The Kingdom Has Fallen

Introduction

"You have to come back."

His sister was not a little girl anymore but sometimes he swore that she still behaved like she was five. She was stubborn and didn't listen to a damn thing he said, at least she didn't now. When she had been little she had been a bit of a sit in the corner type, not wanting to be noticed. She was the kind of child that was nervous when she got called on in school and followed her big brother around like a kind of morphed shadow, scared to be alone yet equally as terrified to be around people.

But that was not the same girl that he had come back to after he got back from his deployment. In fact, Charlie, the battered and tired war-torn hero, hadn't come back to her at all. She had upped and left their home, their town, their state, like it had been plagued and maybe it had been, even back then. He had come back to the little West Texas town just to find out that she had left for school without a single word to their father. Granted their father didn't deserve much but he deserved something, if only someone that would take care of him and his decrepit kidneys as they failed him in the mid-portion of his lives, determined to leave him just like his wife, son, and then final daughter had.

It wasn't as if she didn't have a right to be angry or stubborn. He knew what happened in the dark recesses of that house, the secrets that were hidden in the yellowing, peeled wallpaper and in the washing machine, shoved in there are if the sides would hide the ugly truth that the rest of the town so blatantly knew and even more brazenly ignored. Charlie knew what their father, Domer, had been like after the sudden death of his wife. It was enough to drive anyone over the deep end, most of all when everyone knew about it and was full of a thinly veiled pity. But the older of the two siblings had learned to forgive him for his harsh reactions to the simplest of things. It was a pity that Piper couldn't.

He sighed as he heard her grumble over the phone. They were hundreds of miles apart and he could tell that she was nervously fanning the edges of a file folder in between her long fingers, only half listening and praying for the night that one of them would eventually give in and say yes instead of the stubborn heels in the ground ways that they had both always given.

"There's always some crisis that I have to come back for Charlie." Her voice sighed through the phone, a twinge of annoyance running through her at the constant prodding. It was borderline manipulation to her, to poke and her again and again.

He shook sweaty mop of dark hair, crammed into a corner of the bar so that the others, his friends, his 'brothers' couldn't hear him and the pleading that he was doing with the stubborn girl that they had all once known. It was the only family that he had now that his sister was so far away, so terrifyingly out of his reach. Sometimes he had Domer, but as much as he tried to forgive him there was still an unspoken tension. Even though he and Piper could be just as strained, she was his sibling. There was a different bond there, one that people got when they went through the hardships of life together but then drifted farther and farther away from one another. His brothers, even though they weren't blood, filled that hole. But now that the drug outbreak was having these unforeseen consequences, he felt the draw to have his sister there with him, nestled under a protective leather wing, be safe with him.

Liam's brown eyes found him, sun-stained lines that were a bit too old for his actual face creasing in worry. Charlie held up and hand to indicate that it was all going to be alright. That was always his motto: 'It will all turn out all right in the end'. It didn't matter if it was with the cops, with their gun running, or with their girls and anything that they gave them.

"Not this kind of crisis Piper." He reminded the distracted voice on the other end of the line. "It's not about Domer. It's about you getting somewhere safe. Haven't you been watching the news? Seen what people are doing to each other?"