Yeah. There was no gettin’ past the nightmarish months King’d been lost to Z and the club. Z had Harleigh Rose, Ares, Angel, and Monster, and his Loulou to keep him going, but he’d been haunted by the ghost of his firstborn in a way that made even me believe in fucking ghosts.
King dropped his head back against the bike and looked up at the heavens. The night was dark and cloud-strewn, but here and there, a glimmer of starlight pushed through its small, anaemic light.
“Missed my sister like a hole in the gut too. Missed out on the twins’ first months’a livin’, and that aches. Missed my friends. Fuckin’ longed for my brothers.” He paused, rolling his head against my bike in a way that made me want to snarl at him to take care, but the words turned to ash on my tongue when he tipped his bruising chin at me. “Missed you, Priest.”
My teeth clamped together against the surge of something rising up my throat. I tried to clear with a hard swallow and a short cough, but the feeling remained. It was as if the cancer of missing him I’d never really realized had infected me was purging itself from my body.
I fought it, angry for feeling anything, then angrier for heaping more emotion on top of that.
Then I opened my mouth, conceding defeat, and spat it out. “Feck off.”
King laughed. It was the Garro laugh, the sound that had roused me out of my stupor when I’d climbed off that freighter onto Canada soil and followed Zeus Garro for a coffee. It was that full-bellied, head lifted to the sky sound like it was some kinda offering to God, that made me realize even at seventeen, even neck-deep in trauma, that this was the kinda man anyone would follow.
His son had that laugh, and hearing it then was the final straw. I scowled at him as he laughed and flipped open my switchblade with a practiced flick of my wrist.
“I’ll gut ya, you keep laughin’ like that. ’S givin’ me a bloody headache,” I grunted.
The bastard laughed harder.
I ignored him, mostly, looking up at the stars, counting the few that sparkled in the dark. But that sound was a ribbon of silk in my bloodstream.
“Not a crime to love someone, ya know,” King said through his dissipating laughter. “Some say it’s the reason for livin’ at all.”
“We live to die.” There was no deviating from the truth of that.
“It’s not religious to think otherwise,” King poked at me.
“Religion isn’t the fuckin’ enemy,” I said, reluctant to share but irritated enough to do so anyway.
King arched a brow. “Coulda fuckin’ fooled me with the way you talk sometimes.”
“It’s the organized shit that gets me,” I muttered, staring at the edge of the blade between my hands, the way the moonlight made it iridescent like Bea’s eyes. “That shit’s been used way too fuckin’ much for evil ends. Believin’ or not believin’ in a higher power isn’t reason enough to ruin people’s lives.”
King blinked.
His shock made me seethe with bad-temperedness. Not at him, but with myself. When was the last bloody time I talked about any of this shit? The words I needed to articulate it were slow moving in my brain and thick on my tongue.
“Read about religion to understand it. For a long fuckin’ time, it was an obsession. Thought it’d make all the shit I’d been through make sense. It fuckin’ didn’t. But I learned all religions stem from the same place, like rivers flowin’ into the sea. People gotta believe in good and bad, in justice, to get through life feelin’ like the hardship of it is worth it.”
“And you, you think it’s worth it knowin’ it just leads to death?”
Bea’s face was there, summoned unwittingly to the forefront of my mind. The curve of her heart-shaped face so small palmed by my thick, evil-doing hands. The sweet form of her pink mouth smiling that smile with the curled edges, barely parted lips, like an inhale of hope was travelling through them. Like she couldn’t bear the thought of me not touching her, nor could she resist being wholly overwhelmed by the feel of me on any inch of her.
If there was a God, it was there in the way that angel looked at me like I was salvation itself.
I didn’t respond to King.
He didn’t press.
The silence again, this time soft as velvet in the ink dark night. My ass was cold in the mud, Cal Mulligan’s blood drying tight on the skin of my neck, cheeks, and hands. But I could’ve sat there, maybe for hours. Before he’d left, King would’ve sat there with me for all of them.
He was just that kinda guy. He was drawn to the quiet dark of a person’s mind. Mute and me. The wild he’d pulled out of Cress like a black ribbon bound too tight around her soul that’d just been begging to unspool.
“Never really understood the phrase ‘see things as they are,’” King mused, looking like some Hollywood actor playing at rebellion, all that hair and that smile. If I hadn’t known the man since he was a preteen begging me to teach him how to yield a blade, I would’ve thought he was some kinda fraud. “People don’t see things as they are ’cause there’s no consensus on what the norm is. People see things as they are. Through the lens of their own bias.”
I didn’t say a word because I knew King. He’d eventually get to some kind of pivotal point.
He did so slanting me a clever-eyed stare. “Lotta people see Priest McKenna as a killer, as some kinda nightmarish monster. That’s their truth. But pretty little Bea Lafayette doesn’t see a monster when she looks at you, brother. She sees the man who makes her feel whole.
“We aren’t just the things we present ourselves as. In my experience, the true key to knowin’ someone is to watch what captures their attention. Bea might have this sunshiny disposition and wear those godawful heart-shaped sunglasses, but behind them, she’s watched you since the day she met you.” King shrugged as if he hadn’t just handed me some serious as fuck wisdom. “I’m thinkin’ that speaks fuckin’ volumes, man.”
“Already made ’er mine,” I admitted gruffly. “It’s done.”
“But you aren’t happy about it?”
“Don’t know what happiness is, really.” I tried to think of the times before it all when I’d been just a lad, when Ma and Pa, Danae and Keely were still alive. The images I conjured were blurry, distorted by time and worn pale by frequent handling. When I was at the church, those memories were the only things that kept me going. They’d long since lost their magic, and that happiness was less than a memory; it was only a scar I could barely remember receiving.
King chuckled, running a thumb against the gold wedding band on his left hand. It was thickset and ostentatious because he was proud as fuck to be the husband of a stand-up woman like Cress. As he fucking well should be. “There was a time years ago I had to give the definition’a happiness to my wife too. I’m gonna give a different one to you, now, ’cause sure as shit, you’re a different kinda soul than her.” His eyes cut to me, so light they seemed supernatural, glowing in the moon the same colour as its light. “Happiness is lookin’ into a woman’s eyes and seein’ the best version’a you reflected back at you.”
There was a cramp in my gut as if the emotion coursing through me was giving me indigestion. I gritted my teeth through the strange sensation and glared at the biker poet beside me.
“Anyone ever tell ya you’re wise for an eejit?” I asked dryly.
His chuckle was as familiar to me as the sound of my own breath. If I was the kinda man who had a best mate, King woulda been mine.
Until that moment, a small part of me had lived in fear that he’d returned from the dead wrong, a zombie like me at seventeen, like Wrath since Kylie.
But sitting there hip-deep in mud talking about shit that couldn’t have been written in books under stars that felt all-seeing that night, it truly felt like our King had returned.
Bea
Okay, so I followed him.
In my defense, I was worried.
Also, curious.
After seeing the tidy leftover of Priest’s violence with Patrick Walsh at Purgatory Mot
el, then his barely leashed aggression with Eric when he thought he was involved in the serial killings, I had a strange yet insistent need to witness Priest in his element.
It was perverse, maybe, but it was like being with an athlete and not watching his games.
I wanted to see the full extent of who this man was so I could love every single inch of his soul.
Angelwood Farms was a setting that had a place in The Fallen lexicon, but no one had expressly talked about it with me, and I had certainly never visited. From the outside, the towering white barn, fields of freshly tilled soil, and a pen filled with snuffling pigs almost looked the picture of pastoral peace.
But I could hear the screams from where I stood in the shadows of the forest off to one side of the road leading up to the buildings. The sound of the wind rushing flat across the fields and the rustle of it in the trees combined with the screams was oddly stirring.
When they stopped, I watched Priest stalk from the building, King following, then their short tussle in the mud. Logically, I knew watching two muscle-bound, gorgeous men fight like heathens shouldn’t arouse me, but it did.
I wanted very much to be mud bound with Priest heavy on top of me, almost crushing the breath from me so every short pant was something like a bullet from the compressed chamber of my lungs. Something a little dangerous. It was the flint to the spark in my gut, that danger. I wanted a man most people feared to drill me just a little too hard into the dirt.
By the time they finished their mostly quiet requiem, and the rest of the men had filtered out of the barn like demons from the bowels of hell, I was edgy with lust and impatient for action.
It was almost too good to be true that Priest was left behind, leaning against his great metal bike with his muddy boots crossed, face a dark collage of drying earth and human blood, smoking one of his hand-rolled clove cigarettes. I could imagine the scent because I’d stolen one once when he’d left the battered vintage Irish breakfast tea tin on the bar top at the clubhouse during a party a few years ago.
The earthy musk of tobacco leaves, the sharp hit of cloves, and the muted notes of something kind of sweet, like amber or vanilla.
I’d smelled it before bed for so long, the paper had disintegrated under the natural oils of my reverent fingers like the pages of Grandpa’s ancestral Bible. Even then, I’d collected the debris into an old Hello Kitty tin and slept with it under my pillow.
I was a girl obsessed and without shame. For a moment as I watched him with hungry eyes, devouring the dull glint of his red hair in the low light of the cloud-covered sky and the single lamp over the barn doors, I wondered why it was so taboo for a woman to have such an intensity of feeling, but so sexy for a man to be so possessed with longing.
I didn’t care if it made me creepy or mad.
I was in love with a psychopath, after all. I figured I needed a pinch of madness to suit him so well as I did.
My gaze fell to my hands, the carved Dara Knot I fingered gently, rubbing my thumbs on the cracks I’d put there in my times of turmoil the way Priest had meant me to.
You are not weak.
With Priest, I didn’t feel weak. I didn’t feel as though my femininity, my sweetness, or my innocence made me silly or trifling. They made me strong, forged in love and kindness, and wasn’t that so much more forceful than hate or trauma?
I was going to prove it, I’d determined, by making my broken Priest happy.
By making him fall in love with me too.
When I looked up from replacing the Dara Knot in my pocket, he was gone.
I blinked, wondering for one wild moment if I’d imagined the entire scene.
But then there was cold, hard pressure at the back of my head.
I’d never had a gun held to my skull before, but it was unmistakable. A sense of calm overtook me, a sensation like drowning, the pressure against my body of all that water above me, the knowledge I wouldn’t make it to the surface, the hard stop of my breath, and the muted roar in my ears.
“Little Shadow.” The voice slithered out of the darkness. “One day, following me will lead to your death.”
A shiver skipped down my spine, a rock flung against water. “I could probably say the same for you. I seem to attract a certain kind of man.”
“Killers, all of us,” Priest agreed in that voice that could scare a seasoned criminal. “Like moths to an eternal flame.”
“Light needs darkness in order to shine,” I reminded him, feeling suddenly fearful in a way he probably hadn’t anticipated.
My fear was not rooted in violence. Priest would never lay a finger on me I did not want. My fear was almost claustrophobic, as if my love was this great overflowing thing trapped in a room of ice. No one had ever yearned as I did for a spring thaw.
“I’m not poetry, Bea. I’m savagery. Don’t pretend what we both know; no words can pretty up the ugliness of what I am.” He sounded so cruel then, so condescending and old. I’d always been aware of the age difference—our personalities only proved to heighten it—but I’d never felt so young and girlish standing there with hope in my hand like a wilting flower.
“I don’t need a reason to murder. I kill because I am capable of killing. It is my art, and in its own way, because of that, it’s also my soul. I need death to remind me why I’m alive. This is me, Bea. Stained in blood and sin with zero fucking regrets.”
“The heart of a killer can still love,” I pressed, but it felt like pressure on a mortal wound, blood bubbling up too fast beneath my fingers. Futilely, I pressed harder. “Even Death has a heart.”
He cocked his head, eyes blank behind his blink, hardly humouring me. “In storybooks maybe.”
“In the Bible,” I protested. “Satan has human qualities. He sins because he is the most human of them all. He lusts and loves.” But religion was not the way to reach this man, so frantically, I continued. “Hades loved Persephone so much he ripped open the earth to steal her light for himself in the Underworld.”
The glimmer was faint, but enough. I used it as the North Star through his wintry heart’s landscape.
My hands on his were sweating slightly with my angst.
“You stole me away the moment I saw you,” I told him. “You didn’t mean to, but a crater opened up in the earth beneath my feet, and I fell into your world, desperate to be in it and in your arms.”
Swallowing the hard knot in my throat, I turned to face him. He dropped the hand holding the gun to his side, then seeing my gaze, he shoved it into the holster beneath his cut.
Gingerly, unsure of his response, I reached forward to collect his empty hands. They were cold and heavy in mine, but he let me lift them between us even though his stance was rigid.
He had such beautiful hands—long tapered fingers, thick and lightly furred with russet hair the same reddish-brown as the freckles marring the skin that wasn’t covered in dark ink. The tombstone tattoos were rendered beautifully, the names and dead clear even in their small script. I ran my fingertips over them, feeling the grooves in the skin, rubbing my nail over the names: Mam, Pa, Danae, Keely, O’Neal, Mute, Garrick, King. So many people he’d lost or killed, all worn on his skin like deliberate scars. There were those too, though, the wounds that had never healed to invisibility. Thin lines crisscrossed his palms in varying shades of nude, white, pink, and livid red, the latter fresh and obviously self-inflicted. A cicatrix in the shape of a whorl like some strange burn, the skin silky and fine. They were large, strong hands, murdering-men hands, but they had only ever brought me peace. They were storytelling hands, more eloquently speaking to Priest’s bleak history than his lips had even given service too.
A killer’s hands had never been so loved.
I stared up at his shadowed gaze as I brought the heft of one to my mouth, pressing a firm kiss to his palm that unfurled his stiff fingers like a blooming rose. Then I did the same with the right, then held them together so I could run my lips over those bruised, bloodied knuckles.
Whe
n I pulled away, his blood was on my mouth.
Anointed by his sins, I stared up at him clear-eyed and brimming full of intention. “The only nightmarish part in all of this is the idea that you’d leave me in the dark alone. I’m here, Priest. Even before you, I was here. I’m the sister-in-law of The Fallen MC prez. I’m in this life whether you like it or not. Loving you isn’t a worse fate than death. The idea of not loving you? That’s what makes me feel like I’m dying.”
A cloud passed over the moon, casting Priest all in black, yet I felt as if I’d never seen him so clearly. There was need in his eyes. Need. So fierce and poignant it radiated off him like a scent, like a vibration. I could feel it with all my senses.
And knowing I was the one to make him feel so penetratingly?
It eviscerated me.
“Come,” I said, softly, coaxing even as I pulled him inexorably toward the light. “Show me who you really are, only ever alone. Let me follow you into the dark.”
He moved so quickly, I gasped in excitement and in shock. His hand was at my throat, squeezing just enough, settling me in an instant. When he spoke, it was a sinuous rasp against my parted, panting mouth. “You wanna see dark, mo cuishle? I’ll show you every inch of it. Just remember, you begged me for it.”
* * *
* * *
He took me to a graveyard.
It was a little plot close enough to the farm, but otherwise in the middle of nowhere.
We took my car.
My pretty pink Fiat that Priest folded his long, hard body into like a clown car after he put his things in the trunk. I didn’t know what detritus an enforcer for a criminal syndicate carried around with him, but I could imagine.
Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6) Page 21