Welcome to the Dark Side (The Fallen Men Book 2) Read online

  Copyright 2018 Giana Darling

  Proofed by Michelle Clay, Olive Teagan and Marjorie Lord

  Cover Design by Najla Qamber

  Cover Model Jack Greystone

  Cover Photographer Patricia McCourt

  Formatting by Stacey at Champagne Book Design

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  Eight.

  Nine.

  Ten.

  Eleven.

  Twelve.

  Thirteen.

  Fourteen.

  Fifteen.

  Sixteen.

  Seventeen.

  Eighteen.

  Nineteen.

  Twenty.

  Twenty-One.

  Twenty-Two.

  Twenty-Three.

  Twenty-Four.

  Twenty-Five.

  Twenty-Six.

  Twenty-Seven.

  Twenty-Eight.

  Twenty-Nine.

  Thirty.

  Thirty-One.

  Thirty-Two.

  Thirty-Three.

  Thirty-Four.

  Thirty-Five.

  Thirty-Six.

  Thirty-Seven.

  Thirty-Eight.

  Thirty-Nine.

  Forty.

  Forty-One.

  Forty-Two.

  Forty-Three.

  Epilogue

  Playlist.

  Lessons In Corruption

  Thanks Etc.

  About Giana Darling

  For everyone whose lives have been affected by cancer. You are strong, you are brave and I am in awe of your courage of conviction and continual hope.

  And for my dad, who always encouraged the rebel and the writer in me, and who succumbed to his own battle with cancer in 2011.

  “An overflow of good converts to bad.”

  —William Shakespeare, Richard II. Act V. Scene 3.

  I was too young to realize what the pop meant.

  It sounded to my childish ears like a giant popping a massive wad of bubble gum.

  Not like a bullet releasing from a chamber, heralding the sharp burst of pain that would follow when it smacked and then ripped through my shoulder.

  Also, I was in the parking lot of First Light Church. It was my haven not only because it was a church and that was the original purpose of such places, but also because my grandpa was the pastor, my grandmother ran the after-school programs and my father was the mayor so it was just as much his stage as his parents’.

  A seven-year-old girl just does not expect to be shot in the parking lot of a church, holding the hand of her mother on one side and her father on the other, her grandparents waving from the open door as parents picked up their young children from after-school care.

  Besides, I was unusually mesmerized by the sight of a man driving slowly by the entrance to the church parking lot. He rode a great growling beast that was so enormous it looked to my childish eyes like a silver-and-black backed dragon. Only the man wasn’t wearing shining armor the way I thought he should have been. Instead, he wore a tight long-sleeved shirt under a heavy leather vest with a big picture of a fiery skull and tattered wings on the back of it. What kind of knight rode a mechanical dragon in a leather vest?

  My little girl brain was too young to comprehend the complexities of the answer but my heart, though small, knew without context what kind of brotherhood that man would be in and it yearned for him.

  Even at seven, I harbored a black rebel soul bound in velvet bows and bible verse.

  As if sensing my gaze, my thoughts, the biker turned to look at me, his face cruel with anger. I shivered and as his gaze settled on mine those shots rang out in a staccato beat that perfectly matched the cadence of my suddenly overworked heart.

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  Everything from there happened as it did in action movies, with rapid bursts of sound and movement that swirled into a violent cacophony. I remembered only three things from the shooting that would go down in history as one of the worst incidents of gang violence in the town and province’s history.

  One.

  My father flying to the ground quick as a flash, his hand wrenched from mine so that he could cover his own head. My mother screaming like a howler monkey but frozen to the spot, her hand paralyzed over mine.

  Useless.

  Two.

  Men in black leather vests flooded the concrete like a murder of ravens, their hands filled with smoking metal that rattled off round after round of pop, pop, pop. Some of them rode bikes like my mystery biker but most of them were on foot, suddenly appearing from behind cars, around buildings.

  More of them came roaring down the road behind the man I’d been watching, flying blurs of silver, green and black.

  They were everywhere.

  But these first two observations were merely vague impressions because I had eyes for only one person.

  The third thing I remembered was him, Zeus Garro, locking eyes with me across the parking lot a split second before chaos erupted. Our gazes collided like the meeting of two planets, the ensuing bedlam a natural offshoot of the collision. It was only because I was watching him that I saw the horror distort his features and knew something bad was going to happen.

  Someone grabbed me from behind, hauled me into the air with their hands under my pits. They were tall because I remember dangling like an ornament from his hold, small but significant with meaning. He was using me and even then, I knew it.

  I twisted to try and kick him in the torso with the hard heel of my Mary Jane’s and he must have assumed I’d be frozen in fright because my little shoe connected with a soft place that immediately loosened his grip.

  Before I could fully drop to the ground, I was running and I was running toward him. The man on the great silver and black beast who had somehow heralded the massacre going down in blood and smoke all around me.

  His bike lay discarded on its side behind him and he was standing straight and so tall he seemed to my young mind like a great giant, a beast from another planet or the deep jungle, something that killed for sport as well as survival. And he was doing it now, killing men like it was nothing but one of those awful, violent video games my cousin Clyde liked to play. In one hand he held a wicked curved blade already lacquered with blood from the two men who lay fallen at his feet while the other held a smoking gun that, under other circumstances, I might have thought was a pretty toy.

  I took this in as I ran toward him, focused on him so I wouldn’t notice the pop, the screams and wet slaps of bodies hitting the pavement. So I wouldn’t taste the metallic residue of gun powder on my tongue or feel the splatter of blood that rained down on me as I passed one man being gutted savagely by another.

  Somehow, if I could just get to him, everything would be okay.

  He watched me come to him. Not with his eyes, because he was busy killing bad guys and sho
uting short, gruff orders to the guys wearing the same uniform as him but there was something in the way his great big body leaned toward me, shifted on his feet so that he was always orientated my way, that made me feel sure he was looking out for me even as I came for him.

  He was just a stone’s throw away, but it seemed to take forever for my short legs to move me across the asphalt and when I was only halfway there, his expression changed.

  I knew without knowing that the man I’d kicked in his soft place was up again and probably angry. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and a fierce shiver ripped down my spine like tearing Velcro. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I started to scream just as the police sirens started to wail a few blocks away.

  My biker man roared, a violent noise that rent the air in two and made some of the people closest to him pause even in the middle of fighting. Then he was moving, and I remember thinking that for such a tall man, he moved fast because within the span of a breath, he was in front of me reaching out a hand to pull me closer…

  A moment too late.

  Because in that second when his tattooed hands clutched me to his chest and he tried to throw us to the ground, spiraling in a desperate attempt to act as human body armor to my tiny form, a POP so much louder than the rest exploded on the air and excruciating pain tore through my left shoulder, just inches from my adrenaline-filled heart.

  We landed, and the agonizing pain burned brighter as my shoulder hit the pavement and my biker man rolled fully on top of me with a pained grunt.

  I blinked through the tears welling up in my eyes, trying to breathe, trying to live through the pain radiating like a nuclear blast site through my chest. All I saw was him. His arm covered my head, one hand over my ear as he pulled back just enough to look down into my face.

  That was what I remember most, that third thing, Zeus Garro’s silver eyes as they stared down at me in a church parking lot filled with blood and smoke, screams and whimpers, but those eyes an oasis of calm that lulled my flagging heart into a steadier beat.

  “I got you, little girl,” he said in a voice as rough and deep as any monster’s, while he held me as if he were a guardian angel. “I got you.”

  I clutched a tiny fist into his blood-soaked shirt and stared into the eyes of my guardian monster until I lost consciousness.

  Sometimes now, I wonder if I would have done anything differently even if I had known how that bullet would tear through my small body, breaking bones and tender young flesh, irrevocably changing the course of my life forever.

  Always, the answer is no.

  Because it brought me to him.

  Or rather, him to me.

  “He’s going to prison for this,” my daddy yelled from the hallway.

  We were in the hospital. I knew this because I woke up in a white bed in a room with white walls and white floors and there were white tubes stuck into my arm. There were no loud noises, no blood or bodies or biker men around so I knew that everything had calmed down and I was safe.

  At least, everything had calmed down except for my daddy. I’d never seen him so mad because Lafayettes weren’t supposed to let anyone else know what they were thinking or feeling.

  Everyone in the kids ward of Saint Katherine’s Hospital knew what my daddy was thinking and feeling right now. I woke up to a foggy head, a dull pain in my shoulder and the sound of him saying a lot of really bad words. That was five minutes ago and he still hadn’t stopped.

  “Benjamin, you are making a scene,” my mum said.

  “I mean it, Phillipa,” he shouted just outside my slightly open door. “That piece of scum is going away for this!”

  “I understand your sentiments, Mr. Lafayette, and I can assure you that Zeus Garro will go to jail for his crimes.” The staff sergeant hesitated. “But he has a solid shot at a reduced sentence and early parole for saving your daughter—”

  “HE DID NO SUCH THING,” Daddy bellowed. “He is the reason that my daughter is drugged up and lying damaged in a fucking hospital bed. He is the reason that Entrance is known as the hometown to a violent, drug-trafficking motorcycle gang. We are fucking lucky that water real estate is at a premium in the province and our education ranking is so high or else no one would ever live here. And do you know why that is, Harold? Because of fucking Zeus Garro.”

  Oh no.

  No way.

  My daddy was so not going to send my biker man to jail. I didn’t really know what he was talking about except that drugs were bad and so was violence, but I did know that my biker saviour was not a bad man. Bad men just didn’t throw themselves in front of seven-year-old girls to take a bullet for them.

  I was young but I wasn’t dumb.

  “Daddy,” I cried out, but my voice was weak in my dry throat.

  “If you would listen to what I’m telling you, Benjamin,” staff sergeant Danner tried again. “I’m telling you, Garro is going away for this. He killed a man in front of my fucking officers, shot him right in the goddamn head before we could even take stock of the situation. He’s going away. What I’m also telling you is that the man he shot in the head was the man who put a bullet in your daughter, the same bullet that went through Garro’s own chest before it landed in hers. You want to talk about the damage that bullet could’ve done if it hadn’t lost speed going through that barrel of a man first?”

  My daddy was silent after that.

  “Benjamin,” my mum said in her special soft voice that made him listen to her. “He deserves to go to prison but think of the silver lining. If Louise wasn’t hurt like this we wouldn’t know there was something wrong with her.”

  My ears stung to hear it, but I wasn’t surprised. I’d been sick for a long time now even though no one believed me when I said I felt bad because I didn’t have a runny nose or anything.

  “We don’t know anything yet, Phillipa,” my daddy told her sternly.

  “We do. The doctors are concerned, honey. It took her too long to stop bleeding, she lost consciousness for two days. That is not normal. And then there’s the fact that she has been complaining about pain for a few months now—”

  “She’s looking for attention, Phillipa, that’s all.”

  “Whether or not that may be the case, the doctors are running tests and it is not looking good.”

  “Being stubborn again, are we, son?” The wheezy old voice of my grandpa came through my door and I straightened automatically in my bed. Grandpa was stern, but he was also super nice to me and he always gave me lollipops if I recited Bible passages correctly.

  “Even you can’t find absolution for Zeus Garro, Dad,” my daddy said.

  “Maybe not, but I can find it for him in this situation. Without this incident, how long would it have taken you to realize that Louise is seriously ill. I’ve said it once, I’ll say it one hundred times, just because someone is not who you want them to be, it does not mean they are incapable of good.”

  My daddy snorted. “I will not thank a felon for saving my daughter, not least of all because he did not even save her! She’s laying in a hospital bed with a bullet wound through her shoulder! How am I the only rational person here who sees what a monster that man is? He shouldn’t even be allowed to rest in the same hospital as my daughter after what he and his gang have done.”

  “Benjamin, that is enough,” my mum said. “People can hear you. Think what they might say?”

  “No, you’re right. We need to spin this just right and I’m too furious to think with a level head right now. We’ll go home and talk about what to tell the press. Harold, I don’t want any of those vultures in here trying to get to my daughter. Lord knows what she’ll say to them.”

  “Benjamin.” My grandpa tsked. “She’s just a girl.”

  “A girl who needs to grow up. What in the world she was doing running away from her parents and into the fray, is beyond me.”

  Their voices faded as they walked down the hall away from my room. I lay stiff even though it hurt my arm, because wh
enever my parents made me want to cry, I told myself to be still and be calm. Crying was for babies like my little sister, Bea. Not for me. I was a Lafayette and Lafayettes didn’t cry. Not even when they got shot, not even when they got sick and not even when their family left them all alone in the hospital. I lay there for a long time until Nanny came in with Bea to check on me. They both smiled and laughed when they put cartoons on the little TV on the wall but I didn’t feel like smiling. The only thing that made me feel better was the Snickers bar that a super nice nurse named Betsy snuck in for me.

  Later, Nanny was somewhere talking to the doctors because they never did that kind of stuff in front of me. Our neighbor, Mrs. Brock, already picked up Bea and took her home. I was alone but I was happy because I was mad at Daddy for hating my guardian monster and Nanny wouldn’t stop touching me and saying stuff in French that was supposed to be nice, but I didn’t understand.

  I was supposed to stay in the kid part of the hospital because they were keeping me overnight but I didn’t like it there. There were a lot of kids and a lot of them cried. It was sad and it was even sadder that the nurses and staff tried to cover it up with bright colours and lots of toys. It wasn’t a happy place and it kind of freaked me out.

  If I stayed in my room like I was supposed to, it was even scarier and sadder because grandpa said I had a good imagination and I did, so it was easy to picture all the monsters crawling around outside, just waiting for me to fall asleep, so they could eat me.

  Besides, Daddy had mentioned that my guardian monster was in the hospital too so maybe I could find him and tell him to run away.

  My arm really hurt when I moved but it wasn’t too big a deal because my body had been hurting for a while, like my blood was on fire and I was a volcano about to erupt. I winced when I pulled the needle out of my hand and saw the really purple bruise there. It didn’t scare me though. I bruised really badly really easily.

  It wasn’t busy that night so no one noticed me when I walked down the halls and checked out what everyone was doing. People don’t really notice kids unless they’re in the way.