Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  He swallowed hard when I looked up at him after I landed lightly in the grass and made my way over.

  “You aren’t very discreet,” I said softly, almost kindly because I did feel badly for him in a strange way, and also because it amused me that I’d thrown him so off balance.

  “I need the money,” he explained, a pugnacious frown settling into his features. “I’ve got a full course load and no time to work.”

  I shrugged lightly. “I’m a full-time student, I volunteer at First Light Church, and I work.”

  “You’ve got your daddy’s money,” he pointed out, hoping to cut me with the reference to my deplorable deceased father.

  I smiled prettily at him, leaning in close up on my tiptoes because I was short even in heels, and he was taller. “Brett? You mention his name again, I’ll show you why I wore this costume to be ironic, okay?”

  Confusion played over his face like shadows.

  I laughed, pulling away enough to grab his hand and tug him toward the street. “You know, I didn’t think I’d have much fun tonight, but this was great.”

  Brett shook his head. “You’re the weirdest girl I’ve ever met. You’re not like…angry that I deal? Most chicks get their panties in a wad over it.”

  I laughed at him, feeling giddy and lovely. The night was clear and cold, the leaves wavering orange and red like flames flickering in the dark. I was out with a boy who was far less boring than he seemed, and I thought I might let him kiss me when he dropped me off at home.

  “Honey, if I hated every man involved with drugs, I wouldn’t have much of a home life,” I explained as I pulled him into my body against his car and wrapped my arms around his neck. “You obviously don’t know Entrance well if you think I’m your average good girl.”

  “Bea,” he said slowly, pulling at the end of my curls. “Look at you. How could you be anything but?”

  I arched a brow. “And you? Khakis and cocaine?”

  He laughed then, eyes crinkled shut, chin tipped back, and I liked him even more.

  Almost enough to forget about my years-long obsession with another man.

  But not quite.

  Even then, pressed tight to another man, I felt the chains around my heart tug hard as if I’d reached the end of slack and journeyed too far from him. I struggled to focus on the feel of Brett’s linen shirt beneath my hands, then struggled again wishing it was leather under my touch.

  “I’m dressed up,” Brett was explaining. “It’s a costume party.”

  “Oh?” I pushed him away slightly to study his outfit again. “Are you Chandler Bing or something? I think you forgot the sweater vest.”

  Brett laughed again, and the sound warmed my chest. It felt good to have one hundred percent of his consideration after a life of living in my lovely older sister’s shadow. It was such a simple thing, one man’s undivided attention, the wrong man’s regard, but I stretched toward it like a flower seeking the light.

  “You wanna get out of here?” he suggested in a throaty voice as he ran his fingers through the ends of my hair.

  “Yes, I was coming to find you so you could drop me off at home.”

  He frowned, and I laughed because he was so adorable and predictable.

  “I was never going to sleep with you tonight, Brett,” I informed him with mock solemnity. “In that way, at least, I really am a good girl.”

  I laughed lightly as he shook his head in bemusement. It felt astoundingly good to be wanted. So good, I was almost tempted to let him touch me.

  Maybe I would have if I thought he would do it right.

  Not light and tender, as befitting a virgin.

  I didn’t want anything close to that.

  Hard hands with rough calluses and strong teeth with a sharp bite. A man who would play my body not like an instrument, but like one of the weapons he wielded so well.

  Brett watched me as I slid away and got into the passenger seat of his beautifully restored orange Camaro before he made his own way to the driver’s seat.

  “So what does a guy have to do to get close to you?” he said as he settled in the car and turned the ignition. “Are you a three-dates-before-fucking kinda girl?”

  I almost gagged on the cliché. “I’m not going to give you a road map, Brett. Where’s the fun in that?”

  He slanted me a look but stayed quiet, obviously puzzling over the fact I wasn’t as easy to manipulate as he previously thought.

  I leaned back in the leather seat and watched as the rain started to ping against the windshield, fat drops round as human tears. It rained often in the autumn and winter seasons in Entrance, but I was filled with a renewed love for the weather whenever it came. I was enchanted by the rain, the way it washed things clean and nourished the land. Growing up in the church as I did, my biblical teachings had lent the rain an almost divine connotation, and since I was young, I’d always believed it heralded good things. For God withheld the rain when He was wronged and let it shed after a show of faith.

  “You’re not as good a guy as I originally thought,” I pointed out. “To me, that’s a good thing.”

  His laughter was edged with bitterness. “You don’t wanna know how bad I am.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Trust me, I’ve known worse than you.”

  “There’s not much worse than my family in this town, trust me. We haven’t been here long, but you’ll learn. If you’re so turned on by bad boys, you got that in me. Runs in our blood.”

  “Mmm,” I hummed, trying to stave off my laughter. “And what, may I ask, makes you all so bad?”

  Brett faced me, then stalled at a stop sign before a four-way crossroads. There was something dark in his face, something almost feral that made a shiver rip down my spine.

  “The Walshes,” he said after a long moment. “We make the best designer drugs from here to Saskatoon.”

  Fear skittered through me. “And you thought you’d expand west?”

  He blinked at me, thinking, assessing whether to trust me. “Maybe.”

  Suddenly, our flirtation, the slight frizz of attraction fell flat between us because I knew this boy sitting beside me either had a death wish or lacked a brain.

  “Have you heard of The Fallen MC?” I asked softly, barely above the patter of water on the metal roof. “This is the territory of their mother chapter. I don’t think they’ll take too lightly to infringement on their land, especially when it’s their backyard.”

  Brett laughed, his teeth flashing in the darkness, tinged orange by the lights on the dash. “We’ve been setting up shop in Vancouver for months now, and they haven’t done fuck all. We’re not afraid of them.”

  “You should be,” I said flatly, suddenly and adamantly uninterested in him.

  Foolishness was not sexy.

  There was a difference between being dangerous and in danger, a fine line that Brett didn’t seem to know he was straddling.

  “Bea…” he said from beside me, but whatever he might have wanted to tell me was lost in a cacophonic roar.

  One moment, I was staring out the passenger side window, fingering the silver streaks of rain on the pane of glass while we listened to the hard beat of Imagine Dragons streaming through the speakers.

  The next, there was a terrible, ear-splitting crack and boom.

  Then all I knew was pain.

  It was too immediate to pinpoint where it originated, how Brett had lost control of the car on the rain-slicked road or if someone had barreled full speed into us. I had no eyes to see, no body to save myself from the all-consuming pain. It felt as though I lived inside a flame because everywhere burned. I thought I might be screaming, but then the hurt finally hit its apex and blessed black descended.

  When I came to again, there was wind in my hair and rain on the skin of my right hand. I was unbearably cold after the heat of the fire that had consumed me. When I tried to stir, I realized my body was half in, half out of the car.

  Not through the door.

  But through
the windshield, shattered completely, but somehow intact, crumpled around my body, both soft and sharp.

  Pain ripped through my torso as I moved, breath wet and rattling as it exploded through my throat.

  Idly, fogged by pain and shock, I wondered if I was going to die.

  There was blood somewhere. I could smell the copper tang. It could have been mine.

  It could have been Brett’s, who was silent and somewhere behind the crushed glass in the driver’s seat.

  I opened my mouth to speak his name, but only blood came forth, salt and iron on my tongue.

  A sound drew me from myself. I angled my head, each minute movement hideously painful, to see a man walking toward the car. He was tall, all in black, covered in it as if cloaked.

  I marvelled distantly that Death was there to receive me.

  He walked purposely but not hurried, not panicked. I wanted to scream at him to hurry because there was pain and so much fear in my heart.

  I didn’t want to die.

  I’d thought about it all my life, imagined its embrace, if it was warm or cold, sweet or shocking, but I found myself completely unprepared for it.

  I wasn’t even twenty-one.

  I had a mother who had already lost her husband and her reputation.

  A sister who had already been through more than a person should in a single lifetime.

  They didn’t deserve to mourn me.

  Not yet.

  “Help,” I croaked as the man drew close. The fingers on my oddly tingling hand twitched as I tried to reach for him.

  He didn’t say a word. Instead, face blotted out by the ink of night on a street without lamps, he cocked his head as if studying me.

  Then suddenly, an explosion of economic movement, he was on top of the car, heavily booted feet braced on the hood. I whimpered when he bent low and reached for me.

  Death, death, death, I thought frantically.

  I was going to die.

  Only, the hands that reached for me were not ghostly.

  They were lean, strong muscles over long bones, the skin white against the black of tattoos stamped on the knuckles, the back of the palm.

  Blearily, I blinked at the sight of the Triquetra stamped on one hand.

  I knew that symbol. Life, death, and rebirth.

  A sob rolled through me and fell out of my mouth, my spittle pink as it exploded against the glass.

  “Priest,” I rasped then whimpered as something shifted in my chest and seemed to stab me through the heart.

  “Quiet,” he ordered calmly as he adjusted his body, leaning forward, arms descending into the car through the hole my body had made so he could carefully brace my chest and grasp my hips.

  I sobbed as he started to shift me, and he stopped on a vicious curse.

  “Gotta get you out of here,” he said. “The car’s gonna blow.”

  As if coaxed by his words, my ears tuned into the sound of dripping, the hiss of something essential escaping from the car as blood escaped from somewhere above my right ear.

  “Be still and give me your weight. Let me do the work,” Priest demanded coldly.

  A surgeon at work. He had no empathy for me at the moment because his entire mind was fixed on the problem.

  I held my breath in answer, then felt it rip from me like torn Velcro as he hoisted me carefully through the windshield. He had to shift back on his knees to clear me from the wreckage, but then he twisted to sit on his ass and carefully collected my limp, throbbing body in his arms.

  He was warm, and for a moment, I was confused by that. Wasn’t this Death? Was I not on the way to Heaven?

  “I thought death would be harder,” I admitted as my head lolled against his arm, my mind spinning in the confines of my broken skull like loose marbles.

  “Oh, it is,” he agreed. “You aren’t dying.”

  “Feels like it,” I said as I realized I was crying and that the warm darkness in my right eye was blood.

  “I know about death. I won’t let it take you.”

  I frowned because I was certain he had been Death himself, but then the stabbing pain in my chest dug deeper, and I gasped before I forgot how to breathe entirely.

  My world went black and white, then back into focus as he lowered us both to the sidewalk a good distance from the car. There was a calamitous sputter from the wreck, and the man only had time to curl over me protectively before there was a great boom as if a crater had opened in the earth.

  I stared up at the man who was not Death, but my savior, watching as flames exploded behind him so his head was cast in a fiery halo.

  Not Death.

  Priest McKenna.

  The Fallen MC’s ruthless enforcer.

  The man without a heart.

  Kneeling over me like a knight pledged to serve me, to keep me safe from all harm.

  I blinked up at him, his hair the colour of the fire behind him, and let myself touch his bearded cheek.

  “You saved me,” I managed to say even though my consciousness was circling the drain.

  “No,” he said darkly as I closed my eyes and let my hand fall to the ground, giving up my fight against the hurt to embrace the blackness behind my lids. “I did this to you.”

  Priest

  This isn’t the story of a good man. A tale of redemption or salvation. I require none of the former and seek nothing of the latter.

  This is a story of a man without a conscience.

  A part of me wants to state I am also a man without a heart.

  But a very wise girl once told me, even Death has a heart.

  And didn’t that stick with me?

  Once, a long time ago, I was more human than monster. Probably, I was born with psychopathic tendencies. My childhood in the Church only heightened them, stripping the flesh off my bones year by year until I was only bone.

  When Zeus Garro, the prez of The Fallen MC found me, a bloodstained teen ravaged by scurvy and cramped from living in the hold of a freight ship for months, hiding behind crates, he took one look in my eyes and told me he thought I was a dead man walking.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  He was from a culture that bestowed unique names to their brethren, a new moniker for a new life. Usually, they evolved organically, a trait or funny story that gave birth to a new character, one clad in leather and inked with a tattered, winged skull.

  There was no waiting for me.

  I took the name of the monster who made me, who stripped me bare straight down to the dark heart of me, and made it mine.

  Priest.

  The sweet irony of my blasphemy thrilled me as much as I could be thrilled by anything. It amused me to strip the skin off an enemy of The Fallen and hear them beg for absolution from God when I’d done much the same at my darkest moments of misery.

  I knew, as they didn’t, that I was as close to God as they would ever come.

  After all, I was the one who escorted them to their Maker.

  I was on one such errand that dark, bitingly cold October night in Entrance, British Columbia. Autumn had descended swiftly that first week of the month, wrapping cold, cruel hands around the warm remnants of summer and killing it dead in a matter of days. Wind rushed through the flaming leaves and tore them ignobly from their trees. They crackled and flared brightly in swirls around my booted feet as I leaned against my 2009 FXSTB Night Train Harley, the matte black bike obscured perfectly in the shadows of the treelined suburban street. I was kitted out in black to match, a hoodie beneath my Fallen cut, leather gloves, and dark jeans.

  It wouldn’t do to be seen or, even worse, noticed.

  I was waiting, and I had been for three hours in the very dead of night when the rest of the good citizens of town were long gone to sleep.

  I didn’t mind the waiting.

  Predators never do.

  It was an intrinsic part of the hunt. The lull before the strike.

  It wasn’t passive or boring.

  It was tension itself, energy gathering momen
tum to unleash itself at the right moment.

  To a man like me, the waiting was as heady as that lingering moment before the first kiss, all electrifying chemistry and eager anticipation.

  Not that I’d ever felt that way about a kiss.

  Only about the woman I imagined kissing.

  The woman who was everything kind and lovely, completely devoid of sin.

  So, my opposite.

  We might as well have existed on different planets.

  Beatrice Lafayette saw everything through rose-tinted glasses, sometimes literally because she had a habit of wearing ridiculous sunglasses shaped like hearts and flowers.

  I saw everything as it was and would be. Waiting to die, tinged in the grey rot of time.

  She was not for me.

  To even entertain ideas of kissing that full, cotton candy pink mouth could have amounted to one of the most disturbed thoughts to ever cross my admittedly extremely disturbed mind.

  I tried not to let myself think beyond the possibility of a kiss.

  Because I was not a soft man or a kind soul.

  I was a killer fashioned by the hands of monsters. When I fucked, it was just as brutal as when I fought or just as coldly efficient as when I killed.

  I liked to choke the breath out of a pretty neck to heighten pleasure, paint pale skin in livid red bites, and play with a pussy until it was swollen, drenched in so much cum it ran down my wrist and my partners begged me brokenly to stop.

  There was no romance or flowers, no intimate smiles or…cuddles.

  All things Bea would want.

  Things she deserved.

  So I thought about that kiss for a fleeting moment as I leaned against my bike, then considered what a nineteen-year-old girl might be doing on a Friday night while I staked out my prey.

  Leaves crunched behind me, alerting me to someone’s presence.

  I didn’t turn, didn’t even flinch when a massive frame moved into sight at my periphery.

  “Looked for five minutes, could barely see you in the dark, and I was lookin’,” Wrath Marsden grunted as he crossed his arms and stared into the dead street before us. “Gotta admit, you’re good. Surprised your name’s not Ghost.”

  I let out a sharp exhale that was as much effort as I was going to expend on my indignancy.