Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  My womb tightened so hard, I worried I would implode, and then I did, every molecule of my body spiralling high and far. There was a keening in my ears I faintly recognized as my own voice calling out in hallelujah and a guttural groan as Priest fucked me somehow harder, then a roar of fierce, masculine triumph as he climaxed inside me. I could feel the heat of his seed against my tender walls, the trickle of it leaking from the seam of our joined bodies.

  I sagged helpless against the basin, my limbs noncompliant, my pussy, pulse, and breath the only things still working, still throbbing.

  There was a strange emptiness that made me flinch as Priest gently pulled out of my body. I blushed as he cupped my pussy, smacking it lightly a few times the way you might a well-trained pet. It made my exhausted body tingle again, lit up with shame in a way I didn’t know could be sexy.

  I whimpered softly as he smeared his cum over my clit, then back up all the way to my asshole, which I clenched shyly. His soft exhale was a laugh for Priest. My panties and fishnets were ruined beyond recognition, so he tore them off my legs with efficient tugs, then flipped my skirt back down, smoothing it gratuitously over my ass.

  Only then did he pull me up and turn me around, one arm banded around my low back and the other at my face, fingers abrading along my swelling, pink cheek.

  “I’m gonna kill ’im for touchin’ you,” he swore darkly, eyes a hot brand on my injury. “Gonna string that motherfucker up by his hands so his arms dislocate, then take my time slicin’ him into pretty ribbons. When I’m done with that, when he’s told me why the fuck he attacked you, I’ll gut him like a fish, sliced right through the soft belly. I’ll reach in and pull out his innards so I can feel him die from the inside out as I watch it happen.”

  I stared into those luminous eyes with their long russet lashes, such pretty eyes for such a cruel man. I wanted him to read in my own gaze the words he’d carved into my heart long before he’d even touched me. Priest would never cross a line that would be too far for me to handle. He was capable of devastating violence, but he would never hurt my loved ones, if only because they were loved by me, and so was he.

  Whatever I succeeded in writing on the screens of my blue eyes, Priest read the way a monk devours scripture. When he was done, his long sigh gusted against my face a moment before he tilted his forehead to mine. We rested there like that, his hand on my face, mine pressed to his chest, one over the rough woven badge on his breast that read “Enforcer”, until the cum between my legs began to dry and my heartbeat mellowed to match the steady thud I felt against my fingertips.

  Finally, he pulled away to run his finger in the blood gathered in the hollow of my collarbone. With it, he drew on the only white corner left on my crop top. I let him, gazing up at him with all the bright, bursting love I felt in my chest radiating through my eyes.

  When he was done, he gave me a slight curt nod. The passion that had suffused his face with human beauty was gone, leaving him once more cold and perfect as a statue. He flipped open his burner phone and dialled a number, bringing it to his cheek as he greeted Wrath.

  I turned to the mirror, eyes already falling to the sketch he’d drawn on my shirt.

  A wobbly, blood-drawn heart.

  And just like that, Priest had once again turned one of the worst moments of my life into one of the very best.

  Priest

  There was an art to torture.

  Few were natural talents and even fewer learned true skill.

  It wasn’t one’s capacity for violence that made a torturer proficient.

  It was one’s capacity for patience.

  A man in physical agony can withstand a surprising amount of physical pain before he breaks. It’s the mental suffering that opens them up like a stuck lid banged against the counter.

  In fact, it’s a simple recipe, really. First, imagination. Nothing was unthinkable; everything was geared toward the absolute desecration and dismantling of a human mind and body. Add that to prolonged time, both of inflicting torment for hours but also anticipation, so that they wonder themselves into madness guessing at when the next strike will land, and small hurts collected over time. Timing was everything, which explained why the tortured made the best torturers. Nothing counts more than experience.

  With the hooded would-be rapist, I started as you might imagine, by targeting his erogenous zones. I strung him up in the barn on Angelwood Farm where the club often disposed of bodies or conducted illicit meetings. Manacled his hands in thick cuffs attached to chains on a pulley system fixed to the vaulted wood ceiling and strung him up until the satisfying pop of his dislocating shoulders echoed in the drafty barn.

  Then I went to work on the bastard.

  Now, he was naked and shivering in the deepening winter night, the chains chiming with his fierce shudders. It was like music to my ears, the rattle and the rumble of his pained groans, though they were warped by the screwdriver I’d driven through the soft underside of his chin into the roof of his mouth so it would stay open while I pried out his teeth with pliers.

  He wasn’t a seasoned con, a lifetime criminal, because he broke too quickly. Humpty fucking Dumpty tipped so easily over the wall, fracturing into pieces that were tediously simple to put together.

  Four teeth gone, nipples sliced off and fallen to the ground like rounds of discarded pepperoni, pathetic excuse for his manhood beaten black and blue by brass knuckles, and he was blubbering.

  “He fucking paid me,” the motherfucker mumbled through the blood and metal through the center of his tongue.

  “Take it out,” Zeus ordered mildly, belaying the leashed violence in every line of his posture where he leaned against my work table, watching me at play. “Wanna hear the bastard clearly.”

  My fisted hands shook with the need to disobey, with the need to make it harder, not easier, for the man to talk, to think, to take one more breath, but I did as Zeus bid.

  Not because he bid it, but because I wanted to know why this piece of shit had gone after Bea.

  There was a cold, hard need in the base of my gut, a boulder of unsophisticated, almost primal yearning to rip this man and any other man who might desire Bea Lafayette apart with my bare hands. I wanted to fucking roar from every rooftop that she was mine, mine, mine.

  I wanted her to wear my name on her skin, etched there forever by my blade. I wanted her name on my flesh in the same way, but visible, so that everyone who feared me would look at me and know they should fear her too.

  Because if they fucked with Bea, they fucked with me.

  And I wasn’t a man you fucked with.

  Ever.

  With a vicious, slanted pull, I ripped the screwdriver from the asshole’s mouth. His squeal matched the high yelp of the pigs in their pen outside.

  “Please,” he sputtered, bloody spittle spraying from his ravaged mouth. “Please, stop.”

  I cleaned the screwdriver on the bottom of my tee. Moments like this were why I tended to wear black.

  “I’ll stop, you tell me what I want to know,” I said casually as I moved to my work table and surveyed the spread of my tools.

  I always kept a canvas roll of my favourite torture devices and weapons in my saddlebags; a variety of blades from Karambits and gut hooks, scalpels and filet folding knives, bamboo for splintering fingernails, vials of poison, blunt instruments like hammers and mallets, various batons and whips, though I rarely used those. It was a collection I was proud of, one I’d collected over the years and took great care to keep clean and well-honed.

  I held up a few different knives, listening to the sweet whimpers and harsh exhales of my victim.

  Considering the mood I was in, they weren’t enough.

  I eyed Wrath sitting on a bale of hay in the shadows. “Get me the chainsaw.”

  “Fuck!” Cal Mulligan shouted, tears coursing down his cheeks.

  Curtains had worked his geeky magic and found old Cal online in about thirty seconds based on the driver’s license we’d foun
d in his wallet. He was a forty-three-year-old living outside of Entrance working for a local trucking company.

  And he was a convicted sex offender.

  “Fuck, man, please,” he begged through his sobs. “Some guy I met paid me a fuck ton of cash to rape the girl.”

  “To rape Beatrice Lafayette,” I confirmed. The chill in my voice had frost coating my throat. The cold cast of my heart was turning my blood to fucking ice.

  When he didn’t answer quickly enough, I slid the Karambit onto my right hand and punched a hole with the end of one knife just below his sternum.

  Hot blood seeped out of the hole like sap from a tree and ran down his thick stomach to catch in the dense bush of his groin. Disgusting, pathetic excuse of a man.

  I twisted the knife for no other reason than I wanted to crank up the volume on his screams.

  “YES!” he hollered, sobbing so hard now his body shook and swayed, the bone in his dislocated shoulders grinding. “Fuck, fuck, fuck. Yes!”

  “How did you meet him?” I asked flatly, leaving the knife in his gut, ready to unzip his belly with it and pull out his innards like I’d promised Bea I would. “Why did he want you to do that shit?”

  “He-he didn’t say,” he panted.

  I crashed my fist into his face, sending it careening to the left. “Try that again.”

  “Priest, brother,” Zeus tried to soothe me. “Don’t kill ’im yet.”

  I couldn’t, wouldn’t be soothed. The image of the fuck’s hands on Bea’s pure, gorgeous flesh, the way he’d marked her fragile face with a vivid bruise, the fact that if I hadn’t been there, she might have been taken for only the third time in her fucking life by a worse kind of monster than me…

  Fuck.

  My eyesight tunneled.

  I grabbed Cal fucking Mulligan’s fleshy cheeks in a tight grip and brought my snarling face an inch from his own. “You tell me everythin’ you fuckin’ know in the next ten seconds, or I’m gonna spend the next ten hours killin’ ya so slowly, all you’ll remember of your pathetic fuckin’ life is pain.”

  “He paid me five grand to hurt ‘the pretty blond girl’ that spends all her time with Priest McKenna,” he spewed through his heaving breaths. “Told me I could find her by hanging out around Hephaestus Auto for a few hours. That you worked there.”

  I stilled as everything in me centered around this new information.

  Not the serial killer.

  This wasn’t him. This wasn’t his gig or his motivation.

  This was someone else entirely.

  And just that easily, I knew who the fuck it was.

  “What was the name of the man who sent you?” I demanded. When he hesitated, eyes rolling in his head like loose marbles looking for help from my witnessing brothers he would never get, I warned, “You tell me now, I’ll kill you in five hours instead.”

  Cal’s bloody, torn lower lip warbled, his belly shaking under the blood like red Jell-O. Watching a man come apart at the seams was a special kind of headiness.

  “W-Walsh,” he cried. “Sean Walsh.”

  Adrenaline fizzed in my blood, urging me to hunt down Sean Walsh and splay him open with my knife, skin flesh from muscle, muscle from bone, then whittle those into pretty fucking trophies for my fucking mantel.

  “Sean Walsh,” I repeated just in case Curtains hadn’t heard.

  A forgotten Walsh relative out to avenge his dead kin.

  “He met me outside First Light Church,” Cal sang like a fucking canary. “After a meeting.”

  “Didn’t know they held Rapists Anonymous,” Wrath muttered darkly. “Woulda made a point to hang out outside those buildings too if I’d known.”

  The crack of his knuckles resonated through the barn.

  Cal Mulligan sobbed louder.

  “Enough,” Zeus ordered, already turning to clap a hand on Curtains’ shoulder and look over it at the computer screen. “Shut it down.”

  “Gladly,” I said with one of my small curdled smiles.

  Sinuously, I ripped the Karambit from Cal’s belly and dropped into a kneel in the pool of blood on the floor. A second later, his small cock was in my hands, the knife curling and cutting like butter through the appendage.

  His howl rang through the damp wooden structure and sang through my blood.

  “Leave him,” I snapped as Wrath moved forward to lever him down from the ceiling. “Let the motherfucker bleed out.” I flashed that little grin at Cal as he whimpered and shouted with pain. “This is my kinda mercy. Be grateful for it.”

  I turned on my heel, boot squelching in the blood, and stalked out of the barn, needing the cold air to remind me I should have a cold heart. Instead, the traitorous organ thudded in my chest like a bellows, blowing hot blood through my entire body. I was on fire with something for the first time in my life, with passion instead of calculated ruthlessness. This violence wasn’t just sport; it was necessity.

  He deserved to die again and again for laying a single finger on the angelic head of Bea Lafayette. Scum like Cal should run from her, knowing instinctively he was too fucking inferior to be within spitting distance of a woman so pure of fucking soul.

  I seethed against the side of the barn, leather back to the wet wood, the frigid fingers of the stormy night in my loose hair, whipping into my face. I welcomed the pain, but it didn’t ground me the way it should have, so I pulled out my switchblade and cut a long, shallow gash in both my palms, tracing old scars. When I fisted my hands at my sides, the melodic drip of blood to the concrete beneath my feet calmed me.

  The shivering of my thawing heart quelled with the pain, but I fished my tin of hand-rolled clove cigarettes out of my jeans pocket to further the calm.

  The moment I took a deep breath of the toxic stick, I exhaled like a monk at prayer and closed my eyes to relish in the light-headed haze. The next, I was flicking the cigarette to the ground and stalking to my bike, mind clear and intent on hunting down Sean motherfucking Walsh so I could feed him his own bollocks.

  A steely grip on my forearm stopped me in my tracks, causing my boots to slide in the frosted mud. When I turned around, King was there, holding fast to me even as I pulled away, his face set with that Garro look of determination.

  “Don’t go vigilante on this, Priest,” King urged.

  I blinked at him in answer, face held otherwise still.

  He didn’t get to tell me what to do, and he didn’t get to act like he knew me well enough to map my goals. The bastard had gone and died for months, leaving the entire club shattered by his perceived loss.

  Many of the brothers hadn’t forgiven him yet.

  Including me.

  I wasn’t the kinda man to form close connections, but King meant something to me, carved into the icy walls of my heart, and thinking he was dead had haunted me. I was a soldier of The Fallen, the leased beast of Zeus Garro, and most importantly, the wall anyone should have to get through to get to his fucking family.

  And I’d failed.

  “Priest,” King repeated, pulling hard at me. “Don’t go off fuckin’ half-cocked. Something about this doesn’t ring right.”

  When I turned around to swing a leg over my bike, King cursed. A moment later, he was on me, tackling me to the muddy ground. I grunted as I hit the soft earth, but I was already moving, rolling King onto his back before he leveraged me back onto mine. We went tumbling over the wet earth, our limbs lacking purchase in the slick, our intentions lost to the animal urge to overcome each other. Finally, I pinned him to the ground, reared back, and landed a punch to the square edge of his chin.

  I snapped my teeth at him. “Only brothers get a shot’a reinin’ me in. Last I checked, you were a ghost.”

  The starch went out of his muscles instantly, the cast of his features moving from snarl to shock.

  I should’ve pressed my advantage, but there was something soft in his expression that made something sharp pierce through my thick skin.

  “There it is, then,” King mutter
ed, angling his chin up again like a taunt. “Go ahead, man. If you need me to pay some fucked-up penance ’cause it’s the only way you know, I’ll fuckin’ well pay it. Means we’re brothers again, you can beat me into the fuckin’ earth.”

  His words slotted between my ribs like a well-placed dagger, but it was the resolve in his face that twisted the knife agonizingly beneath my flesh.

  He knew me too well. I wanted him to apologize with a pound of fucking flesh because that was the way I’d been raised. Father Hannigan’s canes and ceremonial knives carving pieces out of my young, supple flesh.

  No one knew even close to the full story of my childhood, and no one ever would, but King was a clever bastard, and he’d come close to guessing at it over the years.

  Sickness bloomed like algae in my belly, turning my gut to acid.

  I flung myself off King and rolled to a seat beside his prone form in the mud, leaning against the cold chrome of my Harley.

  “Get up,” I ordered, avoiding his eyes as he sat up and dragged his ass through the dirt to sit at my side.

  Silence descended, the faintly buzzing static of a television with a lost signal. I propped my forearms on my raised knees and stared at the tombstone tatts on my fingers. King’s name caught my eye, etched in black on the thumb of my right hand. The ink was still fresh, so clear it jumped from my flesh like a declaration.

  The King is dead.

  My throat burned with that long-lost fire that had cracked through the concrete foundation I’d laid in my gut a very long time ago. It had been boiling and roiling beneath the surface since that kiss with Bea in Purgatory Motel, growing in force every single day thereafter.

  Truthfully, I missed being made of fucking ice.

  “Ya know, bein’ dead was no cakewalk for me either,” King finally said.

  The guy couldn’t stay quiet for long.

  I made a kinda grunt in my throat that wasn’t affirmation or rejection.

  King chuckled slightly. “Yeah, yeah. Listen, I made the decision; I gotta live with the fallout.” He paused, turning his head to look out over the freshly sown fields of wheat. The fingers of icy wind lifted his pretty boy hair and tangled it over the stub of a pencil he wore behind one ear. “Never gonna forget the look on my old man’s face when I came back. Thought I’d been torn straight down the fuckin’ middle by the agony on his face. Gotta son now, so I can guess better what kinda fresh hell Dad was livin’ every day I was lost to ’im.”