Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  “Priest,” I rasped.

  His fingers flexed around my neck then loosened to a soft collar so I could breathe easy.

  “You got a death wish I don’t know about?” he demanded coldly, shaking his head once, hard enough to dislodge the hood. It fell back to reveal his thick, lush red hair and the pale, narrow set of his beautiful eyes.

  He looked like the reaper come to collect my heart and put it on a string he’d wear around his neck. As if he wanted to punish me for my stupidity in the same breath he wanted to be the only one ever responsible for my pain.

  “Maybe,” I told him honestly. “Lately, I’ve been…restless.”

  “Death’ll put an end to that sure enough,” he agreed, but the tension in his jaw made his words click robotically against his teeth. “You can’t do shit when you’re in the ground.”

  “Actually, I’d like to be cremated. Maybe even made into a tree. Did you know you can do that now? Lila told me about it.”

  Priest blinked at my babbling. He had absurdly long, curly lashes the colour of fine copper.

  “I coulda killed you, Bea,” he told me as if I was an idiot. “I coulda killed you so many different ways, and you would have deserved it for bein’ so stupid. What were you thinkin’?”

  “I was thinking you were in here.” I hesitated, then slowly lifted a hand, the way you would with a rabid dog, and wrapped it lightly over the wrist of his hand that held my neck. “I wanted to thank you.”

  His flinch was only a micro-expression, a tightening of his mouth, a flickering of his left eye that he couldn’t quite staunch, but I was used to Priest. I’d become an expert at reading his minuscule ticks and mining them for gold.

  “Nothin’ to thank me for.” Abruptly, he let go of me and took a large step back, the wall at his back the only thing stopping him from retreating farther.

  It was a narrow space. There was no place for either of us to run and it was difficult to tell, just then, who wanted to flee more badly.

  In my own way, I supposed, I was terrorizing Priest just as much as he was used to being a terror to others.

  My kindness toward him was an aberration he wasn’t accustomed to.

  It only made me want to swaddle him up in my love and never let him go.

  I stepped toward him.

  He scowled, his gorgeous face twisting into an expression that would have scared the socks off Jack the Ripper.

  It worked differently on me.

  I felt that intensity warm my belly, heavy between my legs. It made me want his hand back around my throat so he could feel the siren’s call of my rapid pulse and know I was so affected by him.

  “Of course, I have to thank you,” I said softly. “You saved my life.”

  “I nearly killed you.” His voice was hollow without even a hint of emotion.

  I bit my lip, then went for it. “Sometimes, a near-death experience can be eye-opening. It can make you realize things you never thought you could or should want.”

  “Want is not need. Be satisfied with the essentials. Hopin’ for more will only bring you sufferin’.”

  “Is that what happened to you?” I asked on a breath, shocked by my audacity.

  My gasp was cut off as Priest surged forward suddenly, his hand back at my throat, this time bringing me closer instead of pushing me away.

  I didn’t think he was aware of the way his thumb brushed back and forth over my jugular, testing my pulse. My mouth was open, breath hot and fanning across his face, so close I could’ve counted the cinnamon flecks on his cheeks if I’d had better light. I could taste him on my tongue, the spice of him, the faint bitterness of tobacco.

  I wondered wildly how he would taste, of animal or man.

  Unconsciously, my back arched to bring us closer, but he kept a careful distance between us. A sliver of air that had substance.

  “You don’t know anythin’ ’bout me, Bea Lafayette,” he growled, his voice so abrasive it scored goose bumps into my flesh. “You think you can follow me around like a little shadow and I wouldn’t notice it? I notice everythin’. Even little girls without a brain in their head.”

  I tried not to let the insult land, but my parents had always called Loulou the smart one, the pretty one, better than me in all aspects. I didn’t care about being pretty, though people seemed to think I’d grown into my looks. I did care about my intelligence.

  I clung to the capacity of my mind the way a desperate, drowning man clings to the lip of a ship. It was the basis of my confidence, the crux I wanted my life to hinge upon.

  So it damned me that in some ways, Priest was right.

  I’d been a fool to sneak around some creepy motel room searching for a killer, even if I’d known that killer since I was a girl.

  I’d been a fool to think that he could care about me.

  A bitter little laugh plumed between us like toxic fumes.

  Priest’s scowl tightened, the creases between his brow black lines like horns in the shadows. He gave me a little shake as if to rattle something loose in my head. “You don’t give a shit about your safety, but you care what I think about you. That’s the problem right there. I exist. I am a valuable tool. But I am not a man. Not like you think I am. Don’t go expectin’ anythin’ like that from the likes’a me. You get me? There’s nothin’ here, and there will be nothin’ here ’cause I got nothin’ to give.”

  I swallowed thickly against the surge of disappointment that crawled over the back of my tongue bitter as bile.

  Something in my expression made Priest even more frustrated, his thumb digging deeply into my pulse point. He studied me with those eerie, unblinking eyes for a long minute, the only sound the harsh rasp of my breath and the thud of my erratic heart I was sure both of us could hear.

  “You’re an eejit,” he finally said gruffly, his eyes pinned to mine and so pale a green even in the shadows that they seemed to glow. Vaguely, I recalled eejit was Irish slang for idiot. “’Cause there’s a mess’a people who care for you and you’re willin’ to toss it away for nothin’. You fuck with your life, you fuck with theirs. You think your family hasn’t been through enough?”

  “They feel the same way about you,” I said once I found my voice, somewhere in the depths of my roiling belly. “Everyone cares about you, Priest. Not…not just me.”

  There was a second––blink and I would have missed it––when something like hunger flashed through his eyes. It wasn’t a visceral, physical yearning, but something more metaphysical.

  It occurred to me that Priest’s greatest fear and greatest desire was accepting love and comfort. Perhaps he worried it would soften his edge, like a blade held too close to a flame. Maybe he’d been burned by it in the past and carried the scars under his skin like armour. Or, worst of all, I thought, maybe he had never experienced any kind of love at all.

  “Loving me is a fate worse than death,” he warned me, hatches battened down so he was once again a living sculpture, breathing but unanimated.

  I felt his words like a blow to my chest. I ached for this man, this man who believed he deserved so little.

  Before I could stop myself, I stepped back slightly, just enough to loosen Priest’s grip on my throat, and then lurched forward, clumsily launching my mouth up to his. I landed awkwardly, my mouth parted around the surprisingly plushness of his lower lip.

  I was kissing him.

  Kissing Priest.

  Like a struck flint, my body ignited in all-consuming flames. Thoughts burned clean to ash and all that remained was heat, fixed at the point of our contact.

  For one glorious moment, the span of one monumental beat of my heart, Priest let me kiss him.

  The next, there was a brief flash of pain at my lip, then I was moving.

  Hand to my throat still, an iron collar, he propelled me back against the wall, and with a strange mixture of gentleness and rigidity, he pulled me forward and pushed me back again, as if to underscore his point.

  Then he was on the other
side of the narrow hall, staring at me like a cornered animal, vicious and unsettled.

  We stared at each other in the grimy pink light.

  I noticed, as I licked my lips, that he’d bitten me in his haste to get away. The tang of copper exploded on my taste buds. My hand flew to my mouth, thumb to the little, broken welt in my bottom lip. The pale pad came away smeared with red.

  I looked over the small evidence of his violence into Priest’s eyes.

  There was a vibrating stillness to his posture, a coiling of muscles and potential energy just waiting to explode into action. He cocked his head slightly to the left, eyes narrowing as he watched me.

  Slowly, deliberately, I brought my thumb back to my mouth and delicate as a kitten, licked the blood off my flesh.

  He growled.

  A low, barely audible purr of noise rolling through his chest.

  As if a string connected us, I found myself shivering with the vibration of that sound and let out a resonant hum of pleasure.

  Priest pushed off the wall slightly, then paused, as if caught between two dueling ropes.

  I almost had him.

  So close.

  I was toying with a creature that was more monster than man, but I’d never felt more alive. More aroused. The place between my thighs I’d never been very interested in was slick with moisture, the tips of my breasts so tightly furled they throbbed.

  I almost had him.

  My heart thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings as I brought my saliva-slicked thumb back to my lips and purposely smudged the blood over my mouth like macabre lipstick.

  His chest was discernably rising and falling now, great, calculated breaths dragged into his lungs in an effort to calm the beast that stirred there.

  I wanted him to come out and play so badly, I shook with it.

  Still, he didn’t move.

  My tongue peeked out slowly, shyly, to prod at the wound as I assumed a more languid position against the wall, muscles lax, head tipped so slightly to the side to expose my throat.

  The way a submissive wolf might do to its alpha.

  The air went electric a fraction before he moved, sinuously, predatory, stalking the three paces across the hall. His hand went up to my neck at the same time his head bent to bring his mouth to mine.

  He didn’t kiss me.

  Instead, he carefully took my split lip between his teeth and tugged slightly. A bead of blood pooled from the wound, and Priest, sensually, almost lazily, licked it from my mouth.

  I gasped, my mouth blooming open naturally, begging for more.

  And for the first time in all my years of knowing him, ascetic, controlled Priest, he indulged.

  My God, he ate at my mouth as if it was a lush fruit, licking up my spilled blood, diving deeper to taste the silken edge of my tongue with his, to explore the recess of my mouth. He ate at me as if I was his to devour.

  I made low, whimpering, shameless noises that I couldn’t control. I was desperate to touch him, but too concerned it would shatter this perfect moment and remind him of his control. So I just hung there, pinned to the wall by the strong hand around my throat asserting just enough exquisite pressure to make my blood sing.

  And I let him kiss me.

  I let him ruin me so surely in that one, long, luscious kiss that I knew nothing else would ever do.

  I needed this.

  Priest and his dark, ferocious need. His cold, calculating mind locked like warring antlers with mine.

  Lord, but I would eschew everything I knew to exist forever in this cruel, claiming embrace.

  And then, it was over.

  Even though our only points of contact had been our fused mouths and that straining, edgy hand on my neck, my body felt sluiced with ice water when he pulled away.

  I watched, still mired in the aftershock of that earth-shattering kiss, as he wiped that cruel, lovely mouth with the back of his hand. As if he needed to be rid of my taste from his lips.

  Boy, that hurt.

  He stared at me, so completely dispassionate, I wondered woozily if I’d hallucinated the entire embrace. When he moved, it was back into the bathroom, his gait efficient and controlled as he disappeared behind the door. I watched through the thin crack between the door and its hinges as he pushed the shower curtain back and bent to retrieve something heavy from the basin of the bathtub. He reappeared moments later with a large black plastic wrapped shape hefted over his broad shoulder.

  There was no mistaking the shape of the body within it.

  Or the slight splatter of blood on the white tape holding it closed.

  In the hand not occupied in keeping the dead body balanced on his shoulder, Priest held a leather saddle bag, the white top of a bleach bottle poking out of the flap.

  I pressed myself to the wall and my hand to my stomach as he maneuvered past me in the narrow space without hesitation.

  Not one blink or acknowledgment of my presence.

  Without a single look back, Priest stepped over the broken door to the room and exited with his bagged corpse into the ink dark of night.

  I watched him go with my broken fingers unconsciously dipped in the blood of my torn lip, anointing the cast with my blood.

  It didn’t taste like blood in my mouth. It tasted like faith, like distilled divinity. It tasted this way, I knew with dawning rightness, because it tasted like us.

  Bea

  When I was little, God was my best friend.

  I was a lonely child. My sister was mostly in the hospital, my parents preoccupied with their respective social lives, our rotation of European nannies the only constant presence in my life.

  So, my Grandpa became my closest familial bond and with him came God.

  He was my grandpa’s first love, even before my grandma, who passed on when I was only six.

  The first consequential book I read was the Bible and then, when I finished that and expressed interest in more, my grandpa gave me the Quran, the three sacred texts of Judaism referred to as the Tanach, and the Sutras of Buddhism. I can still remember being small, my legs too short to reach the floor when I sat in the pews, kicking my Mary Janes back and forth as I asked my grandpa all the spiritual questions of my youth.

  Was there one God or different Gods for different religions?

  Why did God let people die?

  Where did they go?

  Why was there so much suffering if God was good?

  Why did God make Loulou so sick?

  My grandpa didn’t mind my critical questions. He was patient, calm, and filled with gratification as he spoke about his Christian God. Even later, after Loulou was diagnosed for the second time with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, after our father hit her for loving the wrong man and cast her out of the house, after he himself was revealed to be corrupt and then murdered in cold blood, my grandpa maintained that God was good, but he did not castigate me for distancing myself from the Lord.

  By the time I was a teen, God was not my best friend. I’d shed that romanticism along with my perception that my father was a hero and my mother a princess, as well as that childish notion that good people deserved good things.

  I’d learned the truth of life. That there was no great power looking out for you, no fate preordained in the stars that controlled your life to the letter.

  Life was more luck than destiny, more choice than subjugation.

  Life was quite simply what you made of it.

  I’d determined to make mine happy, no matter the setbacks.

  Still, I attended First Light Church every Sunday for service to listen to my grandpa preach about the finer points of his religion, about love and charity, about community and acceptance. I loved to sit in the same front pew I had as a girl, close my eyes, swing my legs and listen to that melodic, reverent cadence of his voice pulling wisdom from the Bible. I loved the echoing silence hovering in the peaks and turrets of the old stone structure and the veneration emanating from the walls as if years of worship had imbued the brick and mortar with
sentient feeling.

  It soothed that restless darkness in my chest, like a lullaby for my demons.

  I loved the community too. My grandpa’s flock hadn’t turned their backs on my mother and me after the scandal of my father’s death. Far from it, they’d turned up at our little rented bungalow after we were turned out of the mayor’s mansion and brought with them food and endless support.

  So, First Light remained an integral part of my life.

  I sat in the front pew as my grandpa finished his sermon about embracing self-love. My mother was beside me, dressed beautifully, not a hair out of place, but I could see the shimmer in her eyes as the words resonated with her as deeply as they did with me.

  “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” Grandpa quoted from Romans 12:2 and then looked out over the gathering in that way he had of somehow looking everyone simultaneously in the eye. “We must not all be exactly alike to live a life worthy of God’s grace. Instead, we must follow the path our hearts set out for us so that we might find fulfilment in ways more than just spiritual, but equally profound.”

  I considered that as he said his final blessing, and everyone echoed, “Amen,” before dispersing into their social groups.

  It shocked me to realize that I had been conforming to an old sect of beliefs and social mores that were no longer relevant. I was not the mayor’s second daughter, the good girl relegated to the shadows. I had things of import to offer the world, complicated, beautiful things as unique to me as my own fingerprint.

  I’d chained my dark thoughts and natural deviancy like some rabid beast inside my chest and never given it room to breathe. It made me wonder if those predilections had grown stronger because of my neglect and now, temperamental and too big for that cage, they knocked recklessly at the door to my soul dying to get out.

  Naturally, my mind went to Priest and our kiss the day before. My fingers traced the healing split in my lip as I remembered his sheer ferocity coupled almost contradictorily with his restraint. He was such a powerful man, strong enough to break my neck with a twist of his tattooed hands, but instead, he’d only shackled me with one. He let me feel all that considerable violence leashed tenuously by his control. Whether or not the control stemmed more from his loyalty to the club or from his lack of desire for me, I wasn’t sure, but the romantic in me hoped it was the former.