to run, his lion roar of fury as he began to pummel the Mexican drug lord’s face. Bat appearing from out of nowhere with a huge sniper rifle strapped to his back. He took down two Nightstalkers with his bare hands without any discernable effort.

King. I tried to track his progress across the warehouse but I was too dazed, too dizzy.

“Babe,” his voice called, his voice peeling through the heavy curtains of darkness shrouding my mind so that I could see the light.

I opened my eyes to see his face in front of me. He had never looked more like a fallen angel than in that moment, his gorgeous face a mask of vengeful fury.

“King,” I breathed but the effort hurt my ribs and I wondered if maybe my tormentor hadn’t just aimed his hits at my face.

“Gettin’ you out of these ropes,” he was saying when I clued in again.

Distinctly, I could feel him loosen them at my chest and ankles. When he got to my hands, he cursed so viciously I jerked and then whimpered as the pain abruptly followed.

“Motherfuckin’ fuckers,” he swore again.

He suddenly had a hammer in his hands, blood speckled over the metal head. I realized they’d probably dropped it to the floor beside me after they’d nailed me in.

I gagged violently again but didn’t throw up.

“This is gonna hurt,” King said over a particularly loud round of gunfire.

He didn’t give me time to brace. With the other side of the hammer wedged painfully under the head of the small spike, he wrenched the metal out of my hand.

I screamed, so hard and loud that I passed out for a few seconds.

Then, I came to just in time for him to pull out the other spike.

I passed out again.

“Shit, she’s bleedin’ so fuckin much,” King was saying when I zoned back in but I didn’t open my eyes.

“Wrap it tight,” someone, Nova I thought, said from my other side as they bound each of my hands with fabric.

The pressure deepened the pain, then my hands felt oddly numb. It was a massive relief. I opened my eyes and mouth to say so and found two Nightstalkers approaching silently from behind King and Nova.

I shouted wordlessly.

They both shifted infinitesimally. Nova evaded his attacker, then threw himself at his torso in a low tackle.

King wasn’t so lucky.

He took the edge of a wicked-looking knife to his shoulder, the same blade that had sliced my throat. His face contorted in pain, but then he was trying to wrest the blade out of the man named Victor’s hand. I watched them fall hard to the ground, neither one on top as they struggled for supremacy.

My thoughts rushed and whorled like water circling a drain. I could barely feel my body anymore, the pain had washed it clean of sensation, but I recognized that I was free to move.

“Cressida,” Zeus bellowed from across the room as he came charging over.

I blinked slowly, not understanding why he was yelling.

A clatter brought my attention to King again and I watched as the knife flew out of Victor’s hand and skidded to a stop by my feet. Victor used King’s momentum against him and pinned him to the floor with his knees so he could reach into his waistband for a gun.

No.

Anything in world could happen to me, could happen to anyone else. I didn’t care if all the kittens, birds and bees had to die, if I had to personally slaughter men, women and children to make it so but nothing could happen to King.

I wouldn’t allow it.

The knife was at my feet, I just had to get it. I fell to my knees with a brutal crack that vibrated from my kneecaps and up my thighs, but I ignored the pain and tried to clutch the knife in my brutalized hand. It fell through my weak-as-water fingers again and then again.

“Cressida,” Zeus shouted, closer now.

I looked up to see him close to Victor, who was about to press the gun against King’s thrashing head.

Fury launched through me.

“Give it to me,” Zeus ordered, hand out stretched as he lunged towards me.

I wrapped the knife in a excruciating grip and tossed it to him.

He caught it on the fly, sprinted the two steps to where his son lay prone on the ground with a gun at his temple, and without hesitation, he plunged the bloodied blade into the back of Victor’s neck, right at the base of his skull.

The sick sound of crushing bones and tearing flesh was louder than the last gunshot that reverberated through the warehouse.

I tried to keep my head up and my eyes open, but moving so much had drained the last of my reserves. With a thin sigh, my head dropped to the concrete and I was out.

I knew before I woke up that I would be in a hospital. The smell was the first thing I noticed, the plastic, medicinal scent of all hospitals everywhere. My body felt strange, not my own, but at least the mind-melting pain was gone. I tried to lift my hand, suddenly terrified that it would still be nailed to the chair. When I succeeded, I opened my eyes to look at the heavily bandage flesh and burst into tears.

“Babe.”

I turned my crying face to King as he moved to lie down beside me and carefully pulled me to him. I wanted to clutch at him, touch him all over to assure myself that he was alive and well but my hands were mittens, so instead, I nuzzled my face hard against his cheek, his neck, his chest.

“I’m here, babe, I got you,” he assured me over and over again.

I cried harder, so hard I couldn’t breath.

“Shh, babe, I need you to take a deep breath for me, yeah?”

The air rattled around in my open mouth as I tried to suck it into my uncooperative lungs. King took my face gently in his hands and breathed deeply, silently prompting me to mimic him. I tried again and finally found air. We did this, deep breathing together, until my mind cleared and the tears stopped.

“I got you, babe,” he said then, each word low and weighty with significance.

“Thought you were going to die,” I croaked out because even my throat, teeth and lips hurt.

King’s thumb swept tenderly over my swollen mouth before he ducked down to kiss each side where the rope gag had given me a temporary Joker-like smile.

“Luckily, I had my Queen to keep me alive,” he said.

I stared into his eyes, desperate to mark each bubble of air caught beneath the ice of his irises and every color of pale blue that brightened and darkened them like shapes under glacial caps.

“I want to go home,” I told him, suddenly desperate to leave the hospital. “Can I?”

His lips pursed in thought but when I whined low in my throat, he sighed. “We can do whatever the fuck you want, Cress babe. The doc’s checked you out. You don’t need surgery on your hands but you’ll probably have nerve damage and you might need rehab. Otherwise, you have a concussion, a fuckin’ laceration on your throat and a fractured jaw. Not to mention your beautiful face is fuckin’ black and blue.”

“Not great,” I murmured.

“No,” he bit out.

“Alive,” I pointed out. “Both of us.”

“Thank fuckin’ Christ,” he said against my lips before kissing them softly.

“Home?” I asked again.

“Okay, wait here and I’ll get everythin’ in order,” he gave me another kiss before sliding off the bed and made his way to the door. He paused at the door and looked back at me, his hand pulling hard through his curls. “Need a second. Haven’t left you since it happened and I’m havin’ a hard time doin’ it now.”

My heart stopped then restarted with a jolt in my chest.

“Love you,” I told him.

“Bone of my bone,” he replied.

I waited for him while he talked to the doctors (who actively disagreed with my decision to leave but technically they couldn’t do anything about it) and brought me papers to sign.

“My parents?” I asked softly, because if they’d been there they would have been given dispensation to sign them for me.

As it was, it was hard to sign papers without the use of your fingers.

“Called ‘em. To be fair to the cunts, they wanted to come but they were freakin’ out so much about you gettin’ what was comin’ to you because you involved yourself with ‘riff’ fuckin’ ‘raff’ that I ended up hanging up on them before I could tell them where you’d be.”

I smiled only slightly because it was sad about my parents, but he was awesome.

“Everyone else is okay?”

His eyes warmed as he helped me sit up on the edge of the bed and then proceeded to dress me. “Priest and Zeus are bruised but fine. Nova got a bullet to the gut. He’s in the room down the hall. Puck, Lab Rat and Cy were also there, took care of the guys outside and they’re roughed up but cool. I got a nick to the shoulder, not bad. Bat’s the only one without a scratch but he was in the navy for ten years before he patched in so go figure.”

“Good,” I said, placing my hand on his shoulder so I could step into the flip-flops he brought me.

Someone had packed one of King’s big sweatshirts that said EBA on it in green and an old pair of jeans I’d left at the clubhouse. They were comfy and they smelled like King, which brought me instant comfort.

“Have lots more questions,” I murmured tiredly as I took his hand.

“So do I,” a smooth, deep voice said from the doorway.

King growled, but I just sighed and collapsed to the hospital bed again.

“Yeah, officer, come on in,” I welcomed Lionel Danner into the room.

He stepped through the doorway, his partner Riley Gibson behind him.

“Sorry to do this when you’re still recovering, but I just have to ask you some questions,” Danner said. To his credit, he really did sound contrite.

If I were still the old Cressida who liked rules and regulations, I’d probably have fallen for Lionel. He was gorgeous, loyal, dutiful and tough like a Wild West sheriff. So, in short, female catnip.

As it was, because he was Zeus’ enemy, he was also mine.

And, needless to say, I was head over heels in love with the teenage biker who stepped slightly in front of me to argue with the cops about interrogating me while I was injured.

“Just a few questions,” Danner urged.

“It’s fine, King,” I said. “Just hurry up. I’m exhausted and I want to go home.”

Gibson nodded, stepping forward. “We just wanted to clear up the timeline. Two nights ago—”

“Two?” I asked.

King squeezed my hand. “You were concussed and out of it for a long time, babe. Happy to see those whiskey eyes again.”

I leaned heavily into his side as I turned to the cops again. “Go on.”

“Two night ago, you were at Evergreen gas station when you were hit over the head by a man named Hector Alonso and transferred to a warehouse just off highway 99. They kept you for three hours before Zeus and his… friends,” he hesitated over what to call them but continued, “found you.”

“Correct.”

“In the ensuing fight, did you witness Zeus Garro kill a man named Victor Hernandez?”

My heart seized as I was thrown back to the night of my bachelorette party. The cops had asked me the same exact thing about Lysander killing Marcus Whitman. No matter what I said about my brother defending me from rape, they had still cuffed him, carted him away and put him in jail for six years of his life.

Then I remembered that Lysander had been in the warehouse, had stood beside a man who wanted to kill me and had done nothing. I couldn’t reconcile the one image of him with the other. How could he go from being my defender to my persecutor?

I shoved those thoughts to the back of my mind and focused on the irrefutable fact that I did not trust the police and I adored Zeus.

So, I told them, even though it made my jaw ache, “I’m sorry, officers. I don’t think I can be much help. As you can see,” I held up my heavily wrapped hands, “I was preoccupied at the time and in and out of consciousness.”

King slipped an arm around my shoulders and I knew he was happy with my answer.

“You’re sure?” Gibson pressed, even taking a step forward in an attempt to physically pressure me.

It was a low move after the trauma I’d already endured and both Danner, who held his partner back with an arm and a glare, and King, reacted. My man bared his teeth and declared, “This conversation is over. Cressida is concussed and she has a fuckin’ fractured jaw. Asking her to talk to you in this condition is physically painful for her.”

The pain in my jaw was nothing compared to the pain in my hands, but I was done with the conversation so I allowed King to pull me to my feet and I followed him when he grabbed his bag and started for the door.

The cops let us go but I could hear Danner murmuring to Gibson to let us be. I was grateful to him because exhaustion hit me like a physical blow as we stepped into the fresh air. Thankfully, King had thought ahead and my car was waiting for us instead of his bike. We were silent on the ride home, mostly because I slept.

He took us to the compound but I didn’t question him. Truthfully, I was happy he’d made that decision. I was still shaken and I liked the idea of being on the compound, one of the safest places in BC if not the world.

“No one else is here except for my dad, Bat and Buck. They’re in the garage and I need to take you to them before I put you to bed,” King said as he let me out of the car.

My intuition prickled. “You have him, don’t you?”

King’s full lips thinned. “Yeah.”

I nodded. “I take it he isn’t in the kitchen drinkin’ tea with the guys?”

“No, babe, he isn’t.”

I sighed, not sure how I felt about my brother being held at the hands of The Fallen, however badly he may have betrayed me.

“If he hadn’t called us, I don’t know if we would have found you,” King told me as he closed the passenger door and swung me up on the hood of the car.

He stepped between the legs I spread for him and one of his hands found its place at my neck. His thumb reached around to rub at the taped-together blade wound just under the midline of my throat.

“He called?” I asked to pull King out of his memories and ‘what ifs.’

He nodded. “He called just after you were taken. We knew because Benny Bonanno spotted you getting hit over the head at the gas station and called Tayline who called me. We’d barely begun to mobilize with no fuckin’ idea where to look when your fuckin’ brother calls me, tells me the Nightstalkers got you and they’re takin’ you to a warehouse off the highway behind the gas station at the base of the mountains.”

“Why would he do that?” I asked because I didn’t have one clue how to process the information.

“That’s what I need you to find out. We got him here, babe, for two reasons. The man’s got to pay for fuckin’ with The Fallen but more, for fuckin’ with our Queen. And we need to know what the fuck kind of game he was playing. We roughed him up but he won’t talk, he says, unless it’s to you.”

He stared at me hard and long, his pale gaze burrowing to the heart of me. I wondered, probably because I was high on painkillers, if he found a mirror there that reflected his face back at him.

“I’m not patchin’ in. I meant what I said to you when I was in the clink. But, babe, this is my fuckin’ world and one day, I’m gonna rule it. I need you to know what you’re getting into if you take me on.” He closed his eyes and pressed his forehead to mine. “Can’t lose you, won’t lose you, but I don’t know if I can walk away from my brothers, especially after what they just did to get you home to me.”

“I don’t want you to,” I admitted softly, pressing my own hand to the back of his neck in mimicry of his habit. “When you were lying there about to take a bullet to the head, I swore that I would kill anyone and anything that got in the way of you living, or you being in my arms every single day for the rest of our lives. It was awful but I meant it. I know I’ve told you a thousand times that I’m not the kind of woman who can deal with the MC life but I think I was wrong. Or, even if I wasn’t, I want to be that woman for you, with you. The rough and tumble Queen to your biker King.”

His smile nearly took my sight, it was so dazzling, but I kept my eyes on it, glaring happily into the sun, uncaring if it blinded me.

“I won’t show you anything like this again, you need to know that too. MC business is kept between brothers, and I don’t want you held accountable for anything. Unfortunately, this involves you and I need your help.”

“I understand.”

He pulled me fully into his arms to hug me.

“Made from me, for me,” he murmured into my hair. “The perfect Queen.”

I kissed him, my mouth open and soft because it hurt to kiss, but I needed to kiss him more than I cared about the pain. Gently, he pinched my chin so he could control the movement and he kissed me back.

When we parted, I slid silently down his body and took his hand so he could lead me to the garage.

They were in the last bay, the garage door pulled down but the industrial lights on so everything was in stark white and yellow relief. This included my brother, who was bound to a hook in the ceiling that normally hoisted cars. His hands were shackled with chains and his feet dangled just off the floor. There was blood on his face, down his throat and in the weave of his shirt. They had clearly already gone over him once or twice.

My eyes flicked to Bat, Buck and Zeus, who stood closest to Lysander, still wearing brass knuckles that were wet with blood.

I looked up and caught Zeus watching me, his face cruel and guarded. He was waiting for me to freak out, I realized.

So, to prove him wrong, I turned to my brother and walked closer, aware that he watched me between the slits in his swollen face.

“Why did you do it?” I asked simply.

His answer was not so simple.

“I owed them money,” he warbled through his split lip. “Lied to you about the gambling but it’s the same story. Took their money to get on my feet after getting outta the slammer and with the interest, I just couldn’t get back out from under it. I won pretty good at the races one day a while back but you needed the money for the house, so,” he tried to shrug but grimaced when the movement was cut short by the chains. “They found out you were my sister. My fault, I don’t keep much but I got that picture of you from your graduation in my wallet because I’m an idiot. They knew you were datin’ Zeus so they had an eye on you, but I was keepin’ my eye on them and they didn’t care about you in a big way.

Then fuckin’ William. The crazy motherfucker talks to some of his fucked up clients and asks one of them to kidnap you for him. Wanted to run away with you to fucking Indonesia or some shit. The Nightstalkers heard, took the job and the ridiculous fucking payout, and decided to kill two birds with one stone. They knew you’d probably have information they could use, and if you didn’t and they ended up killing you, it would drive Zeus into making a bad mistake.”

Wow.

I had trouble digesting everything that he was saying, had trouble believing that my soon-be-ex-husband could ‘love’ me enough to pay for me to be kidnapped, that my brother could have kept such a massive secret double life from me.

“Why did you need the job at Hephaestus, to spy on my friends?” I asked.

“I told them no like six hundred times but they were having too much trouble cracking into the drug trade up here, so they got desperate and threatened me.”

“The morning you showed up at my house,” I whispered.

He groaned miserably. “Yeah. Decided it wasn’t worth it, involving you, but then King got involved and it was so easy. I figured I would take the job but wouldn’t give them anything important and I swear to fucking Christ, I didn’t, Cress. I would rather die than put you in danger. You know that.”

“Do I?” I asked softly. “You killed a man for me once, Sander, but does that mean I need to forgive you for every other bad thing you ever do?”

He was quiet. A smart move because there was nothing he could say to save himself from my condemnation.

“They won’t kill you,” I said, gesturing to the mean looking bikers with Sander’s blood on their hands. “You’re my family and I’m theirs so they won’t kill you. What they’ll do to you otherwise, I don’t know and I don’t really care. You almost got me and the people I care about killed. I can’t—I won’t—forgive you for that. I hope you get your act together, Sander, I really do, but I don’t want to see you ever again.” I ignored the gurgle of hurt that sounded in his throat, the way he flinched so hard against his bounds that his body rocked in the air. “I’m done with people who take from me and don’t give anything back. I’ll always be thankful that you saved me, but this is goodbye.”

Quickly, because I was aware that I was about to burst into tears, I walked forward to press a kiss to his bloody cheek. When I turned away, I moved to Zeus and wrapped him in a full body hug.

“Thank you,” I whispered with my heart in my mouth.

He’d stiffened at first, but at my words, his body melted slightly and a hand came around to pat me on the back. He didn’t say anything, but he was a badass biker and he didn’t have to.

Zeus Garro had my back and now, he knew I had his.

I didn’t look back as I collected King’s hand and walked out the door, my head held high, blood on my lips and my King at my side.