Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  Or I thought I could because when we finally pulled up to the barely illuminated graveyard, gargoyles and angel tombstones haunting the landscape, I wasn’t prepared for what he pulled from the trunk and hefted over his shoulder.

  The body of the man who’d attacked me.

  He was wrapped in a serviceable dark blanket of some kind, taped close at the neck and feet. Priest carried him like a sack of grain, muscles bulging in the close-fitting black hoodie beneath his cut as he stalked off with his package into the dark.

  With his hood up, he looked exactly the way most artists rendered the Reaper.

  Priest didn’t wait for me, and something was reassuring about that. He wasn’t going to check in and make sure I was fine with anything. This was what I’d wanted, to know him not just carnally, but criminally, to know that complicated, substantial part of him shrouded in secrecy. Once he’d made a decision, he didn’t falter, and he expected the same of me. There was respect in that, which buoyed me above the turbulent waters of fear and doubt in my belly.

  As I’d been doing for years, I followed him, hastening after him into the trees.

  The night air was bitter cold, the clouds over us condensed and quilted, overstuffed with downy snow. I wished I was wearing more than just my plaid skirt and cream peacoat with the super cute wooden buttons. If it snowed, I’d freeze.

  But my discomfort was easy to ignore in the face of my morbid captivation. I was silent as Priest stalked up the slight incline, then cut through the haphazard plots in a way that said he’d done this many, many times before.

  He stopped by an uneven row of crypts lining the back of the rusted wrought-iron fence. Easily, he balanced the body of a grown man on his shoulders, traded the black gym bag from one hand into the other, and fished a set of antique keys out of his pocket. The black scrolled gate groaned open ominously, the sound echoing in the empty interior.

  Empty, but for the dead.

  I shivered delicately, knowing whatever was about to happen was pure, unadulterated sacrilege. My spiritual soul quivered as I took my first tentative step into the freezing crypt after Priest, who had forged inside like it was his own home. When I was immediately struck down, I rolled my shoulders back and told myself to stop being such a ninny.

  The air was so cold it burned my nostrils as I sucked in the scent of musk and wiped a cobweb from my nose. The stone structure was surprisingly large, almost cavernous, with dozens of slots for caskets and a little altar with an elaborate stone cross. Priest knelt beside it, his head bowed and hands raised, but obscured from me by his broad back, the fiery winged skull of The Fallen emblem laughing at me from the leather. If he had been anyone else, I would’ve assumed he was praying.

  Instead, there was a metallic clatter, and seconds later, Priest was shifting enough to let me see the large, flat metal box he’d dragged out from under the altar. Inside, there were two shovels, rolls of canvas, rope, sheers, and a Mason jar filled with silver coins. I recognized the latter instantly as the coins Bat made for Fallen funerals, embossed with The Fallen emblem on one side and an image of a reaper on the other.

  He didn’t reach for those now. Instead, he shifted in his crouch to grab a shovel, then looked up at me with as happy an expression as I had ever seen. In fact, the sight of his crinkling pale eyes and slightly tilted lips nearly took my breath away, but it was the almost boyish mischievousness in his eyes that stole my heart.

  He raised his eyebrows and extended one of the shovels my way. “Ever dug a grave before, sweet Bea?”

  Oh, but this was a test, and he was enjoying administering it, pushing me hard to see if I would run crying back into the light.

  I’d show him.

  I hiked my chin in the air, quickly tied my hair back in its pink ribbon, and accepted the wooden handle of the shovel the way an incumbent queen accepted a golden sceptre on the throne. “No, but I’m an exceptionally quick learner.”

  There was laughter in Priest’s voice, though his face was emotionless as he stood with the other shovel and moved to hoist the body into his arms once more. The sound of it made his voice rumble, abrading my skin until it pebbled with lust. “Oh, I don’t doubt that.”

  Armed with our burial weapons, Priest led the way out of the crypt and moved economically through the graves once more.

  “So what’s with you using a creepy crypt as a storage shed?” I called ahead because he was moving fast and my high heels, though thickly wedged, kept slipping on the frosted mud. “Just for morbid kicks or what?”

  Something like a snort was half lost in the wind as it rattled the dark arms of the oak and cedar trees surrounding us.

  “Kodiak,” he explained when he came to an abrupt stop at a seemingly random grave in the middle of the unkempt cemetery. There was a massive stone cross nearly the same height as Priest with faint markings at the base that were too worn to read properly. “Kodiak’s family mausoleum.”

  I blinked, blowing a lock of hair out of my face as it fell from my ponytail. “And he’s okay with you using it as a tool shed?”

  “Was his idea,” he murmured as he laid the body down and arranged his tools in exact alignment beside it.

  “Oh-kay,” I drawled. “I thought Kodiak was First Nations? Don’t they have different burial rights?”

  In truth, I didn’t know much about the mysterious tracker in The Fallen other than that he’d appeared a few years ago and never left, and that he was decidedly beautiful with the thickest, longest black hair I’d ever seen. Truthfully, he was almost as scary as Priest, which was saying something, so I didn’t exactly make a point of prompting small talk with him.

  “His dad’s white,” Priest grunted as he shucked his cut. “Hates him and that whole side’a his family. Think the idea’a this desecration gets ’im hard.”

  His smile was a sharp slice of white teeth in the dark, a Cheshire cat grin that was slightly manic. He didn’t have to say the blasphemy turned him on too because that much was obvious.

  I was about to tease him for it when he shocked me by taking off his black hoodie. The black, long-sleeved thermal he wore underneath kissed every inch of his skin, highlighting the dips and hills of his beautifully honed muscles beneath the thin fabric. This was as close as I had ever been to seeing Priest naked. Even in the summer, he wore long sleeves and denim. I’d always wondered idly why, until recently when it became apparent something was going on beneath his clothes besides the ink of his tattoos.

  I wanted desperately for him to show me his naked self in so many aspects, least of all the bare skin of his torso and legs, but he stopped at the tee and put a shovel over his shoulder as he walked out the dimensions of the grave.

  My eyes hungrily mapped his sheer power as he reared back with the shovel lifted, then stabbed it deep into the hard crust of the earth.

  He worked quietly for a few minutes, seemingly unaware of my drooling and shameless ogling before he graced a hand against the shovel where it was planted in the earth and cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “Witnessin’ and doin’ dark deeds are two very different things. Told you once, I’ll tell you again, if I’m a killer, you’re a killer. Not like most men in the MC, mo cuishle. I got no plans to keep secrets from you, but this is an all or nothin’, you get me?” He jerked his chin at me. “Get goin’ or go.”

  Harsh, but in his own way, with his own wisdom, fair too. I fished in the overlarge pocket of my coat, pulled out a handful of Fuzzy Peaches I always kept in my pockets, and popped them into my mouth with vigor.

  “Okay,” I said with a mouth full of sugar. “Move aside; a new gravedigger is in town.”

  He tried to hide it, but I swore I caught a glimmer of a smile in his beard.

  * * *

  * * *

  Apparently, Priest had many burial sites and body disposal methods. He didn’t go in-depth, explaining all the wonderful ways he covered up murder, but he grunted enough to paint a certain kind of picture. He used Evergreen Cemetery because it
was at capacity and mostly forgotten save a few family crypts that still had space for more members. I was amazed to learn that up to six bodies could fit in a single grave. There was such resourcefulness in digging up someone already buried and forgotten to add more, knowing no one would ever look there again.

  I lasted forty-five minutes, but it took almost two hours. It was roughly 150 square feet of dirt that needed to be dislodged, the night was cold and dark, and I was only five foot four with minimal muscle mass. My stamina was pathetic, but I was happy to sit on the flat tombstone wearing Priest’s clove-scented cut around my shoulders while I watched him sweat and heave in the dirt.

  It fascinated me to watch Priest open up about his dark deeds. The entire expanse of my skin felt electrified with desire as I watched him work calmly, efficiently, and somewhat brutally to bury his sins. It was erotic as hell to watch him dig that grave, to see the sheer strength in that long, lean form, and the determination, the unwavering longevity he had. I wanted to pounce on him, to devour the grim line of his mouth and scratch at that deeply contoured back.

  But there was such focus to his efficiency that I held myself in check. I’d never been a sexual aggressor. I didn’t even know how to begin, especially with a man who was mostly unmoved by normal social cues.

  So, I sat mainly silent, sometimes chatting mostly to myself about how I missed Sampson and Delilah, about how I was worried about Billy Huxley and his poor family, about why Fuzzy Peaches were a good substitute to real ones in the winter when it was hard to find the fruit. Priest didn’t react, but there was a quality to him that somehow made me aware he was attentive to every word I spoke.

  “Oh,” I said at one point, a short exclamation of awed joy as I tipped my head into the sky. “Priest, look! It’s snowing.”

  I laughed into the dark, crowded sky as soft, sugar crystal flakes of snow melted on my forehead, in my eyelashes, on my extended hand. Then, because sitting wasn’t enough, not when it was snowing beautifully and the world was all draped in pressurized silence, waiting with bated breath to be covered in cold, I stood and spun around trying to catch flakes in my open mouth.

  “It’s silly,” I called to him. “But snow tastes so sweet straight from the sky.”

  A cold hand wrapped around my left hand. I startled, painfully inhaling a large gulp of cold air.

  Priest stood there, eyes dark under his furrowed brows, intensity radiating off him in tangible waves. When I tried to move, his grip on my wrist only tightened.

  “Priest?” I questioned softly.

  I gasped again as he suddenly tugged me hard into his body and slid a hand into the back of my hair, clenching it hard enough to dislodge the ribbon and pin me in place. My hair fell in a sweet-scented curtain around us as he took my mouth in a deep, possessing kiss.

  Instantly, I liquified, my cold body like soft wax against his hard edges. He kept me upright with only that stinging grip in my hair and a hard hand on my ass, kneading the flesh there as he held me close against his thigh.

  When he finally tore his mouth from mine, I couldn’t help but whimper instinctually, filled as much with yearning as I was with lust.

  Priest’s face was all shadow, the deep black valleys of darkness at his eyes, under the steep edge of his cheekbones making him look skeletal. In the middle of a graveyard, burying a body together, being kissed by a man who embodied death in so many iterations, somehow, I had never felt more alive.

  “You’re right,” he said, so gruff his words seemed pained. “Tastes sweet on your tongue.”

  I surged at him, launching my body at his, scrambling inelegantly to climb his long torso and wrap myself securely around him. He didn’t help; he stood there like a headstone of some dark angel and let me spend my enthusiasm on him like some untrained puppy. I peppered his bearded face with kisses, sucked at the lobe of one ear, ran my hands a little too hard through his tangled, long tresses. My hips canted and pressed awkwardly against his groin, eager for friction but unsure how to secure it. Growing frustrated with myself, my lust flaming higher as some perverse result of Priest’s impassivity, I finally nipped at his lower lip to provoke him. The full swell broke beneath my little teeth, blood welling in the crease. I lapped it with my tongue and shivered with longing at the salt and iron tang.

  Oh, but it worked.

  His arms banded around me too tight, twin cobras suffocating my youthful, untrained fervour. When I grew still and pliant against him, he molded me deliberately with his cold strong hands in the position of his choosing, legs wrapped around his waist, hands linked around his neck, throat exposed to the march of his hard teeth down my jugular. My pulse beat madly against his tongue.

  “Oh my,” I breathed as he stroked one hand down the crease of my bum cheeks to the apex of my thighs.

  With a quick, vicious tear, my underwear was gone, cold air wafting over my hot, wet flesh. Priest’s cool fingers felt divine as they parted my folds and played in the wet, swirling up over my clit, then down to dip and tease at my entrance.

  “Gonna fuck you here,” he warned in that rough-hewn voice that felt like an extra set of calloused hands on my skin. “Gonna fuck you here, now, take you hard on the ground and fill you up ’til you can’t take anymore’a me.”

  “Yes,” I hissed, trying to pump my hips against his excruciatingly light touch.

  In retribution, he shocked me by swatting my entire sex with his big hand. I jerked at the sensation as heat sparked through my entire body. My eyes were wide, mouth parted as I pulled back to stare at him in awe.

  Priest’s eyes glimmered, pale frames around dark pupils.

  He slapped me again.

  Breath exploded from my mouth. I felt a telltale trickle of wet down my thigh, the pooling of it in Priest’s cruel palm.

  “Priest,” I gritted through my teeth, feeling dangerously close to electrocution. I didn’t understand what was happening to me; why such force against my tender clit could feel like an explosion of sparks. “Wh-what are you doing to me?”

  “Owning you,” he responded instantly on a growl.

  The next second, he was taking us to the dirt. The frosted grass crackled beneath my body as he lay me on the earth, propped up on one elbow just enough to keep from suffocating me while the other hand dove into his shirt to pull out a blade on a thin silver chain. I panted wildly, chest heaving so badly I worried he might nick my flesh for one mad second. Of course, he didn’t. The dagger was an extension of himself. He rucked up the sweater I wore beneath my coat and cut away my pink lace bra so my small breasts tumbled out, nipples hard enough to cut glass in the cold air. It was nothing compared to the cold of the steel against my trembling belly as he ran it around my belly button over and over and over.

  He tipped his head down to watch it. “Such soft, white skin. Like fuckin’ silk. Just a little flick”––he followed his own direction, his wrist twisting slightly to open up a tiny cut above the whorl in my belly then again below. I gasped at the sharp zing of pain that was all too brief before it morphed into pleasure––“and I could tear all that silk in two.”

  I frowned even though my mind was drugged with pleasure, my eyes heavy and hot in my head. “No, never. You’d never hurt me, Priest.”

  Something twisted flared across his features like lightning across a dark sky. The knife rasped along my belly, gently through my soft curls, then to my left inner thigh. My legs quivered as he drew hard lines with the side of the steel inside my flesh from upper inner thigh to the top of my knee.

  “A line for every year you’ve been mine and haven’t known it,” he said, almost to himself, hypnotized by the sight of my skin raised and red in the wake of his blade.

  “How many?” I wondered, breathlessly.

  I couldn’t conceive that he might have wanted me before now, before the accident. He was always so aloof, so impenetrable.

  “Watched you eat a peach at sixteen,” he muttered, shucking the chain over his head and dropping it along with the knife
to the ground so he could undo his fly and bring his long, curved cock into the snow-bright night. “Cut it with a sharp blade into segments and licked the juice off the steel.” He looked up into my eyes after he slotted the thick, hot head of his cock at my grasping entrance to growl, “I wanted to be the knife.”

  In one unyielding stroke, he seated himself to the hilt inside me. My head ground into the grassy mud as I keened long and low to the moon flickering through the clouds. I clasped him to me, clinging so he would anchor me through the mind-rending sensation of his bulk splitting me in two.

  “Hold tight, Little Shadow,” he warned as he fisted a hand in the back of my hair and pinned my hip to the ground with the other, rendering me immobile, perfectly positioned for his pleasure. “Gonna fuck you so hard, you forget there’s a God.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but there was nothing in my head but the acute stretch of him inside me, the way my womb seemed to contract and pussy pulse. He dragged his erection out of me on a slow, friction-filled glide, then thrust savagely back to the end of my sex.

  Owning me, he’d said.

  Well, I was owned then. He fucked me into the earth, pinning me, using me, but also letting me use him because he was giving me one of my greatest fantasies. The illusion of being taken almost against my will, the feel of a large, much stronger body trapping me with hard hands, strong teeth, and a plundering cock was too heady, too perfect to voice.

  I made little animal noises in my throat that built in frequency and crescendo as he fucked me raw. Together with his harsh grunts and the heavy gasp of our breaths, we made a kind of animalistic symphony. I felt animal then or heathen, something base and dark.

  I turned my head into Priest’s neck and bit into the straining tendons there. His cock kicked inside me as he groaned raggedly.

  Somehow, he found the will to fuck me harder still. His thrusts pushed me into the earth, digging a grave of lust around us.

  He liked the pain, I was learning, just as I did.