Chapter Two #4
“I hate you,” I cried, choking hard on a brutal sob. “I fucking hate you. I won’t ever forgive you.”
“Okay,” he said softly. “Okay, H.R., you don’t hafta forgive me.
I can live with that. Can live with you hatin’ me and Lou and Nova and Bat and the rest’a the men of The Fallen.
Can live with the fact I missed Angel and Monster growin’ bigger and Ares startin’ to become a man.
Can live with all’a your hate ’cause I did what I did to keep you all safe and alive.
You’re alive to hate me? I’ll consider myself a happy fuckin’ man. A lucky bastard.”
“Shut up,” I demanded as my eyes burned and my throat singed because my anger was an internal flame lighting me up and burning me away.
He didn’t shut up.
But then again, King wasn’t exactly the quiet type.
He could find the words for everything, exactly the right ones, whereas I always floundered and failed.
And right then?
He did the only thing he possibly could have to soothe me.
Carting me into his arms, he walked to the back of the store, the place where Old Sam kept the stools in the corner near the record player, the place I’d first seen Lion play the guitar as a girl, and he sat down in one of them.
He positioned me in his lap, curled up with my wet face pressed into his ruined shirt smeared with black liner and salty wet.
And then, he sang to me.
Just softly, barely above a hum.
I felt the words thrum through me more than I heard them with my ears.
He sang about forgiving him.
About dying together and being reborn.
About the mystery of being absolved and saved.
He sang a song written by another man, but the emotions saturating the words were all his own, and they moved through me like a swift, cleansing tempest. I let myself grow empty and quiet in his hold so that I might be better filled with his words and this moment.
With the idea that my original hero was back from the grave and the only reason he’d ever left in the first place was to keep me safe.
To keep our family as whole as it could be without him.
He’d always been all heart, but this was different.
This was a sacrifice on the level of sainthood.
Because as much as we missed him, as much as we mourned, King did too. Alone wherever he had been, in whatever purgatory for eight long months, he’d thought about us. Felt for us.
He’d known exactly whose grave he was digging when he jumped from the cliffs of Back Bay Road.
It wasn’t his.
But one for every member of his family who would be forced to put him to rest, if only for a short time.
He’d done it knowing that maybe, not everyone would forgive him.
It was hard to forgive someone who ripped out your heart, even if it was for the right reasons. Pain was pain, and it couldn’t be rationalized out of being.
But I knew as I lay there in my brother’s arms, his own tears just salt-crusted tracks down his face, his eyes clear as diamonds and just as bright as they looked down at me with protective love and gratitude, that I didn’t forgive my brother.
Because there was nothing to forgive.
He had done exactly as I would have done.
We would both die for each other.
For Dad and Lou and Ares and the twins.
For The Fallen men and our biker babes.
It went beyond duty because that lacked emotion.
It was something like a privilege to die for the people you loved. To know your loss was worth something so much more than yourself.
King had given Zeus back to us. He’d put the man who had hunted us our entire lives behind bars for good.
“I love you,” I told him, still crying somehow, though they were soft, quiet tears now that dripped down my face and into his shirt, his skin.
“I’ll never stop loving you, not even for a moment because you’re the only person in my life who has never, not even for a moment, let me down. Not before you left and not now.”
A soft, broken sound echoed at the base of his throat, and the whites of his eyes pinked with the effort not to cry.
“But King?” I said as I sat up and slid to the ground on my knees so we were eye to eye and I could stab a finger into his chest. “If you ever scare me like that again, I swear to fuckin’ God and Satan or whoever is in charge of these things that I will kill you myself. You get me?”
The song finished, the store filled with scratchy, wavering silence for a long moment as King stared at me, mouth open, eyes vulnerable.
A moment later, the soft strains of “Oh, Sister” began to repeat themselves, and my brother blinked then smiled so hugely, I could count every single one of his pearly white teeth.
I was about to tease him for it when he lunged forward, dragging me into another tight, painfully beautiful hug so he could laugh into my mess of big hair.
He laughed and laughed.
And behind us, I could hear Cressida laugh wetly, Old Sam clapping and chuckling softly, Lion clearing his throat of tears before he laughed too.
And I knew in my bones in a way I hadn’t known since King was gone that everything was going to be okay.
Because my brother was home.
And no matter where he went again, I’d never let him go unloved.