Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  I was done talking.

  The sight of my dick notched against her tiny hole, knowing I was going to fill her light with my darkness, possess her like a demon from the inside out with my deviancy made my cock kick at the door to her cunt, precum adding to the mess there.

  I lashed out to wrap the long tendrils of her silken hair around my fist, then held her arched like a bow, taut with tension, ready to spring forth into motion, into climax.

  “Mine,” I growled as I thrust savagely forward, crushing the flimsy barrier blocking my entry as I imbedded myself balls deep in Bea’s snug pussy.

  She made choked, gasping noises as she fought to keep quiet; a desperate, ball-tingling cry that made my mouth water for more.

  I wanted her not only to bend under my hands but also to break.

  Ruin, ruin, ruin.

  I didn’t hold still. I didn’t give her time to adjust. I pulled her tighter by the hair with one hand and moved the other from her hip down to cover her damp curls, parting my knuckles around her clit, curling my fingers around the place where I speared her to add firm pressure to our connection.

  For the first time in my life, nearly thirty years of living, I felt like I was exactly where I fucking belonged. Corrupting an angel into sin, chaining her to me so she would never be able to go back from whence she came.

  Ruin, ruin, ruin.

  The mantra echoed with every beat of my pulse in my chest, in my dick, in my voice box. I wanted to roar with triumph, fuck her until she cried and screamed for me to stop even though she wanted more.

  But Zeus was in the house. The taboo of fucking his much younger sister-in-law didn’t even register. I didn’t care if he heard us or if he saw us.

  Let him.

  She was mine, mine, mine, and I wanted everyone to be able to see that.

  My bruises on her skin like stamps, my kisses on her mouth like lipstick the colour of a bruise. I wished my name carved into the skin of her hip was a permanent scar, I wished I could brand her, tattoo her, mark her in a way it would never die, even if I did. I wanted her to live the rest of her life with the mar of me on her previously pure skin.

  “I-I-I can’t,” Bea whispered hoarsely as I ruthlessly used her tight pussy and angled a finger in over her clit. “I feel like I’m going to shatter.”

  I abandoned my grip on her hair to ruck her up against me, palming her throat in my hand so I could tip her head sideways to land a searing kiss on her mouth. I ate her gasping moans of capitulation of her tongue and felt her pulse flutter madly under my thumb. “So shatter. I wanna feel your cum and your blood drench my cock. And Bea? I’ll reward you by comin’ deep inside your snug cunt.”

  “Holy shit,” she hissed as her pussy clamped down on my next thrust, and her whole body set to shaking. I had never felt more like a god of the underworld as I felt her quake open for me, and then, finally, in a series of breathy exclamations of my own name tangled with her God’s, she came all over me.

  The splash of her cum on my cock felt like a baptism, like a holy fucking revelation. I seated myself in her as my spine tingled, balls tightening, and then I came, hot seed spurting at the entrance to her womb. I held her tight to me, so tight our hearts seemed to beat as one while we climaxed simultaneously.

  And I knew heaven.

  For the first time in my life, I knew why people believed in some fallacy, and I wanted to believe in it too.

  Because this? Bea in my arms, on my cock, shyly, sweetly nuzzling her head back into the crook of my neck and shoulder as she gave me her entire, exhausted weight?

  This was pleasure more brilliant than any I had ever known.

  It blinded me, forcing me to blink, blink away the hot, prickling sensation at the back of my eyes. I felt something like the hand of fate fisted my heart in its grip and refused to let go.

  Before Bea, I had never been so aware of the organ in my chest romantics loved to hyperbolize about. The idea that the heart could break or clench, skip a beat in a way that meant more than just a dangerous palpitation was just blatantly nonsensical. Now, I was learning there was some truth to it, a kernel, as there usually was, at the heart of every fable.

  With Bea, I’d never been more aware of that blood pumping organ and its performance as played under the siren song of her influence.

  “I don’t think I can walk,” Bea mused, sleepiness diluting her cheeky remark.

  I ignored her.

  Because something was happening to me, something that threatened to overwhelm everything. Those beasts in their chains and cages at the back of my mind rattled horribly, threatening to break free.

  I pushed away from Bea as if scalded.

  She turned to face me, instinctively covering her breasts and swollen, leaking sex. Something in my expression made her flinch, her full mouth flattening.

  But I could only stare blankly at her, swallowing quick and thick again and again to force the demons back.

  “Priest,” she said softly, inquiringly, needing me to assuage her vulnerability.

  I focused on my breath, the harsh drag of it into my lungs and out through my mouth. There was a crack in the foundation of my life threatening to collapse everything I’d ever known.

  A previously unknown portion of my brain reminded me that life grew in the cracks, the earth pushing up through those imperfections to fill them with green and flowers.

  Still, panic fizzed and popped between my ears, obscuring my vision with black splotches.

  “Priest,” Bea repeated, stronger this time. She moved toward me, a blurry shape in my bleary stare. I flinched when she reached for me, catching her hand too hard in my grip. She didn’t shy away from the viciousness in my gaze when our eyes met. Instead, she tipped her chin up, little thing that she was, so she could maintain contact. “Priest, it’s okay.”

  My lips pulled back over my teeth, my thoughts gone to static so only instinct reigned. I glowered at her, a low rumble of warning in my throat. I squeezed her hand tighter until I felt every contour of the delicate bones beneath her skin.

  I wanted something.

  Something more than ruin, ruin, ruin.

  My cock, coated in her juices, in her blood, cooled in the frigid air pouring in from the open window, reminding me that I had just brutally taken her virginity from her. A normal man would have bundled her up and snuggled her or some shit.

  I wasn’t that man.

  Instead, I stood panicked and furious with someone, myself or some kind of higher power, for gifting me an obsession with a woman who deserved so much fucking better than me.

  It was too late for that now.

  I had the taste of her in the back of my mouth, the feel of her on my shaft, and that sweet, light voice in my head coaxing me to take her harder.

  I’d be haunted by her forever.

  And I was already haunted by so many demons, didn’t I bloody well deserve to possess just one? To own just one glorious thing in my life all for myself?

  Bea read the turmoil in my eyes and stepped closer, drawing her hand and mine along with it to her neck where she lay it flat against her throat. Only when my fingers twitched did she slide her hand out from under mine so I was collaring her again.

  Her pulse thud, thudded against my palm. Her life in my hand.

  I closed my eyes against the burn of that thought in my head, the way it seared into my grey matter and worked its way down my spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, before settling as a heavy weight in my gut.

  “Better men could love you,” I said, my voice guttural but strong. I opened my eyes and pinned her with the heaviness of my conviction. “But now, I’ll kill any of them who try.”

  Bea made a soft noise in the back of her throat that somehow translated to sheer relief and joy. As if being possessed by me, obsessed over by a psychopath, was all she had ever wanted.

  I stepped away before I could follow my impulse to fuck her into the bed, fuck her until she cried, fuck her until she was permanently changed by the shape of
me in and against her body. I wasn’t used to curbing my impulse, and it was harder than I would’ve thought.

  “You won’t stay the night,” she whispered, not a question.

  “No,” I agreed, already moving toward the window knowing that the winter storm raging outside was safer for me than the sweet-scented interior of Bea’s room. “But I’ll be watching.”

  Bea

  I woke up alone and aching. My eyes fixed blearily on the whorls in the wood beams across the ceiling as I ran my fingers lightly down my naked torso to the center of the ache. My pussy was tender, silk petals crushed under the force of Priest’s savagery, opening torn by his thick, unyielding erection. I was still wet, leaking. My fingers played in the mess tenderly. It felt good, both the light stimulation of pleasure and the further provoking of pain.

  I’d liked it.

  No, “like” was too tame a word. Like “nice” or “okay”.

  There was none of that moderation applied to what happened between Priest and me last night.

  It had been base, savage, and animal, and completely out of my control. I’d submitted so easily to his demands as if he had a knife pressed to my throat in threat. Only, he didn’t have to threaten me. And the knife? It was pressed to my breasts and thighs, carving into my skin so lightly it barely left a scab. I shuddered as I recalled the way his hot tongue had lapped away the blood. It reminded me thrillingly of a predator at its kill, lapping up the residue before it consumed its prey whole.

  Consumed.

  That’s what he had done to me.

  I was eaten up by his intense passion, wrapped in the flames of his burning need to take me however he could, to mark me and own every inch of me. He’d said none of those things in words, but I’d read them in the possessive grip of his hands and teeth on my skin. In the way he worshipped me to ruin me for any other man but him.

  He’d succeeded. Wholly. Perhaps woefully.

  Because then he’d left, gone into the night like some phantom dissolved in shadow.

  No soft words, no kisses, no tender ministrations to my ravaged body.

  Just something like a panic attack in his eyes, a hand at my throat, and one glimmering, shimmering phrase I held delicately between my hands as if it was some breakable glass orb.

  Better men could love you, but now, I’ll kill any of them who try.

  It wasn’t exactly a proclamation of love.

  But it was close.

  It was Priest.

  And it was more than enough for me.

  I grinned so wide my lips cut painfully into my cheeks, and then that wasn’t enough, so I started giggling. Then the giggles turned to full-blown, stomach-cramping laughter. I rolled onto my side in the bed as I laughed, clutching my gut as tears streamed down my face.

  This was happiness, I thought. This was what all those ooey-gooey poems King wrote for Cressida were about. Because of this feeling that existed in my gut like a living breathing entity, Lila had continued to love Nova across years and traumas. This was what I saw whenever I looked at Loulou and Zeus in a room together—that indefinable look in their eye. The way Harleigh Rose and Lion’s chemistry buzzed through any space they cohabited like an electrical storm confined to their orbit.

  This. This. This.

  And now, I had it.

  Me.

  Little Bea Lafayette. The afterthought, the “less than”, the second string.

  I had the attention of the most beautiful man I’d ever known.

  No, more than that. Not just his attention, not just some silly crush or some transient bout of lust.

  I had his obsession.

  And unlike most, I knew just what an obsession was to a psychopath, to a man like Priest. He saw me when he closed his eyes, and he thought of me in the black spaces between other thoughts. He would go out of his way to stalk me, to watch me so he could know me and my life inside out. There was nothing I could do, I knew, that Priest would not be curious about.

  I knew this because I was a student of psychology, but more, I knew this because I felt that way too.

  It made me wonder if, beneath all the pink ribbons and white frills, I might just be a bit of a psychopath myself.

  Two psychos in love, I thought and laughed louder.

  “It’s a good thing everyone was awake already,” Loulou drawled, drawing my attention to the doorway where she leaned with a hand on the deep flare of her hip and her brows raised. “You’re shouting down the house.”

  I snorted a little as I calmed down, dashing the tears from my face with my thumbs before I shot a massive grin at her. “Sorry.”

  “You seem it,” she noted dryly. “Are you sorry for waking Z and me up with your midnight rendez-vous last night too?”

  I blinked at her, shocked.

  Honestly, I’d thought we’d been relatively quiet, especially over the calamity of the storm battering the house. I also would have thought, if they heard us, they would come to…I don’t know…investigate at the very least or shoot Priest in the face for touching me.

  With a heavy sigh, Loulou moved into the room and closed the door, then made her way over to the bed where she sat down gingerly at my side. Disgust flittered across her beautiful face as she studied the covers, and I realized she was looking for evidence of sex in my sheets.

  Quickly, I yanked the duvet up to my chin and glared at her.

  “Bea,” she said on a beleaguered sigh, then paused to run her hand through her long blond hair, the same shade and thickness as mine. “Everything in me is hoping the man here last night was some mild-mannered college kid from one of your classes. Please tell me I’m right?”

  I bit my lip, and it seemed to be answer enough for her.

  She slumped slightly, and I watched her hand as it played with the edge of the charcoal grey duvet. “Yeah, well, I knew it was a long shot.” I watched as she sucked in a long breath to brace for our inevitable fight. “What the hell were you thinking, Bea? You gave yourself to Priest McKenna? He’s ten years older than you and about as outlaw as they come.”

  I rolled my eyes so hard they hurt. “You have absolutely no right to chastise me. You aren’t my mum. And you really want to be a massive hypocrite? Your husband is nineteen years older than you, and you married him when you were seventeen years old and still a senior in high school!”

  “This is completely different, and you know it,” she argued, leaning forward as if proximity to her argument alone would change my mind. “Zeus was a father, a loyal and loving man who just so happened to go to jail for killing a man to save me. He’s warm and loving, and he would do anything for me.”

  “I’m not insulting Zeus,” I said, throwing up my hands in exasperation because my sister was always so damn quick to defend her husband. “He’s all of those things. But why can’t Priest be those things too?”

  Loulou blinked at me. “He’s a killer, Bea. Not someone who’s murdered someone because they have to, but someone who chooses to end people’s lives because he likes it.”

  “He kills people for the very club you love and champion,” I reminded her haughtily, hating her for one vicious, fleeting moment.

  I’d hated Loulou before, so this wasn’t new.

  We were sisters.

  Whoever said sisters always got along was obviously not a sister. We fought hard, but in the end, we always loved harder.

  I knew, in the end, maybe not today, but sometime in the future, Loulou would get where I was coming from.

  “He would kill anyway. Zeus just gives him a reason.” Her eyes were so wide and sincere a blue they seemed child-like, reminding me of all those years she’d spent in the hospital, her eyes the only spot of colour in the drab white hospital room.

  “‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.’” I quoted from Revelation 6
:8 in the Bible.

  The verse had always resonated with me.

  Even as a girl, I wondered why there was no sympathy for Death. He was pledged to rule over a kingdom of restless souls who would never love his own.

  How excruciatingly lonely was that?

  “You’ve always worn rose-tinted glasses, even about morbid topics like this. You can’t make everything sunshine and roses. Some things aren’t meant to be romanticized, and Death is not romantic, Bea,” Loulou spat. “Trust me, as someone who has flirted with it much too closely, I know that for a fact.”

  “Death makes everything romantic,” I retorted. “Don’t you see? The threat of death gives life meaning. It gives it all of its delicious tension. It makes a love like the one you and Z share epic. That man killed for you the first time he met you. He shaved his head when he thought you would lose your hair to chemo and he would lose you to cancer. And Mute? He died for you, and you know what we all know, which is that sweet, perfect man died happy because he knew he’d saved you.”

  I paused to heave in a breath, feeling like I was unspooling my soul for Lou. Hoping she might finally understand Priest. Understand me. Maybe even understand us.

  “Death is nothing if not romantic, Lou. And if you think it’s insane for me to love a man who personifies it, then clearly you don’t understand that it’s a man like that who makes the best lover. He knows the odds of getting out of this life alive are non-existent. He knows how to suck the marrow out of every moment, how to treat the good things that come as if they are miraculous because they are. He knows what matters because he gets the stakes, and he would do anything, literally anything, for the people he feels loyal to.”

  I sucked in air and leveled my big sister with my final blow. “What pains me so much is that he’d do that for you. Anything. Absolutely anything just to make sure you were safe because you’re Z’s, but also because in other ways, you’re his too. Whether you realize it or not. Whether you accept it or not, Priest is the kind of man who would just as easily die for the people he kills for.”

  I stared at my big sister impassively as she stared at me, emotions playing across those cerulean blue eyes like a movie screen. Anger, frustration, sorrow, helplessness, and finally, a reluctant kind of temporary acceptance that turned that blue to wet stone.