Did I love King so much I could make up this image of him in even that exquisite detail?
I didn’t know because I’d never allowed myself to try.
There was wet on his face, slipping down the steep cheekbones into the hollow of his cheeks and off the hard edge of his jaw. One fell all the way to the laminate floor and splashed next to his feet.
Did hallucinations cry?
“My sweet Harleigh Rose,” he said the way he did in the big moments—when Dad went to prison the first and second time, when I came home after killing Cricket, when I told him I was marrying the only man he’d ever felt was worthy of me.
I was Lion’s Rosie, always, sweeter for him than anyone else.
Save my brother.
I’d been born to him sweet Harleigh Rose, and he never let me forget it, especially in the moments like this when all I wanted to do to survive was throw up thorns.
“You’re not real,” I told his ghost, but there was a waver in my voice and an odd tickle in my belly.
A wry grin twisted his mouth into something too misshapen and ugly for King’s beautiful face. He held out his hands, open to the sky, and shrugged weakly.
“I’m real enough to feel the pain I’m lookin’ at on my sister’s face. Real enough to feel it like a dagger in my fuckin’ chest, knowin’ I’m responsible for puttin’ it there.”
“No.” The word escaped on a sob, bursting from me like an exorcized demon. I swayed on my feet, my equilibrium shot to hell, my vision a blur of warped wet.
The waterlogged image of King moved closer, and a moment later, it was touching me.
He was touching me.
King Kyle Garro.
My King.
My brother.
“No,” I whispered again as my legs collapsed beneath me, and my entire weight went crashing to the ground.
Only King didn’t let me hit. He hauled me into his arms roughly, my chest colliding with his, his arm so tight around my torso that I couldn’t breathe.
I didn’t want to.
I wouldn’t breathe ever fucking again if it being back in my brother’s arms like this.
If I was dreaming, I didn’t want to wake up.
If I was dead… well, that fucking sucked, but maybe King and I could haunt our loved ones forever together.
“Harleigh Rose,” he murmured again and again, and I felt my heart thump to the beat of that cadence as if set to a metronome.
He held me and swayed slightly, back and forth, back and forth.
It took me a while to realize I couldn’t hear the music anymore because I was crying so hard, I choked and yelled with it. Then when I realized, I cried harder and started to fight.
Because my anger made this real.
This moment.
This man.
He was here. In my arms and not in the afterlife.
Which meant he’d left me.
Us.
He’d lied.
My brother, who had never lied in my whole life, had constructed the most horrific, lasting lie in the history of the world.
He’d manufactured his death and the grief in my heart and the hearts of so many others.
“How could you?” I wailed, curling my hands into his chest so hard, my nails tore through the fabric into his flesh. “How could you?”
He hummed wordless apologies as if he was soothing an unsettled baby. I felt like one, incapable of finding the words I needed to express myself. Incapable of pushing him away even though I hated him at that moment and the long few that followed.
“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.”