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

by Giana Darling

The only way to find trouble was to throw caution to the wind and buy it.

“Didn’t Mum’s death teach you anything?” I tried to swallow the stone lodged in my throat to no avail. Of course, it taught me something, I wanted to confess. It taught me to protect my loved ones at all costs. It taught me to seek revenge for injustices. It taught me that no wrong goes punished unless people are brave enough to risk themselves to see them penalized.

The only thing that helped to distract me was the joy on Cleo’s face. She was thoughtful, reserved, and quiet, but when she smiled, she warmed everyone in the vicinity with her light.

“Never thought he’d have kids,” she divulged in a little murmur. “A boy who always wore the weight of the world on his shoulders, I think he thought it’d be too much for him to bear. He always felt so deeply. Drove his dad crazy. He called Henning ‘too soft’ like that was a crime.

“Now, look at him.” I was looking. In fact, I didn’t think I could have looked away if a bomb went off next door. This was what I wanted for myself.

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 wanted what Cleo had, but not how she had it. I wanted Henning. Not as a father figure. But as a man. My man.

My God, I was in love with Henning Axelsen.

I tried to breathe and failed again. Because he was so beautiful, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. Why didn’t women talk about men like that? It wasn’t only feminine to be so beautiful. It spoke of his goodness, the generosity of his heart, and the power of his kind, keen gaze. It spoke of a man who was confident enough in himself to be soft when needed and strong enough to take on the whole world if someone he loved was at risk. God, he was beautiful.

And at that moment, I knew I’d never love anyone better than I loved him. So much of the kindness I’d experienced in my life had been at the hands of Henning, and what made that all the more poignant was that he had absolutely no obligation to be good to me. I was no one, not tied to him through blood or marriage, but only the relationship I’d forged with his deceased wife and her daughter largely before I’d ever even known him. It was in this way that he made me feel worthy. If I could earn the kindness and love of such a man, I had to be worth something even though I so often felt less than in the eyes of my overachieving family.

His gaze seemed to cut me open like a knife, like I was prone on a metal slab, and he was performing an emotional autopsy. There was nothing I could hide from him, no insecurity, no secret hope or hidden dream. Maybe love was that simple, to see and be seen. So simple and so impossibly complicated because I couldn’t bear for Henning to know what I knew now. That I loved him. Not tenderly, not softly like a song or a poem.

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.

What cruel, tragic irony that he should be so forbidden to me. My best friend’s dad....

As quickly as I realized I would love him forever, I realized I would never have him.

Henning watched as my heart swelled and broke, a wave against the sheer rock of reality. He frowned, moving away from Cleo immediately, trying to come for me because he knew, in one look, in one moment, I was hurting.

I pressed a hand to my chest where my insides were rearranging themselves to fit arou...

“Rocky,” Henning said, suddenly in front of me, so much taller than me I had to crane my neck back to meet his gaze. “You okay?” 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. Instead, I smiled weakly. “I think the makeup’s making me nauseated.”

“Smile,” Henning said, leaning slightly into me and speaking out the corner of his mouth. “You look beautiful, Mei.” I closed my eyes briefly, swallowing the sweet poison, and then forced myself to smile brighter.

Lin peered down at the photo on the screen of the camera and grinned. “Henning and his girls.” Henning and his girls. And there I was, aching with the desire to be his woman. Damn, I was so going to hell one day.

You only live once, she said, and the sentiment coming from my mother lying in hospice was enough to bring me to my knees. I felt the weight of both Daiyu and Kate with me as I sat there, like they were ghosts pressing reassuring hands to each shoulder. I wanted to live for both of them, soak up as many experiences as I could because they were both robbed of their fill too young.

He was the best man we knew, bar none. A white knight didn’t just come in shining armour. My knight came in leather.

Every inch of me throbbed as I took him in, every molecule attuned to the wild beat of my heart yearning for him. How strange and powerful it was, the way knowing changed my every atom from yesterday to today. I knew I could never go back to before when he was just my best friend’s dad. Just my sort-of friend. Just Hen. Now, I’d never think of him or see him without a wish attached to his name.

Zander was a good guy as far as I could tell, but Cleo seemed to draw some serious jerks into her orbit because they wanted to leech out some of her sweetness.

Nightmares of the carnival plagued me every single night. I woke with Kate’s name in my mouth and the phantom taste of blood on my tongue. My heart pounded out a tattoo on the inside of my rib cage that said fix this, fix this. I couldn’t go back in time, but I could help Henning and Cleo find closure. I could help Kate’s ghost find peace.

“Don’t reduce me to the years I’ve lived. I’ve watched a woman I love be murdered and die. I’m watching my own mother suffer and fucking wither away every single day,” I said, chin tilted, eyes burning in my skull. “You don’t have to return or even like my feelings for you, but I will not be ashamed of the way I feel. You’re my white knight, and it doesn’t matter if you’re too old or too outlaw or too whatever else you want to throw at me. I know in my bones that I’ll always feel this way about you. You see me, Henning, even when I feel invisible, even when I want desperately to remain unseen. That might not mean anything to you, but it means everything to me.”

“My love for you isn’t conditional on you loving me back,” I told him even though my heart hurt, my head hurt, my very soul hurt. “So this won’t ruin anything between us unless you want it to. I hope you don’t. I know I’ll never be yours that way, but having you in my life is better than nothing. I…I don’t have many people I love, and I’ve already lost too many.”

I wasn’t just a thug and he’d expected that. Under other circumstances, I might’ve sighed at the common judgment. Then again, how could any man who went by the name of Axe expect to be seen as anythin’ other than a weapon?

Despite that, Kate and I had loved each other in a way that had saved each of our lives. I’d been depressed and alone after bein’ discharged from the army, workin’ myself into some kinda early grave at the hospital like fucked-up penance for the lives I’d taken ’til she and Cleo gave me focus and a reason to live. And Kate had been so deep in the pits of hell, she’d forgotten to hope for anythin’ else. The bond between us was unusual, hell yeah, but it was deeper than blood.

The low, quiet weight of Henning’s voice would be familiar to me underwater or whispered down a faulty telephone line. I knew it better than I knew my own.

“I’ll deal with you in a second, Mei Zhen. Step off.” I backed up immediately. Henning’s was the only authority I’d ever acknowledged, and it was impossible to disobey him when he looked like that. Capable of murder.

A little gasp fell from my mouth when he whipped me around by my hand and then thrust me back against the wet, warped wood of the building. His teeth snapped next to my throat, a physical threat he couldn’t find the words to embody.

“You want somethin’ from me I got no power to give you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t got a magnitude of love for you in my heart. You told me you couldn’t stand losin’ another person you love? Well, don’t make me go through the same.”

His broad forehead tipped down to press to mine, and he closed his eyes, a pained expression on his rough-hewn features. 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?” It was too much. So much I was drowning in it, sinking beneath the turquoise of his eyes into the deep, dark awareness hidden in the folds of my heart.

This was why I loved him, because there was nothing he wouldn’t do for those he loved. It was crazy, almost, the lengths he would go to. But if anyone understood, it was me. I’d cut my heart right out of my chest if it meant he’d be safe and happy.

“You’ve got your mum to think about and your future. Do this for the both of us, yeah? You got in over your head, but I’m here, and I won’t ever fuckin’ let you down.”

“Henning,” his name broke on a sob as it exploded from my throat. I ducked my head into the curve of his neck and pressed my lips to his pulse point just to feel it throb.

“I love you.” The words burned through my belly and throat like dragon fire. Henning shuddered at the heat of them and pulled me away just to press his own kiss to my forehead. It felt like a benediction from a priest, a holy anointing. “I love you,” he promised, and it was an oath.

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.

I had to be strong for her now. I wouldn’t cry when I saw the state she was in. I’d be strong and sure and gentle as a summer’s breeze. I’d be her best friend and her caretaker and her mother and her sister. I’d be whatever Cleo needed me to be.

Most of these men were broken beyond repair. Even the ones who found the love of a good woman weren’t miraculously repaired by their connection. That love just made breathin’ a little sweeter ’cause it gave them somethin’ to live for.

We were all broken, and we didn’t try to fix shit about each other. We just stood together against all the tragedies of the world that inevitably came for us, and we tried to ease the burden as much as we could, even when it seemed impossible, even when it meant riskin’ our lives for each other.

“Woman’s got a face you don’t forget. Not to mention, I’m sittin’ vigilant at the bedside of a woman who means somethin’ to me who was attacked. I’m thinkin’ if there’s a time I ever forget a face connected with Cleo, it won’t be for a good few decades at least.”

A distant part of my brain noticed she’d grown into a real beauty. The knock-you-down-drag-your-heart-straight-outta-your-chest kinda beautiful no red-blooded man could resist. Mei Zhen Marchand in the fuckin’ flesh.

Her eyes always looked black from afar, but up close, they were warm and rich as something alive—tilled soil, pine bark, mink.

I wanted to be rid of the agony of lovin’ and hatin’ her and the confusion that arose in the thin line between the two.

“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.”

“Cleo obviously kept in touch with the kid. She obviously loves her the way Cleo loves everyone in her heart. Balls to the wall, ride or die. Your girl is a giver, just like her dad. Seems to me, if she called Mei, it was ’cause she needed her right now.

Eight seconds, eight years, eight decades, I didn’t give a damn. My Cleo needed me, I’d do whatever it took to be there for her.

He’d made his decision clear. He’d fallen on a sword for me, but the consequence was eternal banishment from his life. Sometimes, I wished he’d let me bear the consequences of my mistakes back then, not only for his sake but selfishly, for my own. Maybe then I’d still be someone to him. As it stood, he was still everything to me.