Caution to the Wind (The Fallen Men, #7)

by Giana Darling

Calgary was a cosmopolitan oil and gas town, but even the wealthy wore cowboy hats and tooled leather boots.

Rocky because I was scrappy and loyal. He said people were prone to underestimate me due to my slight and dainty build, but they’d inevitably find out some day that I was a champion.

Glory because Cleo’s full name was Cleopatra, which meant “glory of the father,” and Cleo was his pride and joy.

“Your name means elegant pearl, doesn’t it? Like the pearl seen beneath the Chinese dragon’s chin or clutched in its talon.”

“Mong zi sing lung,” I murmured to her. “Parents hope their children will become a dragon among men. That we’ll be special.”

I’d always been like that, driven by instinct without the filter of my brain or the softening of a voice from my heart. If I was moved by something elementally, I let it move me.

“The marriage line is too long,” she added. “Your reputation or theirs will be affected by this union. You are not very lucky, daughter. Not in love.”

“This is balance. Too much of any one thing is no good. Not even luck. For those whose life comes easy, their character can be weak.”

“Because there is strength in softness too. There is purity, success, and happiness in finding balance between yin and yang. If you don’t learn this, the tragedies of your life will overtake you.”

“In real life, Dr. Axelsen, white knights rarely get happy endings. Only broken hearts.”

Katherine Kay was admitted to the hospital six more times over the next eighteen months, and that last time required surgery for the removal of her ruptured uterus, a surgery that made her sterile at the age of twenty-five. The day after she was discharged, I made her my wife.

Nothin’ forged in fire like iron can be so easily broken.”

Looking back, that was the start of it for me. Falling in love with him. Ruining his life. They would become one and the same, but right then, it was pure and simple. I loved him the way a child loved a superhero.

I was probably too strict (no fuckin’ way was Cleo allowed to date), and conversely too mellow (my girl was a good kid, what the hell did I care if she didn’t get all A’s and didn’t like to eat broccoli, neither did I). I made so many mistakes sometimes at night they haunted me ’til I couldn’t fuckin’ breathe. But I did what I could.

Once, some punk kid had made fun of her, but before I’d had to take care of him, Mei had stepped up and hit him in the side of his head with a binder.

Mei and I parentheses around Cleo and her tender heart.

When she set off down the hall toward the principal’s office for detention, I was still standin’ there like a bastard tryin’ to figure out how to love a girl who desperately needed love when it was socially unacceptable for me to love her any more than I already did.

But I’d never been raised to lead, and back then, dumb with grief and in over my head raisin’ a girl on the cusp of womanhood, I made a deal with the only devil I knew.

Sellin’ my soul to the devil and carryin’ out their immoral deeds made me foolishly attached to what remained of my honour.

Canada’s boogeyman. The Fallen’s weapon. Hence my biker name. Axe.

The truth was, Kate wasn’t the love of my life. It was no secret. I’d married her to save her, and in doin’ so, she’d saved me. Given me a family worth livin’ for when the only one I’d ever really known was ripped away from me after I left the military. We weren’t a relationship built on physicality and passion, but did that really matter? We’d chosen each other. Saved each other.

“You need to focus on school crushes and prom, on university and, I dunno, makeup or social media or whatever shit kids like these days. Not on revenge and murder, yeah?”

And whatever Rocky was to me, it was sacred. “Is this how you see me?” she whispered, the words raw as if she’d carved them out of her body and handed them to me still bleedin’.

“It’s strange,” she whispered, almost to herself, and I held very still, suddenly afraid to startle her out of revealin’ her mysteries. “That you could look at me and see everything I’ve ever wanted to be.”

No, I didn’t want that type of love, but the magnitude of it. I wanted a man to tremble as he held back his strength to touch me like I was made of glass, not because he thought I was weak, but because he thought I was precious. I wanted a man to change his career because it would have meant too much time away from me even though I’d never ask him to do so. I wanted a man who’d join a criminal motorcycle gang just to find justice for my murder. I wanted a man who would always try to save me, even when I tried to sabotage myself.

I loved him in all my dark places. In the way I would die for him, impaling myself on a sword intended for his side. In the way I would kill for him––a happy murder, a giggling death with blood on my teeth that tasted like love and sin.

No, I wanted to shout, I’m in love with you, and it feels like a prison sentence confined to solitary because you’ll never love me, too.

Henning: Cleo told me about that asshole. You doin’ okay? My smile was instantaneous, so wide it ached in my cheeks. Mei: No “I told you so”? Henning: I figured it went without sayin’.

We don’t step into each other’s territory, and we got any disputes outside of that, we have a sit-down like fuckin’ gentlemen.” “Outlaw gentlemen?” I shot him an appraisin’ look. “Says the man in head-to-toe designer shit.”

“Which would your brother have a harder time with, do ya think? That fact that you’re fuckin’ a white man or the fact that you’re fuckin’ a white man

“Give a thug an education, and there’s no tellin’ what he’ll do,” I snarked softly. “When it comes to protectin’ his family, he’ll do damn near everythin’.”

“Good. So you get if you touch one hair on Mei Zhen’s head, I’ll take every one of yours along with your fuckin’ scalp. You get me?”

And I knew he’d never love me the way I loved him. Like I was the oxygen he needed to breathe. But at least he loved me like this. Like losing me would be living with half a lung.

“I’d pay any price for you,” he whispered fiercely, his blood-soaked hands clutching at my face so hard it almost hurt. “Is that enough love for you, Rocky?”

I didn’t even know then that it would be the last time I saw Henning Axelsen for eight long years, and the next time I did see him, he’d hate me just as much as he’d once loved me.

The glue or the catalyst or the flamin’ thing that drew us all together as one unit against all else. Tragedy. Every single man in The Fallen MC had been through hell and come back, willingly or not. We didn’t have just one hardship, one tiny tale of woe. We had a string of them like black beads in a macabre rosary.

It shoulda made me feel somethin’ good, relieved, or vindicated, but instead, I felt my anger calcify like somethin’ undernourished. My fury wanted to fuckin’ feed, and what the fuck could I feed it if not the blood of the man responsible for almost murderin’ my kid?

The knock-you-down-drag-your-heart-straight-outta-your-chest kinda beautiful no red-blooded man could resist.

“It’s funny,” he said at length, clampin’ a hand on my shoulder. “How our demons can have such pretty fuckin’ faces and cause us so much damn pain.”

“She broke Cleo’s heart.” My voice was weak, stripped bare by the emotion tearin’ me up from the inside out. “She broke yours, too,” he said, heavy and firm, so there was no room for me to argue with him. “Not much left to break by the time she got around to it,” I half denied.

Bea and I stared at each other for a long moment, both of us warring, I thought, with our respective importance to Cleo. She was her best friend now, but she still called me hers like I’d been born to her. A feeling I reciprocated.

“He took my womb from me, Mei. I’ll never have kids.”

“I don’t know how,” she whispered brokenly. “I’m just so empty. I don’t know how to fill myself up.”

“Harsh words for someone with a bow in her hair.” “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

“Did it hurt to get your life story written into your skin for everyone to see? Does it hurt when people look at them and know?”

“And besides, you aren’t a Kay anymore, and you haven’t been for a long time. You’re an Axelsen, and we both know Axelsens are like bamboo. You might bend under harsh winds, but you never ever break.”

Henning watched the two of us, gaze remote now, mask firmly in place. This was Axe-Man, not Henning. A new beast, one I had no experience with. One who hated me with palpable vitriol.

Somethin’ about Mei’s strong-willed spirit relaxed Cleo as if she trusted her friend to deal with the harshness of the world so that she herself wouldn’t have to bear the weight of it as much. And somethin’ about Cleo’s trust and gentleness eased the restless, vaguely antagonistic aura Mei often used as a shield.

“You know, Axe-Man, I never thought I’d see you again, but when I did think about our reunion, it didn’t involve you threatening me so much.” “You must have a poor imagination.”

“In my experience, ghosts haunt us even when we leave the place they died. Sometimes there’s no exorcising them.”