The next, delivered to my lecture hall during my abnormal psychology class by a student who claimed someone paid him fifty bucks to get the gift-wrapped package to me.
One on the porch of my house, one at the library while I studied, another to the Entrance PD station while I was giving my statement to the police there, another to the parking lot of the Van PD station when I was there to give a separate telling of the events.
Body parts everywhere.
I didn’t open the packages anymore, but the cops asked me to identify the body parts through pictures when they interviewed me after each delivery. They tapped my phone, sent cops on routine routes by the Garro’s house, and informed the university of the situation.
Everywhere, people watched me, hoping to catch the killer.
In ten days, they’d come no closer.
Officer Hutchinson, a friend of The Fallen and one of the senior cops in Entrance, had told Zeus a profiler claimed the killer was most likely a middle-aged man who suffered socially, specifically with women, so he took out his aggression and repressed sexual desires on his female victims.
I’d researched murderers and psychopaths long enough in my studies and in my free time to know that the profiling was a template, one they applied to almost every serial killer before they garnered more details.
The police presence in my life did not make me feel safer.
Priest did.
True to his word, he haunted me.
Loulou didn’t like it, but Priest acted as if she didn’t exist. Where I went, he went, stalking me like it was his profession.
I knew he technically worked at Hephaestus Auto, that his exacting hands made him one of the best mechanics at the shop, but for the last ten days, he was with me nearly every moment save Sunday at First Light Church. We didn’t discuss it, but Priest made sure another brother was available for church duty. I knew there was something there, something sinister in his memory and its connection to religion, but I didn’t press. I wasn’t stupid. He was entertaining the idea of more with me only tenuously and there was no way I’d threaten it by asking invasive questions, by peeling back old scars.
It amused me to see how my university friends and peers responded to the long, red-haired man with tattoos of death motifs stamped all over his freckled flesh. Those who had the balls to look at him for longer than a second were met with those cold, pale eyes, unblinking and untranslatable. He always sat by the door to the classroom, thick thighs spread too wide in the little seat, large hands too big for the little desk attached to the right side of each chair. He whittled when he was bored, and the one professor who made a stink about it was subjected to his scathing glare. I’d had to share the note from the police allowing him in class with me in order to get her to let him stay.
Psychopaths, Professor Wells reminded me quietly after reading the note and handing it back, were chameleons mimicking our own emotions back at us. They understood feeling only in abstract, not in personal identification. Whatever trust I might have placed in this man, she urged me to reconsider.
I smiled at her, patted her hand in thanks, and flipped my curled ponytail over my shoulder as I’d practically skipped back to my seat. It was nice to know my armchair psychologist diagnosis of Priest as a psychopath was confirmed by a professional.
And when the professor looked at Priest?
He used the blade of the small dagger he whittled with to clean under his fingernails then winked––winked––at her.
I couldn’t stop the giggle in my throat, though I did hide it behind my hand.
It was a weird time.
I was scared and uneasy, constantly vigilant about my surroundings, carving out time every day to practice defending myself with Priest. I hadn’t slept in my own home or been surrounded by my things for almost two weeks. Sampson was staying with King and Cressida, and I went by every day to feed Delilah.
But I had Priest.
Finally.
If one can even claim possession of a man like Priest.
At times, he looked at me as if through me, as if I didn’t exist. At first, it hurt me to see that because I could feel the lurch of my heart every time I looked at him. But then I studied closer and noticed he only ignored me when he was focused on a task, when he was assuring we were safe.
That was what made him so savage and brilliant. He wouldn’t let anything get in the way of his agenda.
It might not have been an average girl’s dream, but I was freaking thrilled to be the obsession of this particular psychopath.
The other times, in the rare snatches of time we’d had alone together, I saw a different side of the Irish enforcer than I ever had before. He wasn’t softer, because he didn’t have that in him. If anything, he was more intense, scary almost in his laser focus. But that focus was all on me. As if his entire world had narrowed to the dimensions of my body, and his only motive in life was to get to the bottom of my soul.
It was exhilarating, as terrifying and intense as being the focus of the religious serial killer and only slightly different.
I tried not to dwell too long on the similarities. If I’d learned anything in my years studying psychology, it was to avoid self-diagnosis at all costs.
“Bea.”
Eric’s voice infiltrated my daydreaming, but it took me a second of slow blinking to pull myself from my thoughts and focus on the dark-haired man standing beside me at my desk in the sound studio.
I smiled at him. “Hey, honey, how are you?”
His scowl was fierce as he dropped to a crouch so he could be on eye level with me in my chair. He turned my seat to face him then braced himself against the arms, effectively caging me in. Immediately, my eyes darted to the door, knowing Priest was just outside taking a call from Lion. He would not like Eric being so close, and I had no doubt he would make that clear to him if he returned to witness this scene.
“What the hell, Bea?” Eric demanded, moving one hand to my knee to give it a little shake. His hand was hot on the bare skin between my knee-high socks and mini skirt. My gaze fixed on the cross inked into the back of his palm. “You’re basically being stalked by a madman, and you don’t fucking come to me? I thought we were close.”
“We are,” I agreed with a bright smile, hoping to distract him as I shifted back slightly in my chair so his hand would drop. “But I’ve got it handled.”
“Bea, you’re five foot four and maybe one hundred and fifteen pounds with rocks in your pocket,” he observed annoyingly. “How the hell are you going to defend yourself?”
I bent closer to him, watching the way his gaze fell to my glossed lips, and plucked the knife from its thin holster around my thigh. He was leaning close, lips parted, when I pressed the dagger to his throat.
My smile cut into my cheeks painfully, wide and pretty. “Don’t judge a book by its cover, Eric. You’re the last person I would’ve assumed would do that. You and I both know monsters hide in all kinds of packages.”
“So, you’re a monster now?” he asked dryly, but his throat worked hard as he swallowed against the pressure of the steel.
I pulled away with a light laugh and spread my thighs to slot the knife carefully back into the pink holster. Eric watched me with dark eyes.
“No,” I agreed as I tossed my curls over my shoulder and crossed my legs primly. “But you better believe I know how to play with the best of them.”
Summoned like a demon by the mere mention of him, Priest appeared in the doorway. I let myself indulge in a long, reverent look at him. In his Fallen cut and a thick boiled cashmere winter coat I knew Cressida had bought him for Christmas last year, he looked like a poorly civilized heathen, his hair pulled into a messy cue at the back of his neck, pieces falling into his glowering face, a lock stuck in the thicket of his russet eyelashes. I’d never seen a man with hair like that, a deep, dark red that look like spilled blood and rust and perfectly complemented the cinnamon freckles dusting every visible inch of his skin. I could see the handle o
f his curved hunting knife in its holster at his hip under the open jacket and the cling of mud to his heavy motorcycle boots from his nights spent on the beach and grass of Zeus’s back yard.
His entire powerful frame leaned slightly forward as if into a howling wind, braced and ready to attack at any provocation and, seeing Eric, so close to me, it tensed further, a long, lean human weapon.
“Back the fuck up,” he ordered in a voice that was both bored and threatening, as if the idea of enforcing his words was too easy to bear and he was aggravated he even had to voice them.
Eric glanced over his shoulder, irritation in every inch of his body, then froze when he caught sight of the large redhead. “I’m not even touching her. What the fuck is your problem?”
Priest cocked his head to the side in a movement that was more animal than human. He studied my friend with a long, unblinking stare and said nothing, letting his silence emphasise his original request.
I didn’t interfere.
I’d seen alpha men operate enough to know they needed space to piss on the things they felt were theirs. It made them easier to deal with once it was done.
Besides, I was too busy mooning over the fact that Priest was staking that claim on little old me.
Eric looked back at me, choosing––unwisely––to ignore the threat at the door. “Listen, Bea, I just wanted you to know I’ve got your back. You can come stay with me, if you want. I’ve got a gun and licence, you wouldn’t have to worry with me.”
“You think she has to worry with me?” Priest asked in a monotone that hardly made it a question.
Eric, silly, sweet Eric, ignored him again. Instead, he placed his hand on my knee again for a little shake and beseeched me with his wide, dark eyes. “Don’t do anything rash just because you feel unsafe.”
“You seem like a stupid motherfucker,” Priest continued, deadpan. “So I’ll tell you one more time to get it into your wee fuckin’ brain. Back. The. Fuck. Up.”
“Listen, asshole,” Eric started to say, rising to his feet so he could turn around.
He didn’t get the chance.
Priest was there so suddenly, I couldn’t compute how it happened. He was just there, pressed to Eric’s back, his arm around his neck in a chokehold, his booted heel kicking out Eric’s long legs so he folded helplessly into the tight embrace.
“Seems your friend has a death wish, Little Shadow,” Priest said calmly as Eric fought the hold, hands tearing at Priest’s arm until it bled. “Should I play fairy fuckin’ godfather and grant it?”
“Priest,” I said, trying to bite back the lust warming my tone. “He’s my friend.”
His red brow hiked into his forehead. “He wants to fuck you.”
Eric gurgled in protest. Priest tightened his hold.
“Maybe,” I consented. “But if you killed everyone who wanted to sleep with me, you’d be so busy killing people I’d never see you.”
He blinked at me, but I caught the way his firm mouth twitched with humour. “I work quick,” he informed me.
“I don’t doubt it,” I agreed, having so much fun, too much, when my friend was clearly in distress. “Still, why don’t you put him down? I don’t have many friends and I’d like to keep the ones I do have.”
Priest considered it for a long moment while Eric turned a startling shade of red. Finally, he ducked his head slightly to whisper terrifyingly in Eric’s ear. “I don’t give warnings. I’m the man they send in once the threat’s been laid out. I’m the man who finishes the job. Count your lucky fuckin’ stars that today, for her, I’m exercisin’ restraint.”
Eric gasped as he fell to the floor, catching himself badly on one hand so he yelped with pain. I wanted to go to him, but the way Priest continued to loom over him, eyes dark and fixed on his prey, I decided it was best not to get between a predator and his meal.
I squirmed in my seat, thighs rubbing together to ease the ache between them.
I wanted him.
Oh, but I wanted him more fiercely than I’d ever craved anything else. In fact, I decided, watching as Priest crossed his arms and bared his teeth at Eric, I didn’t think I properly understood the meaning of the word crave until I met Priest.
“Done playing?” I teased him, unable to curb my sunny smile.
Priest’s eyes flicked up to mine and the hatred in his eyes eased into something just as dark, but totally different. It was the kind of darkness you wanted to fall into.
“No.” But his posture adjusted slightly, shoulders pulling back, weight settling in his heels so I knew the imminent threat had passed. “Only ’cause you got a show to do and I got Lion callin’ me back in five.”
“So gracious,” I said, deadpan, even though my lips twitched. “Can I get to work then?”
Priest inclined his head in agreement, but instead of leaving, he crouched down to stare at Eric who was massaging his neck and staring at his attacker with unveiled hatred. Priest studied him like a scientist with a bug under the microscope, no doubt detailing all his obvious failings. Finally, he grinned that horror fun-house clown grin and lashed out to grab Eric by the neck again. Before he could react, Priest flicked his knife open with a sharp jerk of his wrist and pressed the tip to the exposed skin between Eric’s clavicles above his tee.
Another quick flick and he was carving an inch-long gash into the skin there.
“Strike one,” Priest intoned in that flat operator’s voice. “The only one you’ll ever get.”
Eric tried to struggle away, but Priest dropped his hold, causing my friend to fall awkwardly onto his side again. Then Priest wiped the bloodied blade on Eric’s head and turned on his heel to leave without a backward look.
“Wow,” I whispered, reeling.
“No fucking kidding. That guy is a fucking psycho,” Eric exclaimed as he stood, fingers pressed to the lightly bleeding wound at his throat.
A giddy little giggle boiled in my throat, bubbling up from a dark, heated place in my gut that Priest never failed to stoke into flames. I felt drugged by Priest’s display of villainy, seduced completely by his demonstration of ruthless dominance.
I was his, his, his.
He might not have said it with words. He might never.
But that was fine with me.
Sometimes, actions were just so much louder.
And his said I belonged to him.
The Fallen’s angel of death had claimed me and suddenly I had gone from property of no one, to property of Priest.
It was hard to curb the force of my smile pulling at my cheeks as I watched Eric put himself to rights and glare at me as if I was responsible.
I guess I was.
I shrugged and flipped my hair over my shoulder, wheeling my chair back so I could face the microphone and get settled for the podcast. “I told you I don’t need your protection.”
“You’re kidding me?” Eric’s mouth dropped open. “You need protection from that…that freak.”
“Hey,” I snapped. “Call him names one more time, and I swear to Heavenly Father, I will strike you down where you stand.”
Eric blinked at me then tipped his head back and roared with laughter. “Fuck,” he finally said as he wiped tears from his eyes. “Only you could make me laugh after something like that.”
“I wasn’t joking,” I pouted slightly, annoyed that I was constantly underestimated.
Women who wore pink were just as capable of defending themselves as women in leather and denim. If anything, I felt it gave me an edge. Let them underestimate me, I’d be only too happy to prove them wrong with a pretty smile and my deadly blade.
Unfortunately, stupid boys growing up fed stereotypical gender roles and misogyny with a silver spoon didn’t understand that.
I tipped my chin in the air like Loulou would do and ignored him.
Eric sighed. “Oh c’mon, Bea. Don’t be so sensitive. I’m the one who just got attacked by your feral guard dog.”
“If you think that was bad, how were you
planning to protect me from a serial killer?” I countered as I put on my headphones. “Stop being sore. He warned you, after all, and you really shouldn’t touch me like that without permission anyway. It’s the 21st century, consent is everything. Now, are you ready for the show?”
“Don’t tell me you’re…what? Into this guy?” Eric ventured quietly, almost like he couldn’t believe what he was saying. “Bea, sweetheart, there’s a difference between being clinically interested in the psychology of serial killers and psychopaths and being fixated on them, romanticizing them. You know that, right?”
“You don’t know the first thing about Priest,” I refuted, checking my episode notes.
He was quiet for a long time. “Clearly, I don’t know much about you either. I thought you were a good little Christian girl, but you’re much more than that, aren’t you?”
“Women are complicated creatures,” I said in answer. “We’ve been friends for a few years, Eric, but that doesn’t make you an expert.”
“I could be,” he said quietly, voice strained by the weight of his hope. “If you let me. Maybe I’m not as good a guy as you think I am. Does that make me more intriguing?”
I could feel his stare on me, but I refused to engage in some childish stand-off. I’d done nothing wrong and, in my mind at least, neither had Priest.
It led me to wonder with mild apprehension, if there was a line Priest could ever cross that would be too much for me to handle. I thought about the hot blood on my ankles as he slit Brett’s throat for endangering me and I knew with cold certainty that there was not.
* * *
* * *
“Okay, we’re going to end today’s episode with our monthly Q&A,” I said into the microphone, my voice skipping over the words, bouncy and light. “If you’re new here, listeners submit their questions by email and my producer, Eric, reads them out for us to discuss. You ready, Eric?”
It said a lot about my friend that he remained professional throughout the episode about Richard Ramirez even though I felt his thoughtful stare on me more often than not. It probably helped that Priest remained outside the doors, probably whittling something in the hall to occupy himself.
Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6) Page 12
