Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  Wrath shifted beside me and irritation spiked through me. He was a big ass motherfucker, nearly as big as our prez, Zeus Garro, and he drew attention to himself through sheer size alone.

  I was tall and compacted with lean, sharp lines of muscle, but I moved like a shadow while my brother lumbered like a bear.

  “Don’t need you here,” I said, snapping open my curved Karambit blade while I fished the untouched block of cedar wood out of my pocket. I touched the tip of the steel to the soft wood without thinking, my fingers moving it with efficiency and purpose. I never knew what I would carve before I finished it. My hands spoke to the timber in a language I couldn’t translate in my head.

  “No,” Wrath agreed, crossing his thick arms over his chest, bracing his feet apart in a physical display of his desire to stay. “Asked Prez if I could come by. Figure I better start earnin’ my keep if I wanna stick around.”

  “As I said,” I repeated coldly. “I got this covered.”

  He ignored me. “Motherfucker dealers, eh? You think it’s a requirement they’re dumb as fuck or just coincidence?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that. In my opinion, most people were stupid.

  “Sellin’ drugs to minors, gettin’ girls hooked on coke to lock them into prostitution. We gave them a warnin’, they chose not to heed it.” My voice shifted seamlessly into the language of my brothers. I was a chameleon, if chameleons were armed with teeth, claws, and deadly intent. “He deserves to die. They all do.”

  “How’re you doin’ it?” Wrath asked with mild curiosity, like we were discussing the weather.

  He was the former enforcer for the disbanded Berserkers MC so he knew a thing or two about killing.

  But he was a blunt force instrument, all muscle and fury. No finesse in his torture, no art in his murder.

  He would never be as good as me.

  Not many could be, no matter how hard they might try. Most people, like Wrath, had some kind of social conscience, a voice in the back of their head that whispered what other people might think or feel about them.

  I didn’t have that voice.

  Just my own dark whisperings echoing in a vast, black abyss.

  “Car bomb,” I told him, looking down at my hands to see what they were fashioning. It was, unsurprisingly, a tombstone. I had a habit of carving them and anointing them with the name of the victim I was going to murder. There was peaceful satisfaction in burning them after the deed was done. “Make it seem like there was a malfunction in the exhaust. It’ll blow out the windows, the engine, and then, finally, explode.”

  “Not even a body to bury?” Wrath surmised with mild respect. “That’ll send a fuckin’ message.”

  I didn’t respond because that was obviously the point.

  “You gotta hand it to the Irish fucks, they’ve got balls,” Wrath mused as he shifted from foot to foot and cracked his knuckles. He was always moving, overfilled with restless, angry energy. The air around him buzzed like static and made my skin itch.

  “The Irish usually do.” I had no loyalty to my Irish kinfolk. We may have originated in the same place, but I left for a fucking good reason and put that version of myself behind me.

  Wrath’s eyes were hot on my cheek as he studied me, but I didn’t flinch or flap my gob just because his stare asked a question he was too chickenshit to give voice to.

  “You ever get nightmares, man?” he ventured finally. “You ever mourn the people you’ve killed?”

  “No,” I said flatly.

  Silence and then, bitter as coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup, “Never lost someone as a consequence of your violence. You do, you’ll dream of horrors.”

  “You need to sleep deep for dreams.” My voice was metallic, the clang of my robotic heart sharp in my speech. “I skim the surface of sleep, and I never fuckin’ dream.”

  “Lucky you,” Wrath muttered just as the sky opened up and rain began to float down.

  If I’d had a metaphorical heart, the kind poets and artists wax on about, I might’ve felt a pang in my chest of something like sympathy for my newest Fallen brother. He’d loved a woman who had been ripped away from him ruthlessly by his enemies. They’d tried to kill them both, but only succeeded with Kylie.

  It was a waking nightmare I doubted he had to sleep to dream of.

  I could understand this, but I couldn’t feel it.

  Simply it had nothing to do with me so I couldn’t bring myself to care very much.

  “It’s been a year and a half,” I said blandly as my ears caught the faint rumble of a vehicle barreling down Everett drive. “You should get over it.”

  Wrath startled slightly, his muscles flexing with a surge of fury, the instinct to pummel me to release some of his angst. Then he stilled, logic dousing the inflammatory response.

  He would not win if he tried to fight me and I would never forget that he’d tried.

  So he froze beside me and chewed through the surge of passion until it passed.

  “You’re a fuckin’ asshole,” he mumbled finally before letting loose a ragged sigh. “Shits me, I like you anyway. Every other fucker treats me like a rabid beast or beaten dog. You? You just don’t give a fuck about my past.”

  I shrugged a shoulder, mind trained on the car I could now see glinting orange down the street.

  “Show me how you detonate the device,” Wrath asked, and I could tell he was trying to bond with me, reach me on my own level.

  It made me smile, even if it was a small, tight curve of my mouth and a minuscule flutter of good humour in my chest. I tossed him the burner phone. “Tried and true. Hit send when they stop at the sign.”

  It was my olive branch. My attempt at recognizing his friendship and accepting it.

  Wrath stared at me again in that way he had, stripping away my skin like a scalpel to discover the contents of my blood. He nodded curtly, massive hands cupping the phone gently, like I’d given him a gift.

  I was glad he understood that I had.

  Killing people was my joy, and I’d passed it over to him. In my world, that practically made us best mates.

  The rumble of the old Camaro engine grew louder, taking up the entire airspace of the sleepy neighborhood. I turned to watch the car drive to its demise.

  The target was Brett Walsh, twenty-two years old, just a kid really.

  But that was the point.

  We’d warned Patrick and Brenda Walsh twice, which was one too many times, to stop their operation from seeping into Entrance.

  We’d heard even Javier Ventura, the mayor of Entrance and head of the Mexican cartel on the west coast of Canada, had issued his own warning.

  They’d made the conscious decision to die by not obeying.

  It was bad enough they were dealing their designer crap on our turf, but Brett had also sold to King and Harleigh Rose Garro’s half-sister, Honey. She was just eighteen, and the club had been trying to keep her safe and get her clean for the last year.

  Brett had ruined any progress they’d made with his cock and his coke.

  He had to pay.

  And I was the happy debt collector.

  The car was closer now, almost level with where Wrath and I stood veiled by the night dark and massive oaks. They were going fast leading up to the stop sign, passing in a streak of orange-like paint smeared against the nightscape.

  Too fast, really, to see the interior of the dim vehicle.

  But I was a human predator.

  A clinical psychopath.

  I blinked half as much as the rest and had instincts keener than a room full of psychologists.

  So I spotted something bright and glinting like moonlight caught in a jar on the passenger seat of the rigged Camaro.

  I opened my mouth as my hand snapped out to still Wrath’s fingers on the phone.

  But that bastard, he knew death, and he didn’t just embrace it.

  He ran toward it.

  His thumb was on the trigger before I could slap it from his fist, an
d a second later, my shout was drowned out by the muffled boom and sharp tear of the car exploding.

  For the first time in a long time, I felt my heart in my chest, beating too fast, too hard against its confines like a rioting prisoner.

  Something was wrong.

  Sound was distorted in my ears as I shoved Wrath and stalked toward the car. There was the hiss of gas leaking, the scattered pop of hot metal peeling off the frame and the tinkle of glass falling to the pavement.

  But no human noises.

  I prayed to a deity I hadn’t believe in since I was nine that my eyes had deceived me.

  That my mind, broken and warped as it was, had only transplanted her at the scene. I thought of her often, at strange intervals, in odd places like a ghost haunting my thoughts.

  That was it, I told myself even as I prowled toward the steaming metal wreck and rounded the front of the car.

  It wasn’t her.

  It couldn’t have been.

  Beatrice Lafayette would never be seen with a motherfucking loser like Brett.

  But there was no denying what lay before my eyes as I faced the car head-on.

  The safety glass of the windshield was webbed with fractures, a gaping hole blown straight through the middle by the body of a woman. Her blonde curls caught in the wind, waving like a white flag over her prostrate form. Bizarrely, she was wearing wings, giant feathered white things affixed to her back that wilted brokenly over her spine, the left one crumpled and tangled in the glass hole.

  My eyes burned, and my heart, it throbbed.

  Thump, thump. Thump, thump.

  I felt painfully alive the way I figured most people did the moment before they died.

  It was her.

  Bea.

  My Little Shadow, the woman who noticed me and studied me too much. The sunshiny girl who followed me around like a second shadow.

  There she lay.

  Broken and folded into the wrecked car like a savagely opened present.

  I sucked in a deep breath that tasted of ash and rain, then decided my course of action.

  The car was going to blow.

  I’d rigged it that way.

  And there was no way in fucking hell or heaven, any conceivable destiny on earth that I’d let this broken angel die like a criminal in the street.

  My boots landed with a clamour on the hood of the car as I jumped up to extract her, almost drowning out a faint whimper.

  Thank fuck, she was alive.

  “Priest,” she said, her voice so light, so sweet it unraveled like torn silk.

  My heart punched against my ribs, but I kept my calm.

  She was going to be okay.

  I ignored her as she muttered nonsensically while I carefully cut the left wing off her back so I could gently pull her from the windshield. She was boneless in my arms, head lolling, pupils blown wide open with an obvious concussion, but she was breathing.

  I listened to her breath stutter wetly through her bloody lips as I slid off the hood and made my way quickly away from the car, my arms immovable so I wouldn’t jostle her battered body. When I gauged we were far enough from the wreck, I dropped to my knees and curled my torso over her prone form seconds before the Camaro burped one last, rattling gasp and then tore into pieces from the force of the explosion.

  I could feel the heat of it break like a wave against my leather-clad back.

  “You saved me,” Bea whispered, one hand reaching for my face, the bones in her index finger broken and spliced through the skin.

  “No,” I protested, giving myself one pristine moment to listen to her breath, to feel her in my arms in a way I never would again. “I did this to you.”

  A moment later, she was out like a light. I shifted her body onto the grass, then looked up just as Wrath stalked toward me, gun out and face fierce with a grimace.

  “What a fuckin’ shitshow,” he grunted as he knelt beside me, his eyes running over Bea. “Fucking, fuck.”

  “I’m going to kill them all,” I vowed as I moved a clump of bloody hair out of Bea’s face and then shucked my leather jacket to put it under her head. “Every last Walsh and every single one of their associates.”

  “Priest, man…” Wrath tried to reason with me, but I couldn’t hear him.

  I was singularly focused on one thing.

  Revenge.

  Which is why I heard the cough and responded to it before Wrath could do anything to stop me.

  Brett Walsh.

  Somehow the cockroach had crawled from the wreck, or been thrown far enough to escape the flames that now leapt from the metal, as orange as the charred paint peeling off the exterior. His skin was all blood and abrasion. Even from a distance, I could tell there was something impaled in his belly, that soft place that meant a long, painful death if it wasn’t treated.

  He deserved that, but I wasn’t willing to give it to him.

  Unthinking, unfeeling, cold and programmed by violence, I was up and stalking toward him. My Karambit blade slid from the sleeve of my hoodie into my palm. It felt good to wrap my fingers around it as I approached the sick fuck who’d put Bea in danger.

  Who’d put her in the path of me.

  I knelt casually over his broken, dying body and stared into his face.

  One eye was swollen shut, but the other was clear, black with panic.

  “Help me,” he gurgled.

  There was a large piece of metal, probably cast off from the door, in his left side, and his ribs were crushed from the impact against the steering wheel.

  He was dying.

  I ignored his squeal of pain as I stood, taking his foot with me as I went.

  Then I ignored his howl of outrage as I dragged him over to where Wrath was tending to Bea. My brother watched me without judgment as I dropped the piece of shit to the ground at her feet. I squeezed his face in my hands and forced him to look at her.

  “You see this?” I demanded coldly, my knife at his throat, already deep but keeping the blood at bay by sheer pressure. “You see what you’ve done. Women like this are untouchable, you motherfucking swine. Women like this are not for the likes of you or me.”

  “Don’t fucking kill me for this, she’s just a girl,” Brett pleaded. “I have money. Lots of money! I’ll pay you whatever you want. Fuck! Just let me go.”

  I barked out a cold, hard laugh that hurt my chest and sliced an inch across his butter soft neck, spilling blood down his front.

  “You crossed The Fallen MC,” I hissed into his ear, twisting my knife just to hear him groan. “And now, you’ve personally crossed me. I’m going to end you here, and then I’m going to end your family and everyone you loved because this girl is worth more than you and your scum family combined.”

  The sharp odor of urine perfumed the air as Brett Walsh whimpered and shook against me, tears falling from his one good eye.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  “I’m not,” I said, levering him higher into the air by his hair, ready to end him.

  I wanted to feel his blood flow hot over my hands. Maybe then I could rid myself of the vision of Bea, angelic as heavenly death caught up in all this ugliness.

  “Priest.” The soft, silken voice of my broken angel cut through my laser focus.

  I looked down at Bea, her head in Wrath’s lap, her big blue eyes gone black with terror and pain. She studied the careless way I held her date and the deadly intent in my gaze as I stared back at her. I let her see the depths of my black soul, the absolute resolve I had to kill this motherfucker in front of her, for her.

  Wordlessly, she inclined her head.

  A second later, before Brett could draw another breath, my knife was across his throat and his blood splashed to the ground, anointing the earth at Bea’s feet like a sacrifice made for the gods and goddesses of old.

  And through it all, we watched each other, Bea and me, locked together in this death in a way I felt echo into the future of our lives, linking us in a way I’d never be able to f
orget.

  I knew then, as I’d only been curious about it before, that Beatrice Lafayette was going to be mine.

  Bea

  The sharp, antiseptic scent in my nostrils when I finally swam sluggishly from unconsciousness into a painful wakefulness meant I knew immediately where I was. The Garros visited St. Katherine’s Hospital so frequently, I joked with Loulou that we should start a loyalty program.

  She hadn’t laughed. In fact, when I woke up in scratchy white hospital sheets with a residual ringing in my ears and pain throbbing like strobe lights under my skin, Loulou was yelling.

  My sister did not yell.

  Mostly because people usually did what she asked. It had something to do with her intense beauty, but also her quiet confidence and kindness. She was the kind of woman who understood the power of the feminine mystique and had long ago learned to control it.

  So, I was shocked she was yelling until I saw exactly who she was yelling at.

  Priest stood just outside the door, hands loose at his sides, face completely placid even though a passionate, angry Garro was shouting in his face.

  He just took it.

  And Zeus, who sat in a chair in the corner of the room, let it happen.

  “There is nothing you can say to excuse this,” Loulou was yelling, tears in her voice, her anger on the edge of collapsing into sheer grief. “There is nothing that will ever make me forgive you for letting this happen to her.”

  Priest blinked.

  “Easy, little warrior,” Zeus warned quietly, but he didn’t move from his chair. “Don’t say somethin’ you can’t take back.”

  “He deserves worse than my words,” she cried dramatically, her arm flinging in my direction. “Look at what he’s done to her!”

  Her eyes widened as she caught sight of me awake and watching.

  “Bea,” she breathed before launching herself at the bed. Despite her eagerness, her hands fluttered gently against my face like butterfly wings as she checked me out. “Beatrice.”

  “Hey,” I whispered even though my throat ached. “How’s my favourite sister?”

  I watched her blue eyes, bright like the ocean under a noon sun, flood with tears.

  “I thought you were going to die on me,” she admitted. “And I know, that is one tragedy I wouldn’t survive.”