Chapter Three
Cressida
Paradise Found.
My bookstore was named after Milton’s book of epic poetry, but it was also a statement of fact.
I’d found my paradise.
Entrance, British Columbia, and its infamous motorcycle club, The Fallen, had become my home and haven. It went beyond my undying love for King Kyle Garro.
It was Zeus and his Fallen men.
Harleigh Rose, Loulou, Tayline, Rainbow, Cleo, Bea, Hannah, and Maja, my gang of biker babes.
It was the cliffs of Back Bay Road where our little Shamble Wood Cottage lay nestled among the towering pine and fir trees overlooking the vast stretch of the blue ocean at the foot of the mountains.
It was in the air and the earth of this town. I could feel it, the love, the moment we crossed from Alaska into northern British Columbia in a rented truck with King’s precious bike covered and secured in the back.
This place and these people were my home in the way Vancouver, my parents, and William had never been.
King had given me this paradise, but I’d taken it and made it my own, and I was proud of that. In the past five years, I’d gone from the meek, prim, and boring Cressida Irons to the Queenie my King deserved.
Returning home to Entrance felt like a returning to myself.
King and I knew it wouldn’t be an easy welcome home. More for my husband than myself because I wasn’t the one who had been faking my own death for the better part of a year.
But I had kept his secret.
When Harold Danner, former Staff Sergeant of the Entrance Police Department, had finally been found guilty for the first-degree murder of Riley Gibson among a slew of other charges such as police corruption, money laundering, and police brutality, King and I had packed up our little house in Sitka, Alaska, and hit the road the very next day.
It was time to go home and pay penance for the days of pain we’d left behind.
We’d seen Zeus and Harleigh Rose before anyone else.
Of course, we had.
Pain, loss, and adversity had forged our bonds as a family together like titanium. Being away from them, knowing they were hurting, had haunted us every single day.
Watching King reunite with his beloved dad and little sister would remain two of the most poignant, magical moments of my life.
But now, it was time to reunite with my tribe.
The people who had supported me through King’s “death” and my ever-descending whirlpool of grief. The same people who had happily offered to take over the responsibilities of my life so I could take off down the Sea to Sky and flee my sorrow like a bat out of hell.
I stood outside the black-framed glass panel door of my store and traced my finger over the golden words adhered to the pane.
Paradise Found.
I’d gone and found my fallen King, but that had been startlingly easy compared to this. I was…nervous. I’d hurt my friends by taking off, by keeping secrets, and I was scared of how they would react to me.
If the same people who had gotten me through the worst time of my life would hate me for my selfishness.
But in a strange way, I relished the difficulty of opening the door and stepping through to face my fears. My loved ones deserved this effort. They were owed my vulnerability and my fear.
So I would lay them at their feet and hope that would be enough.
No one noticed me at first.
Which was fair. It was surprisingly busy for a mid-week February afternoon.
Benny was with a customer at the till, his hands flying like sparrows as he animatedly discussed the book his female customer held out between them. His hair was longer, curling at the ends of his jaw in sweet little dips and flips I was certain Carson loved and had convinced his boyfriend to keep.
A new hire I didn’t recognize, a teenage boy so long and slim he looked like pulled taffy, spoke with two older ladies in the stacks to the right, and Jamie, a university student who had been my third employee, diligently darted between the rows of books helping people where she could.
But I only spared them all a single glance because my gaze swivelled to the lounge area near the floor-to-ceiling windows at the left of the store and stuck on the tableau there.
Sweet Loulou sat on the carpet by the coffee table stacked with books, playing with Angel, who had grown so much in the past four months, I couldn’t believe it.
Her twin brother, Monster, sat on Harleigh Rose’s lap scowling like the little grump he was.
When Lila blew a raspberry on his cheek, he squirmed and thumped his chubby fist against her jean-clad thigh in retribution.
The babes laughed.
Loulou, Tayline, Rainbow, Lila, Hannah, Maja, Cleo, Bea. Harleigh Rose had corralled them all together at the shop that afternoon so I could ambush them.
My heart swelled until the soft tissue pressed between my ribs so hard it hurt.
For a moment that felt like a lifetime, I stood there dumbly in the entrance to the shop, rubbing absently at the deep ache wrapped around the base of my back. It was strange to look into the window of your own life without you in it and realize that your loved ones could survive without you.
The beauty was in knowing they didn’t want to.
And that was proven the moment Louise Garro––once the sick teen I’d taught in my fifth period English class at EBA, now the First Lady of The Fallen––caught my eye.
A shudder rolled through her slender shoulder, pale cloud of blond hair shimmering.
“Cressida,” she mouthed, blue eyes so vivid I could see the exact shade of them from across the room.
Cerulean, I had decided a long time ago.
For Lou and Bea.
Aquamarine for Harleigh Rose.
A brown as rich as freshly tilled soil for Tayline and a dark shade, nearly black for Rainbow.
A haunting, striated green like carved jade for Cleo.
Almond-shaped, thickly lashed brown eyes littered with gold like fallen leaves in the autumn for Lila.
The ever-changeable green/grey/blue for Hannah and Maja.
I didn’t have a talent for drawing like Nova, but King and I had painted pictures with our words of the loved ones we’d left behind.
Whole tapestries of them tossed between us on our small kitchen table in that cramped cabin on the oceanfront of a town that looked enough like home but would never be.
In a way, we agreed that we knew our family better, loved them better for the strange period of absence we’d been forced to take.
Taking the pieces of a person out again and again as you longed for them made it easier to notice the nuances of their beauty.
My ladies froze for one long moment as a group and then turned in eerie unison in their seats to look at me.
Tayline caught the sob that exploded from her lungs in both hands, eyes wide.
Rainbow choked on the latte she’d been drinking.
Cleo’s jaw dropped open, and she had to close it shut with both hands on her cheeks.
Maja and Hannah, seasoned as they were, just reached for each other where they sat on a loveseat, lined hands tangling.
Bea blinked and blinked like she stared into the sun.
Lila pressed her hand to her heart so hard the skin bleached white.
One blissful moment of suspended peace and then…
Chaos.
They erupted into motion, racing to me, hands everywhere on my body, my swollen belly, my hair. They pet me as they peppered me with questions, as they jostled like eager puppies around their mother.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were coming home?” Loulou demanded.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were pregnant?” Tayline barked coarsely even as she bent to press her cheek to my rounded abdomen.
“It’s King’s,” Cleo breathed, eyes round with dreamy wonder as they locked with my own. “What a gift.”
I nodded, my voice lost to the storm of emotions in my gut. Absently, I realized I was crying, but only because Lila collected my tears on the tips of her long fingers.
“You’re home,” Benny said as he pushed through the female mass and wedged himself under one of my arms, his huge dark eyes luminous with love as he looked at me. “My God, you’re home.”
When I opened my mouth to say something, a sob fell out. I tried again, and another sprang forth.
“Someone get her a tissue,” Rainbow ordered as she and Maja ushered me to the lounge area and practically forced me onto a couch.
Everyone else pressed in close around me, pages around a flower they wanted to preserve forever.
Loulou sat Angel in my lap where the little girl happily hugged my big belly, resting her curly blond head there.
“Aunty,” she said as she pat, patted my stomach as if I was her pet.
On-tay.
I looked at Loulou who smiled. “We showed her lots of pictures while you were gone. They started talking a lot three months ago.”
“Even Mr. Grump here,” Bea added, hoisting Monster into her lap even though he scowled at her.
“No,” Monster argued.
We laughed, and I felt as I had since moving to Entrance that laughter was a powerful magic. It was a bonding, cleansing force. I let it move through me into the women, and Benny gathered around me, unifying us and tightening our loosened ties.
“You’re home,” Tayline said, sniffing as she wiped her forearm across her nose. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“So you could brace and not make a fool of yourself crying?” Rainbow offered with an arched brow.
Tay glowered at her, but it wasn’t very effective on her sweet-faced, five-foot-nothing frame. “I’m not crying.”
Harleigh Rose poked at a tear caught on the edge of her chin and held it aloft as proof. “What’s this then?”
Tay sniffed and looked away. “I have allergies.”
“In February?” Hanna asked, trying to smother the laughter in her tone unsuccessfully.
“Why are we talking about me? Cress is the one with explaining to do!”
They looked at me, and I felt the way I had the first time I’d had to lecture an auditorium of university students when I was doing my master’s degree, ill-equipped and deeply uncomfortable.
I swallowed thickly, my hands carding through Angel’s curls as she dozed on my lap. “I’m home because I found what I was looking for on my trip.”
Maja nodded sagely, bent over the back of the couch so she could press a kiss to my cheek before going back to playing with my hair. “Closure.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “But not just that.”
“A baby,” Harleigh Rose snarked with a wink.
I rolled my eyes at her, but Loulou looked back and forth between us with a slight furrow between her pale brows.
“Why don’t you seem more shocked?” she asked her daughter-in-law slash best friend. “You’re usually dramatic as hell.”
“Hey,” H.R. snapped. “I’m not dramatic. I’m intense.”
“There’s a difference?” Cleo murmured, leaning in to Bea, who giggled in response.
“Fine, so why aren’t you being intense about this?” Loulou demanded.
“Have you seen your husband at all today?” she asked innocently, picking at a hole in her jeans.
“No…”
A smile flickered over H.R.’s wide mouth.
Lou turned to me with betrayal souring her expression. “Cress? Did you tell H.R. you were coming home and not me?”
“Not us,” Tayline countered with a similar frown.
“I didn’t just find closure in Alaska,” I hurried to say. “I found what I’d been looking for my whole life.”
“Now who’s being dramatic,” Rainbow muttered.
I bit off the edge of my smile. “I did marry into the Garro family.”
There were murmurs of agreement. Harleigh Rose pushed Lila over in retribution, then pulled her back in to smack a kiss on her cheek.
Home.
The word reverberated through me with each beat of my heart.
“I hate secrets,” Tayline grumped.
“Be grateful she’s home to have them,” Cleo offered, not unkindly as she squeezed my foot.
I smiled at her in thanks. “I wanted to hang out with you guys today before the…celebration tonight, but I do have secrets and I would appreciate it if you let me keep them until tonight. If you’ll let me.”
Everyone waited, and I knew it was because they wanted Loulou to make the decision for them.
She was Zeus’s Old Lady, the head of our biker babe posse because of her status but also because she’d won the respect of every woman there.
They looked at me too, or they had, because of my age and marriage to King, but I understood I’d have to win that privilege back over time.
Loulou pursed her glossed lips and leaned forward to run a hand down her baby girl’s head as she slept draped over my stomach, a little patch of drool forming under her open mouth. Those Lafayette blue eyes, so saturated a blue they seemed as fake as a Crayola crayon, locked with mine.
“I’m good at keeping secrets,” she reminded me as her hand slipped from Angel’s back onto my belly.
She had been the only one who figured out my pregnancy before I left town, and she’d kept that secret even from her own husband all these months simply because I’d asked her to.
“But I’m good with waiting for them to be told too. ”
I reached up to palm her cheek, marvelling at the twenty-one-year-old mother of twins who was at once fresh and wise, a contradiction in so many ways I doubted I would ever get to the bottom of who she was and what made her so endlessly beautiful.
“Thank you,” I said, rubbing my thumb over the ridge of her cheekbone. “For trusting me and loving me, even when I was gone.”
“Entrance isn’t home without you,” she responded easily as if her words didn’t rock me. “The Fallen isn’t either. We’re just glad you’re back.”
Over the past eight and a half months I’d been on a journey through death and back, one slow, agonizing step at a time.
But sitting there in my dream come true with the women who loved me better than my mother ever had, knowing my man was alive and well celebrating that fact with his father on the back of their bikes on the Sea to Sky Highway, I took one of the final steps to being reborn.
It might have been King returning from the dead, but I’d been the one to ferry him home, to die spiritually alongside him, and I couldn’t wait for our return.
To awake, arise, and be forever Fallen.