Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  In cramped, severely spiked lettering, he had written: you are not weak.

  Later, alone in the room beside a comatose Lou while Zeus took one of his infrequent breaks to shower and eat, I looked up the meaning of the knot of my phone.

  Strength and power.

  I clutched it so hard in my hands those next fretful days that the force of my hold cracked one of the thinly carved sections of wood. But it helped.

  He never spoke of the gift, never even alluded to it.

  Still, I knew it was from him, carved by his bloodstained, heavily tattooed hands. He was always whittling something, wood shavings caught at the ends of his hair and on the fabric of his jeans. It did strange things to me even at thirteen to imagine those big, killing hands carving something just for me.

  “Open it, open it,” Cleo demanded breathlessly as she tiptoed through our floor picnic and the women plus Benny lying on the ground against the pillows and each other to reach my side.

  I got to my knees on the carpet, absently petting a yowling Sampson as I accepted the box into my lap. My cat batted at the box with extended claws and made that almost ear-splitting meow again.

  “Hush,” I told him. “You’re being rude in front of our guests.”

  As if defending him, Delilah cooed from her cage.

  My unfinished braid fell into disarray around my face as I bent to carefully peel off the black wrapping paper. My fingers encountered a little note taped to the box beneath it.

  “‘And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, [together] with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel,’” I murmured, reciting the quote from Judges 19:29.

  I looked up at my biker babes to gauge their reaction, but they all wore the same look of suspended disbelief. The air in the room was taut but still, like the calm before an ocean storm.

  My fingers trembled slightly as I slowly sliced through the tape with the tip of my nail then dislodged the lid. It fell away to reveal delicate tissue paper, dark at the center.

  The only sound was breath and a slithering hiss from Sampson that seemed to be a physical thing, a serpent baring its fangs.

  My hand shook, my breath stuttered, because somehow, I knew that whatever lay inside the box was not going to be a gift.

  “Wait, Bea,” Harleigh Rose whispered because we were all caught up in this frightening moment. “Let me call Lion.”

  But I didn’t wait, because the paper was already parting and inside lay something that made hesitancy impossible.

  A woman’s hand and forearm, the skin around the fingers chapped and tinged yellow from smoking.

  I knew before I began to scream exactly whose arm it was.

  Someone had killed Brenda Walsh and sent me one of the pieces.

  Priest

  I was distracted.

  Which wasn’t completely uncommon.

  Club meetings in the Chapel at the clubhouse were never exactly riveting unless we had serious shit at our doorstep. Since Irina Ventura was killed and Staff Sergeant Danner went down for killing Officer Gibson among a slew of other crimes, life had settled into a boring kinda routine most people equated with happiness.

  I was just bored.

  My gaze fixed to the stained-glass window behind Zeus as voices droned on around me. I’d put it there. That window. When I started making serious cash with the club, I’d had someone ship it all the way from arsehole, Ireland. It’d been cracked, the glass mottled and faded in places, but it was easy enough to get fixed. Now the window that had haunted my youth in a completely different kinda church hung in my safe haven, a Chapel only to the rebel bikers who preached brotherhood and loyalty, who prayed to no god but themselves.

  It was another form of blasphemy that got me hard.

  So, I was bored, but boredom was a harbinger of peace, and I told myself to enjoy it.

  The truth was, it wasn’t antipathy that had me uncharacteristically disconcerted. No, I was distracted like a crow with a fucking shiny object, that shiny object being the crown of Bea Lafayette’s shining golden hair.

  It wasn’t exactly the first time I’d been occupied with thoughts of the girl with the pink ribbon in her hair. In fact, I calculated—because I was bored and, admittedly, obsessive—the first time had been two years, three months, and twenty-seven days ago.

  It happened one day when she was eating a peach. It was such an innocent, innocuous thing and she, such an innocent, relatively innocuous girl. Nothing about the situation called for my attention. We were celebrating some birthday. The women brought the cake, and we brought the booze. Everyone was happy, talking and laughing as classic rock pumped through the speakers of Z’s oceanside home. I was even enjoying myself, talking to Smoke and Bat about the new advances in gun technology.

  But then, something about the way she endeavoured to eat that piece of fruit drew my gaze from across the crowded kitchen of the Garro’s house. There was a knife in one hand, a sharp-edged paring knife with an ivory handle, and the swollen fruit in the other. Lower lip between her small, square teeth, Bea methodically cut into the fragile flesh and segmented it into clean sections that fell from the stone center into her palm. It was a shade too ripe, the seam of the skin splitting easily, juice splashing across her fingers to run down the slim, pale underside of her forearm. I watched raptly as she finished decimating the peach, then brought the blade to her full mouth, a small pink tongue flashing out dangerously close to the edge to gather the sweet liquid into her mouth. Greedy for the taste of it, she held her sticky hand bearing the fruit aloft and carefully dragged the knife up her arm, collecting the juice so she could once more lick it, kittenish, from the steel.

  I wanted to be the knife.

  It was, without a doubt, the single sexiest act I had ever witnessed. I felt like a voyeur standing in the kitchen of a family home lusting after the seventeen-year-old girl with a cloud of white gold hair as bright as a halo around her face as she sweetly ate a piece of fruit.

  Then she did something very few people have ever successfully done.

  She surprised me.

  I watched with my head slightly cocked, alert like a bird braced for flight, as she sauntered across the tile on light, dancing feet with toes tipped in pink. She didn’t make eye contact with me, and it was carefully done. The way someone avoided the eyes of a potentially dangerous animal even as they were drawn closer.

  She used that knife, now licked clean, to pierce a piece of fruit and casually, just a lazy rotation of elbow and wrist, extend it my way.

  I stared at the peach, the glisten of it mimicked on Bea’s pale mouth. If there had ever before been a moment that felt more like a crossroads, one of those intensely crucial decisions in life when sound and time slow to a molasses crawl, I couldn’t remember it.

  The peach had become some forbidden fruit, like Eve’s lusted after apple.

  I did not believe in signs, omens, or myths, religious or otherwise. I believed in the power of action and base desire.

  And even though I knew it was an idiotic idea, I wanted to taste the same fruit that glossed Beatrice Lafayette’s bowed lips.

  So I folded my large, cold hand over her wrist, prompting her to flinch slightly with fright or anticipation. Her eyes flashed to mine, fleeting and silvered like a fish caught in a net, struggling to escape. I let her look into my own gaze, let her see the echoing dark there, and then I leaned forward to pry the peach off the blade with my teeth.

  She sucked in a barely perceptible breath and watched as I tipped my head back to release the morsel into my mouth.

  Without chewing, I gently took the knife from her and punctured the soft belly of another piece before relinquishing the blade back to her control. To feed her would have been too much, but at that moment, to watch as she ate the same thing at the same time as I did felt excruciatingly intimate.

  The feeling scoured through me, fraying my nerves until I felt exposed.
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br />   I was not a man who chose to emote.

  This was not me.

  But I stood there for another moment as I chewed and swallowed in tandem with Bea, and when I turned abruptly on my heel and left the house without another word, I did it with an elevated heart rate.

  So, that was it.

  The moment I finally saw Beatrice Lafayette and the obsession officially began.

  But that was all before she kissed me.

  Kissed. Me.

  A wry smile tugged the edge of my lips as I thought about her surprising audacity and courage. Such a little thing and so brave, so willing to plunge headfirst into deep, dark waters.

  It stirred something inside me to know she believed I was worth something, worth that bravery.

  Worth kindness.

  It was stupid, the thoughts of an untried little girl speculating innocently at those things she knew lived under her bed in the night. I wondered, somewhat viciously, how she might react if I actually reached out and grabbed her around that slight, frilly sock-clad ankle one day and dragged her down to my depths.

  My cock jerked at the thought.

  Inwardly, I clamped down on my forbidden fantasies, striving to find that ocean of calm, unfeeling solace that lived in the center of my soul. It irritated me that Bea could rouse such waves in it. It made me want to rage against something that wasn’t her, something bigger than both of us that some might have called God or fate or something useless like that.

  “Priest, brother,” King muttered, knocking his fist into my own where it rested on the massive table. “What’s on your mind?”

  I looked up to see everyone watching me and knew I’d been asked a question about the topic at hand. My brain ran through the last five minutes, searching for answers.

  “Don’t see how what goes on up at the rez is any of our business,” I finally said as my memory conjured up what I’d been listening to with half an ear. “The Thunderbird Squad has never been a problem for the club, but they’ve never been a fuckin’ friend either.”

  A handful of brothers nodded, thinking, no doubt, of the past ten years and all the shit we’d dealt with alone. Where was the T-Squad when Ventura was selling women, when Staff Sergeant Danner was running wild with his corrupt force?

  “They got their own problems out there,” Zeus acknowledged as he crossed his huge hands, rings gleaming in the low light. “The rez is separate from Entrance, from the province even. We don’t know what shit they got goin’ there, and I betcha they don’t have a single fuckin’ clue what we’ve been through down ’ere.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “So why merge the two now?”

  The truth was, I didn’t give a shit about people unless they were inside the club, and even then, some of them I ignored completely.

  I was not like them, but I could pretend.

  I’d been pretending my whole life.

  The way they talked, the lopsided swagger, the cursing, and the biker uniform.

  I got it all down.

  It was the best costume I’d ever wear.

  Couldn’t say it was me, though, not to the bone.

  I was still haunted by the affliction of the Irish brogue in the corners of my speech, and I woke up each morning with a prayer burned into my tongue waiting to be said even though it had been decades since I believed in an Almighty.

  I was a collection of masks, perfectly presented. They hid nothing because I was nothing. Simply, I gave people what they wanted to see.

  And they liked it.

  Those closest to me might’ve guessed the truth, that I was a highly functioning psychopath, but even they did not hold it against me.

  This was the magic of being what people want you to be while otherwise fading into the background.

  They do not invade your privacy, and they do not judge you as the alien creature you are.

  * * *

  Bat’s lips compressed, jaw tight. “Someone murdered one’a their women, a mother of three, in cold blood.”

  I looked at Kodiak, wondering idly if he felt any sympathy for the First Nations group even though it wasn’t his own. He never said shit all about his upbringing on a small rez in Alaska, but he had tribal ink he took seriously and a set of customs we were sometimes witness to that spoke to his heritage. Of all the brothers, he was probably the most shrouded in mystery. He didn’t talk much, and he kept mostly to himself.

  It wasn’t surprising I liked him a hell of a lot.

  “Someone fed her to the wolves,” Curtains confirmed, looking shaky and pale. He was a fellow redhead, but pasty as hell like he’d never seen the sun. Even on rides out, he wore his helmet or a beat-up Hephaestus Auto ball cap to keep that pallor from the fiery kiss of the sun. He was bleached white as bone now as he called up some photos on his computer and flipped it around to show us all. “He pinned a typed-up Bible verse to a tree beside the remains of her body. ‘What peace can there be, so long as the whorings and the sorceries of your mother Jezebel are so many?’”

  One of Zeus’s hands clenched into a fist, then released, flexing so hard the veins and tendons stood out in stark relief.

  “We got a murderer out there killing mothers, I got a problem with that,” he growled. “Don’t give a shit it’s not one’a our women. When I took this club over from that piece’a shit Crux, I fuckin’ vowed I’d keep Entrance safe for everyone.”

  “They don’t live in Entrance,” Heckler groused. “We just fuckin’ established that.”

  “What if it was Hannah?” King asked, as always, hitting at the heart of these men. He looked next to Skell, to Bat, to Axe-Man and Cyclops, to every single brother with family outside of these four walls. “What if it was Winona, Mary, or Cleo and Tayline? We don’t let shit like this stand.”

  “We just got some peace,” Kodiak spoke up uncharacteristically, his voice husky with disuse but flat with reason. “We start signin’ up for every war in the province, we’re gonna burn out.”

  “Live free, die hard,” Zeus reminded him of the club motto, but it wasn’t in the voice of absolute power. He wanted the discussion, and we were used to giving him our opinions. We wouldn’t leave here until it was settled and agreed on by the majority. That was just the way Z worked, even if it wasn’t the MC standard.

  This was why I’d stayed twelve years ago when I got off that godforsaken freighter and encountered Zeus in a narrow corridor between shipping crates. He’d taken one look at me and offered me a coffee. Didn’t even wait to see if I’d follow, just turned on his heel and gone ahead, knowing somehow I’d follow.

  The kinda man he was, he led like a general, not a king. First into battle, leading any kinda charge as the point of the knife.

  “Let’s vote it out, brothers,” he suggested. “But I’ll say right now, I’m inclined to help ’em. Somethin’ happened to my family, I’d take any help I could get and make damn sure to reward the giver, yeah?”

  There were some murmurings and nods, but a commotion outside the closed Chapel doors roused us all to something bigger.

  Instantly, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

  Because I could hear her.

  Bea.

  No one had a voice like that, so sweet and smooth like honey poured from a jar.

  I was standing, pushing back from the table so I could vault myself over it, one hand to the wood as leverage to leap over the bulk. Curtains and Blade shoved aside to make room for me to land with a jarring thud on the other side between their chairs.

  Because that sweet voice was raised in alarm and it was calling me to her like there was some direct link between us, some line only she could reach.

  I was throwing open the doors before anyone else could get there.

  Bea stood just inside the clubhouse surrounded by the biker bitches, tears tracking down her cheeks, voice raised as she demanded Ransom and Carson let her into the meeting.

  Quickly, I scanned her for injuries, but aside from the small splint on her left hand, she seemed unh
armed.

  The great knot in my gut, as complicated as the Dara, untangled.

  “What the fuck is goin’ on?” Zeus demanded from behind me.

  Instantly, Lou went to him and fit herself into his ready arms, but I ignored whatever she said softly in his ear.

  Because Bea was there, and something was wrong.

  Alarm bells were still ringing, blaring so loudly in my head I thought it might explode.

  Tired of waiting, of not knowing what I was killing for frightening Bea so badly, I stalked forward until I loomed over and demanded coldly, “Tell me.”

  Her lips parted, so pink and soft I was almost distracted, but she didn’t tell me.

  She showed me.

  She lifted the flower box in her arms and pulled back the lid.

  Inside, a perfectly severed forearm.

  There was swearing and gasps around me, but I just studied the dissected limb for clues.

  It had once belonged to a woman, obvious because of the sparse brunet hairs dusting the forearm, the carefully cut nails and the silver ring on her middle finger. It had been severed cleanly so the murderer had used a hacksaw, the only tool that could do a decent if arduous job of dismemberment. On closer inspection, it seemed the gift-giver had even cleaned up the edges of the arm with a scalpel or clippers, removing the ragged ends of flesh and sinew, and that they’d taken the time to drain the majority of the blood so the box wasn’t a soggy mess.

  “This is fucked up,” Curtains said about two seconds before he puked into his ball cap.

  “Fuckin’ evil, is what it is,” Kodiak said from beside me, studying the limb with the same cold deliberateness as I was. “It’s not easy to cut up a body. You have to be fucked in the head to take the time and energy to do somethin’ like this.”