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

by Giana Darling

You didn’t fall in love with someone simply because they were nice. Nice should be a given, a social prerogative. You fell in love with someone because they felt like the only person who could see through your skin and bones straight down to the soul, and even knowing all of you––the good, the bad, the motherfucking ugly––they still accepted you.

We pressed together gently because Cleo was still so weak, but our molecules fused back together so tightly it seemed organic, two magnets meeting after years apart. Once again united the way we were always meant to be.

She was wholesome, not because she’d been raised in a wholesome environment by wholesome people, but because she had not. All my sweet Cleo had ever dreamt of was peace. And peace to her meant a big family she could shower her love and goodness on.

“I don’t have anything left but need. Do you know how wrong that feels?” “Yes, because you’re the most giving, loving person I’ve ever known.” Tied with Henning whom she’d no doubt learned it from. “But it’s time for you to take as much as you need.” “I don’t know how,” she whispered brokenly. “I’m just so empty. I don’t know how to fill myself up.”

But I believe any relationship worth having should be based on gwaan hai. If I love someone, I’m more than willing to do what needs to be done to bring them happiness, success, and joy. And the way I love you? That isn’t an obligation, it’s an honour. So please, honour me by trusting that I want to give you everything and anything you need. Not just because of what’s happened to you. Not just because I promised Kate I’d look after you. But because I love you in a way that I need you to take what I have to offer, so really, you’d still be the one giving to me in the end.”

“One of the first things she said when she came to was your name,” Bea said quietly. “She’s talked about you before, but this was different. It was like the only thing that could stave off the panic burning through her was you.”

“I’d die for her, so don’t talk to me about trust,” I snarled softly. “Maybe,” she agreed slowly. “But I’ve heard enough about you to know what you’re like, Mei Zhen. And sometimes, to heal, you have to lay down the sword and expose your underbelly. You might die for her, but that’s not what she needs right now, and I don’t think you’re strong enough to be soft for her.”

“But I can promise I know when something is worth fighting for. I learned that the hard way, but I’m not stupid, and I’ve learned it now. Cleo is worth fighting for.”

“Now this has happened, and all we want to do is help them. Cleo and Axe-Man. Cleo, I can do.” She turned to face me again, eyes flashing with conviction. “I love her, and it doesn’t matter that you loved her first. I’m going to be here for her, too, so we’ll have to make our peace. Maybe together, we can bring her back to life.

“But Axe-Man? I don’t have a clue how to help him. A man like him whose daughter has been attacked and maimed right under his nose?” She shook her head and hissed in sympathetic pain. “I don’t have the first clue how to get him out from under that pain.

It’s hard enough to live with baggage without being ashamed of it. It feels fulfilling to be unafraid of someone knowing what’s happened to me.”

Goodness, love, and kindness are never meant to be rewarded with violence and hatred. Sometimes the worst kind of people are attracted to the best kind of people, like moths to a flame, because they want to suck out your light and corrupt it. The blame for that has everything to do with Seth Linley and his broken mind and absolutely nothing to do with you deserving it. Do you understand me?”

If you believe anything I’ve ever said or done for you, please believe this. Sometimes bad things happen to good people for no better reason than that they shine so bright they’re incredibly alluring to someone swallowed up by the dark.”

“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.”

“Her heart has always been in the right place, and she should be, too. That right place is here, Dad. With me.” With us lingered in the air unspoken.

He opened his big hands, ineloquent, struggling with it. He stared at them as if the lines in his palms might hold answers, and then, when they didn’t, he looked at me. It was an old glance, a beseeching one. The way he might have looked at me eight years ago when Cleo asked for something he didn’t want to give, when he knew I’d act as a translator between the two of them.

It wasn’t only that Cleo hadn’t let anyone but Bea, Harleigh Rose, Cressida, and me touch her since the assault. Not even Lin, her grandmother. Not even Loulou or Lila or Buck’s wife, Maja.

Only Bea, ’cause they were best friends, and they’d bonded over their association with the sick fuck Seth Linley.

Only Harleigh Rose, ’cause she’d been assaulted by her ex-shit-for-brains-boyfriend Cricket before she’d put a ...

Only Cressida, ’cause she knew the weight of staggerin’ grief after thinkin’ she’d lost King for months last year and ’cause she was Cressida, everyone in the club’s touchstone––sister, mother, frien...

It was that I hadn’t seen the beauty of that connection between Cleo and Mei in eight years. I’d forgotten, somehow, buried under the layers of history and shit shovelled over top of it, how they made each other shine brighter.

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. They were fuckin’ beautiful together. Always had been.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so mad, not counting when we couldn’t find Cleo. What’s wrong? Should I call Dad?” “No,” I said, ’cause Zeus would just laugh, probably thinkin’ this was some kinda fucked-up fate, and I couldn’t escape it. For an outlaw with a record and blood on his hands, Zeus Garro was bizarrely romantic. Then again, his romance with Loulou would turn anyone into a fuckin’ sap.

“Unresolved history’s got a way of comin’ back to haunt us.” “Bit young to be dolin’ out wisdom, H.R.” “Hey, age has got shit all to do with it. I’m marrying the love of my life in six weeks, I’ve got a great job, a kick-ass hound and house, and I’m generally amazing. You should be begging me for life advice.”

I snorted ’cause it was impossible not to be charmed by Harleigh Rose. She’d been raised around bikers her whole life, so she knew the language and religion of a biker and his club. Talkin’ to her was like shootin’ the shit with one of the brothers, only she was smart in that way of women who seemed to inherently understand emotions and shit I’d always struggled to put words to as if she’d been born with them on her tongue.

It was more that I didn’t want memories of her here. I knew I’d walk up the steps tomorrow after work and see her mirage outta the corner of my eye, a girl in a too-big leather jacket swallowed up by shadows but still shinin’ like somethin’ that’d hurt your eyes if you looked at it too long.

Moonlight spilled across the side of her face, and I couldn’t remember if she’d always been this exquisite. So damn pretty cast in moonlight, she seemed ethereal, like she’d dissolve if I tried to touch her.

But if you remember anything about me, remember this…” Her eyes flashed up to me then, slicing through me like an obsidian blade. “I’d die for her just as happily as I’d die for you. No amount of time will ever change that. And no amount of hate.”

“Mmm,” she hummed. “In my experience, ghosts haunt us even when we leave the place they died. Sometimes there’s no exorcising them.” “I’m not payin’ for your dime store wisdom,” I grunted.

I noticed a small axe on the side of her throat that made my pulse pound. With her ink-dark hair shimmerin’ over her shoulders, the alabaster of her skin, and the only spot of colour in her pouty mouth, she looked like some kinda badass Asian version of Snow White. The sight of her kicked me in the teeth and again in the fuckin’ gut. ’Cause, fuck, she’d been a pretty kid, but she was a gorgeous woman.

“Just be careful, yeah?” Z said. “The kinda men we are, someone who inspires that kinda loyalty in us often inspires other kinds’a feelings.” I bared my teeth at him. “He’s not gonna hit on my daughter after she’s been fuckin’ attacked. Kodiak doesn’t deserve you even sayin’ that.” Zeus blinked calmly at me, openin’ his hands on the table. “Not sayin’ he would. I’m sayin’ loyalty and love are two sides of the same coin. Just don’t be surprised if the situation develops into somethin’ more.”

What difference would I have made, really? What difference did I ever make, other than to ruin nearly everything I touched despite my best intentions?

Daiyu used to say I didn’t know how to do anything gently. My love was violent. I threw my heart against unsuspecting acquaintances, trampled on it myself before they could pick it up off the ground, and when I stuck it back in my chest, torn, dirty, beating a little less madly than before, I didn’t even bother to wipe it off. It was a reckless, dangerous kind of love that hurt those I tried to care for as much as it hurt me.

He had never been an angry man, or even a sad one despite all the things he’d suffered through in his life, but he seemed so tired now, almost hollow like he had nothing left to give. It made me ache to fill him up, to give and give all I had just to ease his pain for a second.

I still loved him. That man was more than a man to me and always would be because he was also my hero, and no matter what ending they got, the mythological Jason and Hercules, the superheroes Batman and Spider-Man, they lived on eternally for the impact of their good deeds. And Henning’s goodness lived on inside me. I’d grown around it.

It was so much for one man to carry, too much.

“Well,” I said to the popcorn ceiling. “How long will it be before he finds out I’m dating Jiang Kuan?”

GIRL WHAT!!!

The girl from before had been a fixture in my daily life for years. We’d been bonded by the trauma of losin’ Kate and by the loneliness we both felt bein’ different than the people we tried so hard to fit in with. There’d always been this fundamental, elemental understandin’ between us. Like we had the same language written in our blood and bones.

I’d finally fallen into visceral, carnal dreams about Mei Zhen fuckin’ Marchand. Even now, in the weak light of a late winter sun, I couldn’t shake the phantom feel of her small breasts in my hands, the texture of her cunt against my tongue, and the noises my subconscious had manufactured for her when she came around my cock.

“This didn’t go well for you last time, trying to stop our progress,” Jiang reminded me. “No, but I got a whole different brotherhood at my back, and they’re the kinda men who are happy to live free and die hard for what matters. Now get the fuck outta our town.”

She’d always loved pretty things, but since the attack, I hadn’t even seen her in colour-coordinated pajamas. It was like she felt beauty had betrayed her.

“I’m the problem here. I guess it’s hard to see yourself the way other people do when all you can fixate on are your mistakes.”

Taylor Swift was playing from the speakers, and the salon was bright and cheery, with one red-painted wall and a few huge acrylic landscape paintings on the others.

hell yeah

They couldn’t know what a tragic mess I was inside, that the only clear, bright thing I curled around protectively was my love for the Axelsens and my need to take care of them. Even from afar. Even in strange, morally grey and slightly macabre ways.

She hated conflict, always had, so this had to be hard for her. “But you don’t know how or why she was messed up in that or about all the years before when Mei was family to me, my dad, Lin, and my mum. You don’t have a clue, so don’t stand there and pretend you have enough information to pass judgment.”

I made a mistake, and I’m the one paying the consequences. You guys have to just…let me. It’s demoralizing that you think I’m suddenly incapable because I’m a victim of something.”

“Zeus is like nineteen years older than her, and they got married when she was seventeen.” Nineteen years. Married at seventeen. I ached to talk to Loulou suddenly. What had it been like loving Zeus at seventeen? Had it felt like being awoken from a lifetime of slumber? Like realizing suddenly who you were and why you’d been put on the earth? And what had it felt like to be loved like that in return?

“Hey, what about the big bear of a man, Kodiak? He’s hot,” I suggested with a waggle of my eyebrows. Cleo made a face like she’d swallowed a lemon. “No way, he’s way too bossy and rude.”

I should have known better than to let him in, but that option had been taken from me long ago. “Mui mui, aren’t you going to let me in?”

Mui mui, a term of endearment that meant both little sister and girlfriend.