By the time I carried her to her canopied bed, she was passed out, soft breath fanning against my throat. My arms convulsed around her when I thought about setting her beneath the pink satin sheets.
I didn’t want to let her go.
I didn’t want to leave the house the way I knew I should, and I definitely didn’t want to let her out of my sight now or ever.
She was mine, mine, mine.
I gritted my teeth as emotions bubbled and boiled in my gut. I didn’t know what to do with them, so I was helpless to act against them. Instead, I sat my ass on the edge of that girly as fuck bed and held my girly girl in my arms for a long time as she slept. The night outside grew darker, Sampson stalked into the room and curled up on a pillow with a little glare at me for stealing his mistress, and still, I couldn’t let her out of my arms.
She fit there.
She fit against my chest, in the space between my ribs, in the hole where there should have been a human heart. Maybe that was it—maybe she was my heart, living wrongly outside my body, and that was why I felt this way.
Like we should never be parted.
Like we should give in to our twin ambitions and stalk each other until the end of time.
Finally, when dawn peeked its pale forehead over the horizon, I made myself let her go. She slipped between the covers with a little murmur and a frown between her pale brows I smoothed with my thumb.
Then I found ways to stay in that absurd pink house with the vintage furniture and the girly décor. I cleaned up that fucking snowman cup, stared at Delilah as she cooed in her cage, and mopped up the spill of water in her bathroom with those fluffy ass towels.
Somehow, I found myself in front of the ornate gold mirror and caught sight of my reflection. Those empty eyes, pale and green as always, didn’t look the way they usually did.
They weren’t tired and wane, empty as jade vases.
They were bright, lit by some inner flame Bea had ignited like a torch that wouldn’t extinguish.
Agony flared through me, followed swiftly by anger.
I couldn’t feel again.
I couldn’t go through that again.
Mam, Pa, Keely, Danae.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
Mute. Dead.
Me. Dead. Having died in that church a long time ago beneath a stained-glass window that hung in The Fallen MC chapel.
Despite it all, I was being dragged, kicking and screaming, back into the land of the living by one much too young and entirely too naïve girl with moonshine hair and a soul drawn dangerously to my dark.
Without thinking, I reared back and punched my right hand into the mirror. It cracked into an elaborate web, my feral face at its center. My knuckles, already raw from beating in Cal Mulligan’s face, were torn open and bleeding heavily.
I dipped my finger into one of the open wounds, pressing ruthlessly so my panic smoothed into pain. I took a few deep breaths through my gritted teeth to center myself in it and then resolved to get the fuck out of that honey-trap of a house.
Before I did, something in me forced me to stop.
To take my blood-painted fingertip and brush a message for Bea on the porcelain bowl of the sink.
A rún mo chroí.
Secret of my heart.
And as I left the house, locking the door behind me with the spare key I’d found in a drawer in the kitchen, and made my way to my bike where I waited until Wrath, Bat, and, surprisingly, Dane, turned up to take guard duty, I felt exactly as if I had left whatever semblance I had of a heart and soul curled up in a pink bed in that pink house.
Bea
I woke up Sunday morning with a prayer on my tongue. It was so popular with Christians that it was almost a cliché. My grandpa often avoided the passage even though it was one of the most requested for him to recite at weddings. The passage from Corinthians began with stating love was patient and kind, but that wasn’t what grew in my mouth like a newly budded rose when I opened my eyes and knew I was alone in my bed after a night of sin and sex with the love of my life who might never, through no fault of his own, love me back the same way.
It was the end, the whimper at the end of the bang.
Love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
It perfectly articulated the vast wealth of hope and patience I felt for Priest. My love for him was not something I could force on him, especially when he had no context for it. Instead, I chose to think of it as a home I created and tended for him, a place I fashioned like a haven where he might lay his weary head and be free of his demons. Where he might, one day, decide to live along with me, happy in our own way, in love under our own conditions.
I sighed wearily as I slipped out of bed, absently leaning down to pet Sampson as she snaked around my ankles on the way to my bathroom.
He ran from the room when I gasped as I caught sight of my shattered mirror. As I moved closer, I saw a single, long shard of glass in the basin, lying beneath the bloody entrails of words Priest must have written on the white porcelain.
A rún mo chroí.
I traced my finger over the dried blood and shivered even though I didn’t know what the words meant. Whatever the Gaelic denoted, I knew it was inherently some kind of declaration. Of course, the only love letter a man like Priest would ever write was one penned in his own blood.
I fingered the shard of glass, shivering as I remembered the way Priest had used the sharp edge of his blade on my body. I’d never known such a thing could be erotic, but the feel of that cold steel was incendiary. Knowing he had the skill to split me in two, but the restraint and talent to avoid harming me was a heady combination. Somehow, he knew my darkest thoughts, the fantasies my brain concocted only in the deepest hours of night when I lay awake and dreaming with my hand between my thighs in bed.
I looked up at my reflection, noting the way my smile suffused every inch of my face with gentle contentment. Last night had been intense and glorious. The evidence of it was stamped on my skin in the beard burn abrading my neck and chest, in the faint bruises decorating my hips like little bunches of grapes, and in the deeper bruises on my knees from kneeling in the shower to take Priest’s blunt cock in my throat. I’d always bruised like a peach, and for once, I was proud to bear the wounds on my flesh. I shivered at the salacious image I made, watching as my eyes went half-mast with remembered lust.
I startled when someone knocked on my front door, then grinned cheek to cheek as I wondered if it might be Priest come back to see me. I practically flew to the door, hair flying, before I realized I was naked.
I bit my lip, then grabbed the knit cream throw Cleo had made for me from the back of my living room chair and wrapped it around myself.
“Hello,” I sung as I opened the door.
Bat, Dane, and Cleo all blinked back at me.
The two men averted their eyes, covering their smiling mouths, but Cleo burst into delighted laughter and started clapping.
“Oh, oh, I just knew it,” she crowed as she pushed past me into the house holding a picnic basket.
“It was pretty damn obvious,” Bat told her as he followed her into the house, ruffling Cleo’s silky hair. “Don’t be too proud’a yourself.”
Cleo just beamed at him. “I’m just so happy for her.” She turned to look over her shoulder at me as she headed into my kitchen. “I’m just so happy for you.”
I remained in the doorway, getting cold in the icy wind, watching as Dane grinned at me and knocked the snow off his boots before entering and closing the door behind him.
“I’m thinking you aren’t used to being teased like this,” he said softly.
I bit my lip, then nodded. “This is kinda new, you know?”
Something flickered in his eyes like a faulty light bulb. “Yeah, kid. I gotcha. I’ll handle them if you promise me coffee. It’s too damn early to function without coffee.”
I didn’t know Lila’s brother very well. He’d been presumed
dead, missing in action from the military overseas for all the years I’d known her, and when he returned, he’d mostly stuck to Lila, Zeus, Bat, Smoke, and one of the promiscuous club hangarounds, Tempest Riley.
But now he was there in my living room, tall, broad, dark-skinned, and as beautiful a man as I had ever seen. And he was looking out for me even though he didn’t know me from Eve.
I smiled beatifically at him. “I make the best coffee. Harleigh Rose even says so and you might not know this, but she has a serious coffee addiction.”
“First thing we bonded over,” Dane told me with a wink of his absurdly curly-lashed, unusually pale blue eye. “Lead the way.”
Bat and Cleo had already made themselves at home in my kitchen, Bat sitting on a stool at the island while Cleo unpacked her picnic basket.
“What did I do to deserve this?” I asked her as I leaned over her shoulder to press a kiss to her cheek as a distraction so I could steal a peach from the rattan basket.
“I saw that,” she said mildly, but she let me take the fruit and continued to busy herself with breakfast. “You don’t have to do anything for me to do something nice for you, Bea. You know that. But in this case, I figure you being obsessed over by a psychopath is reason enough to bring you breakfast.”
I blinked with the fruit held to my mouth, the soft flesh as smooth as Priest’s surprisingly plush lips.
Cleo caught my look and laughed. “I meant the serial killer, babe, not Priest. Although, after what seems to have happened last night, maybe this should be a celebratory breakfast instead of a consolation breakfast.”
A blush fired my skin, making Bat laugh, and Dane shoved him with his shoulder as he sat down beside him.
“Why don’t you get dressed for church?” Dane suggested, pointedly nodding at my blanket robed nakedness. “We’ll take you after breakfast.”
“Tempest’s bringing Shaw and Steele by too,” Bat told me, mentioning his twin sons, who I happened to adore. “Amelia’s got some appointment, but she wants the boys at church with her this mornin’, so we figured we’d go together.”
I blinked at the massive war veteran with tattoos from neck to wrists, trying to imagine him in the hallowed halls of First Light. “You’re going to church?”
Bat smiled sharply as he plucked the peach from my limp fingers and brought the fruit to his mouth, taking a monstrous bite. “Fuck no. But I’ll wait outside and shoot the shit with Dane while you do your business.”
“Where’s…I mean, is Priest going to meet up with us?” I questioned pathetically because I couldn’t help myself.
I knew he’d left because the intimacy had been too much for him. He was a wild animal, so it wasn’t as if he could be domesticated overnight. I wasn’t angry, and I wasn’t even really sad about his abandonment. I was just happy he’d opened up as much as he had the night before.
And I wanted an opportunity soon to take another crack at those concrete walls.
Bat’s lips tipped in a small, sympathetic grin. “Nah, man’s got club business this mornin’.”
I nodded with my lower lip pinned between my teeth, the pain a slight comfort. Without another word, I quickly put my white SMEG coffee machine on to drip and went to get dressed.
Surprisingly, Cleo followed.
“What’s up, honey?” I asked as she hesitated at the door to my bedroom, hugging the doorframe as if for comfort. “Are you okay?”
She bit her lip, a lock of short, rumpled brown hair swinging into her green eyes, tangling with the lashes. In the glamour of the biker babes, it was easy to overlook Cleo with her sweet, full-cheeked prettiness, the freckles on her nose and the shyness in her expression. But I’d always found her lovely, her beauty growing on you the more you studied her. The problem was, with Cleo, she did not like to be studied at all.
“Cleo?” I repeated as I shucked the blanket and quickly pulled on a ruffled set of underwear. “You’re scaring me a little. What’s up?”
She sighed, pushing off the door to plod over to my bed and collapse on top of the covers with a gusty sigh. “I think I’m in love.”
I blinked.
She went into a half crunch on the mattress to look at my expression and winced, then giggled a little. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. I should have told you, but you’ve been busy with a murdering psycho and a certain redheaded enforcer.”
“Honey,” I emphasised as I quickly chose a wintry cream dress from my closet and dragged it on before going to her side and sitting on the bed. “There is seriously no excuse for not telling me! Even if I was busy, you should have hit me upside the head and told me your news.”
She laughed a little, relieved and also giddy, a happy little flush in her cheeks. “Honestly, it’s been a bit fun keeping the secret. I can’t even really tell you who it is.”
My eyebrows cut hard lines into my forehead. “Oh my gosh, are you serious? This is so unlike you.”
Cleo and I were best friends for many reasons. We were both fairly innocent girls brought into the club world by family ties without a man in leather to call our own. We both loved classic movies, though I skewed to the horror and Cleo loved old love stories, shopping at vintage stores, and basically anything and everything girly. We were two peas in a pod, Axe-Man had said once after walking in on us making heart-shaped pancakes at midnight during a sleepover.
And it was true.
So, I was both shocked by her secrecy and by the fact that she was dating at all.
She’d never had more than a crush as far as I knew.
“Is it Eric?” I asked, thinking about her blushing around him recently while we were wrapping up a Little Miss Murder episode.
Her laughter was embarrassed and stuttering with awkwardness. “Bea! I can’t say, okay? Not yet at least.”
“Why would you need to hide a relationship with him? Are you afraid Axe-Man wouldn’t approve? I know Eric looks like a punk, but he’s a really good guy. Heck, he’s a dedicated churchgoer.”
Cleo’s blush intensified. She grabbed my hands and squeezed them tight, eyes shining as she leaned toward me. “He’s amazing. No matter why I can’t tell you the details, I was just bursting to tell you something. He makes me feel so good, Bea, like pure and beautiful and worthy.”
“Aw, honey,” I murmured, feeling the echo of that sensation in my chest as my mind instinctively turned to Priest. “I know the feeling, and it is awesome.”
“So awesome,” she agreed.
We beamed at each other for a long minute, then dissolved into giggles.
“I’m so happy for you,” I told her, bouncing slightly on the bed to emphasise my excitement.
Cleo mimicked me, then bounced our joined hands up and down in tandem. “I’m so happy for you.”
“You promise he’s treating you well?” I demanded. “I’ll kick his butt if he doesn’t.”
She chuckled, so carefree and beautiful, I wanted to squeeze her. So, I did, lunging at her to hug her so tightly, she wheezed in laughter and protest. We struggled a little in jest before I flopped onto my back, panting slightly as I stared at the pink canopy over my bed. Cleo’s hand found my own and linked our fingers.
“Love isn’t how I thought it would be,” she admitted softly after a minute.
“No?”
“No,” she said on a dreamy sigh. “It’s more than just feeling happy. He makes me feel like I have a purpose now.”
I hummed as I thought about that, but I didn’t have a response to give her that she would have liked. In fact, I didn’t like the conflation of love with purpose. My life before Priest was filled with drive. I loved my podcast, my schooling, my family and friends. I had dreams and goals.
I existed outside of my feelings for Priest, a fully realized woman on an independent path through life.
Loving Priest wasn’t like finding the North Star, a guiding force to hold my hand through life and show me the way. I didn’t need his love to acknowledge the beauty and worth of my own existence.
>
But…
Loving Priest made everything I loved about my life and myself vibrant and clear, somehow simply and utterly more profound. All those traumas I’d bore alone before him, all those things large and small I’d always believed I hated about myself, were suddenly given new depth and compassion. He hadn’t changed my life. It was that he had given me new perspective, limning everything both good and bad in the golden light of his love.
When we emerged from my bedroom a while later, my hair curled and gloss applied, my kitchen was filled with people.
I blinked at the sight, trying to absorb the sheer number of massive, tattooed, and leather decked men cramped into my little space. Zeus was wedged in a corner of the counters with Loulou between his legs, held loosely in one arm while he held Monster in the other and my sister cradled Angel. Lila was beside them, cooing at Angel so she laughed and clapped while Nova watched both of them with obvious desire stamped on his gorgeous face. King and Cress were on the ground beside the island on some of my living room pillows playing with Steele and Shaw, who raced toy motorcycles over their limbs and a smiling baby Prince in his car seat.
Hannah was laughing with Harleigh Rose as they fixed coffee for everyone, moving between and around Lion and Lysander, who were making pancakes in my pink pans on the stove. Sander, massive, scarred and scowling, was even wearing one of my aprons, a white one patterned in red hearts. He looked ridiculous, but I knew he did it to make Honey smile because she was doing so, poorly hidden behind her hand as she pretended to be bored on a stool between Dane and Bat. It was rare to see her at Fallen functions even though she was technically Maja and Buck’s ward, because she resented her half-siblings and had been poisoned against the club by her pernicious, now dead mother. But if she was there, so too always was Sander.
Boner and Curtains were in my living room playing video games on a console they must have brought themselves while Heckler and Blade cheered them on, betting on the outcome. Cleo went to Axe-Man, who sat in my window seat looking out at the snow falling lightly in the street as if each flake was a memory he was desperate not to miss.
Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6) Page 25