Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  Phillipa blushed and laughed, but Seth merely shook his head, a tender look in his eyes as he addressed me. “Do you really think so little of me, Bea? After all this time, I thought you’d know that nothing matters to me so much as God and his teachings.”

  I released a shaky sigh of relief and smiled at him even though Seth’s strict devotion to God always seemed slightly at odds with his practice as a doctor. “I wish you’d just come right out and said it. The way you were standing together was very…intimate.”

  “Have you never seen your Grandpa tend to one of his flock like that before?” he questioned, knowing the answer already.

  Grandpa was a priest and a pastor, the spiritual leader and tender of his flock. I’d seen him hold a widow in his arms while she cried, tend to the broken skin on the knee of a youth, and press a kiss to the forehead of those who received his blessing. Physical affection was not untoward in the name of God, or so people often said. I’d frequently wondered if that wasn’t what priests and bishops told themselves when they exploited young girls and boys. Once, I’d tried to bring up the scandal of pedophilia in the church with Seth, and he’d immediately shut me down.

  That was the difference between people like Seth and myself. I didn’t believe anything existed only in black and white; a degree of grey was where most of life’s lessons lurked.

  “Bea,” Seth murmured, stepping toward me to collect my hands. His were cool, long-fingered, and smooth from repeatedly washing before surgery. “I would not have you think so ill of me when I think so highly of you.”

  I thought of the things I had done recently. Of the bruises on my knees from taking Priest’s cock in my mouth, of the blood that had spilled on my feet like an unholy baptism when my psychopath had killed Brett Walsh for me, of my morbid, eternal interest in all things violent and nonconformist.

  I was just a dark heart wrapped in a pretty pink bow. It astonished me how many people chose to focus on the beautiful ribbon instead of what it harboured inside.

  Seth and Tabitha had been my friends for years, but I wondered, as I said my goodbyes to Seth and promised my mother we’d speak later, how relevant our friendship was now. They didn’t know me well, and that was both their fault and my own. We were comfortable with the illusion of Beatrice Lafayette, good girl extraordinaire, the girl who accepted life in a box constructed by Bible verse and society’s judgments.

  Or we had been.

  Now, I wasn’t so sure she even existed anymore.

  If maybe, before Priest saved me, he was the one to break me. If I’d learned anything the past few years, it was that broken wasn’t bad. It was a step along the road to healing and growth, a pause in the inevitable evolution of ourselves over the course of our lives. Priest had broken me out of my shell, and now that I was free, I vowed I would never go back.

  When I pushed open the door to the Linley’s, he was there. Standing up from his recline on his Harley, he was already moving toward me, pulled to me as if by some gravitational force.

  The force of love, my romantic heart whispered.

  I didn’t care what name I gave to it: love, worship, obsession.

  It all boiled down to one thing, one feeling that struck me the moment he clutched me in a hard, possessive embrace right there on the Linley’s stoop. The feeling that with Priest, every piece of me, dark and light, sweet and bitter, saintly and sinful was glued together by his acceptance into a beautiful mosaic. That feeling that with him, I’d never been so beautiful and whole. We were two broken halves that locked together in a way that could never be undone.

  Priest

  Christmas threw up in Bea’s little pink house. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, my Little Shadow had managed to decorate her space with an explosion of seasonal décor. A snowman at the base of her white Christmas tree decorated in pinks and golds emitted a recorded version of carols when she pressed a button that timed the flashing tree lights to the music. There was a series of crystal reindeer cantering across her coffee table, fake snow, and fir-shaped candles on the dining room table, and pink tinsel on the beam across the kitchen. Sampson was curled up on that velvet couch playing with a candy cane pillow, and Delilah’s cage was even partially draped with greenery and red ribbon.

  Setting foot in the place nearly made my balls shrink back up into my body.

  “You like it?” she’d asked as she tossed her keys in a little Santa Claus bowl on her side table before making her way down the hall. “The girls helped me this morning when they came over for breakfast.”

  I didn’t answer both because she’d disappeared down the hall and because I didn’t have a single fucking nice thing to say about the Christmas chaos. It was barely December, and she’d spewed holiday spirit all over her house.

  I hadn’t been this close to an ornament in my entire life. I didn’t believe in Christ, organized holidays, or sentimental crap, so none of it resonated with me.

  None of it, save the image of Bea in some kinda frothy lace nightgown going up on her toes to place the ornaments on the tree as high as she could reach from her slight height. One of the brothers must’ve helped her put the star on top and didn’t that make rage sear across my skin like a branding iron.

  She was mine.

  If she wanted Christmas crap all over the house, I should’ve been the man to reach the high places, to secure the heavy tree in its planter, to fucking deck the halls if she wanted me to because just existing in the same place at the same time as this slip of a blond girl made my fucking blood sing.

  I was scowling into the empty fireplace, thinking foolishly that I should light the damn thing because my Little Shadow liked the warmth when there was a creak deep down the hall. My head snapped to the dark mouth of it, spine straight, muscles taut as wires ready to spring.

  Bea’d almost fucking died that day.

  I hadn’t been there.

  And why?

  Because I was too much of a fucking pussy to go inside a building just because it was designated as a church.

  I hadn’t set foot in any kind of holy place since I was seventeen. It wasn’t that I had some irrational fear God would strike me down, or I’d burn up to ash for my sins the second I crossed the threshold.

  I didn’t talk about my past. I didn’t even think about it. Sometimes, there aren’t words big enough to describe emotions, to describe the way events carve themselves into your flesh, sinew, and bone. Why would I speak of my horrors only to diminish them?

  The unspeakable had been done to me in holy places, in a church claimed for God. I saw that setting when I closed my fucking eyes every night to sleep. I felt prayer burned into my palate when I woke from restless slumber plagued by memories masquerading as nightmares.

  Avoiding churches entirely was almost unnecessary when the echo of one haunted my every living moment.

  Still, I was a man who enjoyed some pain, but I wasn’t a fucking masochist.

  So I avoided holy places, and until today, it had been fine.

  But I’d made a mistake. I’d put my fears above Bea’s safety like a fucking fool. I was smarter than that, better than that. I was not a man ruled by his past, by pain or emotions as fucking useless as fear.

  Fear was a cage people willingly locked themselves into. I knew that. Or I thought I had.

  Then today.

  Today, today, today.

  When Bea almost died because I was afraid of some stone and mortar.

  “Priest?” her soft voice called, cutting like a beam of light through my dark thoughts, dragging my consciousness into the present.

  She was standing in the shadowed mouth of the corridor wearing nothing but pink. Sheer fabric patterned minimally with tiny hearts. I could see her nipples peaked in the bra, the texture of her downy hair beneath the transparent underwear.

  The tension inside me coiled tighter, my teeth aching as they clenched, my hands fisted so tightly they ached. I wanted to slice open my palms to release the strain and feel the heat of my sli
ck blood trail between my knuckles and drip, drip, drip to the floor like an incantation.

  Instead, I stared.

  I stared at the girl who was my heart displaced outside my chest. Only with her did I ever feel this agonizingly alive. Every beat of my heart, every molecule of blood in my veins, and breath in my lungs claimed and reanimated by her.

  Little Bea Lafayette standing there in delicate pink scraps of fabric I could rend with a curl of one finger.

  She was looking at me, tight-fisted, sternly scowling, cold as a column of ice chiselled into the form of man, as if I was something soft and precious. As if she could hold me in the palm of her hand and stroke me with her little fingers.

  “I need you,” she murmured softly, holding out one hand, knuckles bruised from punching that badmouthing cunt at dinner. The evidence of her capacity for violence made me harder than her lingerie. I liked to think I’d planted that brutality in her along with my seed. That I’d infected her with some of my darkness just as she had with her obdurate light.

  I didn’t move, focused on breathing instead of lunging forward to gnash my teeth at her throat, to open one of her veins just to see evidence of her blood, to know she was still alive despite my fuckup at the church.

  The air between us seemed to whip and snap, crackling with dangerous tension.

  Bea stepped closer, my brave fool.

  “I want you,” she told me, curls tumbling over her small breasts in a shining sheet as she stepped into my orbit and up onto her toes. When she spoke next, she did it while grabbing one of my heavy, scarred hands and placing it on her chest, my fingers curling into the edge of each firm breast.

  Fuck, but I could kill her with one hand, one push.

  One mistake and she’d be dead under me. One rage, one nightmare, one moment taken too far and I could end the only reason I could think of to live. I was a weapon, the sharp edge of a blade and the blunt force of a fist, and Bea was a silk heart. It would have been simple to assume she would be safer in a different man’s hands, but who would protect her better than a weapon, than me? Truthfully, the tension that existed within me between her ruining her and cherishing her for the fuckin’ miracle she was made my heart pound loudly in my chest, my blood roarin’ through my veins straight to my cock. It made me feel so fucking alive.

  “I see you,” she told me, her eyes dark in the yellow lamplight, wide, dark pools I wanted to fall into. “I see you, Priest, even when you don’t want to be seen. You cannot be invisible to me. Religion teaches you to covet the divine, to swallow it wholesale down your throat like communion. To seek it out for absolution. To me, you are divine, and my pursuit of you is anything but unholy.”

  I stood still as she began to explore my clothed body with tender, tentative hands. They fluttered like doves at my chest, plucking the gun from my holster, unclipping the hunting knife from my belt. She knelt at my feet like a servant, eyes shining with worship as she lifted the edge of my denim pant leg to release the dagger at my ankle, then slid the boot knife out of the heel of my right shoe.

  She was disarming me, in more ways than I could count.

  I was sweating, vibrating with the effort to stay silent and calm while she had her way with me. I slept with those knives. I showered with them collected on my sink basin well within reach. Being parted from my knives felt like an amputation, but I sensed it was important to her to see me without them, to have me defenseless under her soft hands.

  I couldn’t give her much, but I could fucking try to give her this.

  There was only one weapon left, the matte black tang knife I wore on a chain around my neck. Bea’s fingers hovered over the faint shape of it beneath my hoodie, then brought her gaze to mine in silent question.

  I swallowed thickly and jerked my chin.

  She didn’t go for the blade. Instead, she tucked her little hands into the shoulders of my leather cut and pushed it over my back. Then she pulled the hem of my hoodie up, but I superseded her by pulling at the neck and shucking it myself.

  We were both panting hard like we had run some kind of race. In a way, we were. There was only so much I could take, and we both knew it. Any moment, the beast in me would lash out and conquer her so she’d forget to conquer me in return.

  Her eyes raked over my black henley, the way it flowed over the hard edge of my honed muscles like ink. I sucked in a sharp breath and fought a flinch as she trailed her fingers lightly up my forearm to my shoulder then over to my collar. The feel of her skin against my neck made me hiss, a bead of sweat rolling down my temple.

  No one had touched my bare skin, save my hands, in over a decade. The feel of it seared through me like wildfire.

  Bea made a whimpering noise in her throat but continued her journey, trailing a fingertip under the fabric to hook around the silver chain holding the blade. With one firm curl of her beckoning finger, the chain broke apart the way it was meant to into her hold. The slither of metal whispered between us as she pulled it gently from beneath my shirt and gathered the body-warmed metal in her palm.

  Finished with my weapons, we stood there breathing heavily, eyes locked and dark, air pulsing between us to the rhythm of my increased heart rate. She didn’t seem to know what to do now that she’d succeeded in her task. Indecision and excitement sent a flush spilling down her neck and breasts.

  “Will you take off your clothes for me?” she asked softly, almost afraid to ask or maybe afraid of the answer.

  I ground my teeth as I fought with myself. I wanted to give her everything, all of me, hollow bones and empty soul, but that was too much.

  Too much, too much, too much.

  I hadn’t been naked since I was seventeen, that last time covered in the blood of holy men who had done so many unholy things to me.

  A shiver tore through me so violently, I stepped backward to brace myself.

  Bea’s face contracted with sorrow.

  And I was done.

  Done being too broken to function. Done bringing sorrow to that angelic face. Done being passive.

  What did it matter if I was unclothed? I’d never been more naked than I was standing there in that pink living room with my Little Shadow.

  I snapped forward so quickly, she gave a little scream before she melted into my hard clutch like warm wax. Then I was kissing her, stealing the air from her lungs because I wanted to taste her breath, eating the sweetness of her tongue to swallow down the poison I’d just felt on my tongue.

  “Gonna take you tonight like you’ve never taken a man before,” I warned her between vicious little nips at her bottom lip. It grew swollen and bruised as a plum beneath my attentions. “You gonna let me take you like that?”

  “Yes,” she agreed instantly, arching into me, shivering as fantasies reeled through her deviant mind. “I want you to fuck me. Hurt me. Make me cry.” She rolled to her toes to speak her next words against the corner of my mouth. “Show me how beautiful it can be to be broken.”

  A groan ripped from my gut. I fed it into her mouth with my teeth and tongue, hefting her into my arms as I continued to kiss her so I could walk us down the hall to her bedroom. I dropped her on the bed without care, watching as she bounced against the mattress, all that pale hair and paler limbs spread for me to plunder. I considered her for a second, head cocked, as I decided what I would do to her.

  How I would own her that night.

  There was Christmas here too. In the string of coloured lights draped through her bedframe, in the holiday-themed pillows on the bed, and the soft music that spilled out of speakers somewhere in the room.

  “Don’t believe in Christmas,” I growled as I decided on my course of action, kneeling on the bed on either side of her hips, leaning forward to unwrap a length of colour lights. “But I’ll always appreciate the things you do…in my own way.”

  She squirmed beneath me as I wrapped the string of lights around one wrist, then back around the bedframe before moving to do the same to the other. The bulbs were warm, not too ho
t, and the idea of her held in place by her own design made me hard as iron in my jeans.

  I knelt back on my haunches over her, peering down at the way her skin pinked with lust and her eyes went bright as cerulean with anticipation.

  “You like bein’ tied down and helpless?” I taunted her as I ran the rough pads of my fingers lightly around her breasts before tweaking each nipple brutally between my knuckles. I spoke again over her hiss of painful pleasure. “You wanna know how it feels to give yourself over completely to the monster under your bed, Bea?”

  Her response was cut off by a moan as I reached behind me to feel her pussy, slicking a finger down her already wet seam.

  “You love bein’ bad for me,” I murmured, feeling heat coiling like a rousing dragon in my gut.

  Oh, I was going to fucking eviscerate her morals tonight. I was going to burn her inhibitions to ash and raze all shame to the ground. When I was done with her, whatever tatters of her virginal bashfulness would be laid to waste.

  She protested when I got up from the bed, turning my back on her to go back into the living room to retrieve something from my saddlebag. When I returned after a pit stop in the bathroom, she was peacefully lying on the bed for me, legs spread so I could see the glistening pink of her pussy beneath the curls. Her only imperfection was the mauve and blue discolouring on her legs from taking my cock hard in the shower the night before. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything so pretty as her bruised knees, milky thighs disrupted by the stamp of her immorality. I was ingloriously thrilled to know she would have knelt on those knees in church, the pain a constant reminder that she worshipped me before her God.

  My mouth watered as I placed the bowl of hot water, the washcloth, and the sharp blade against the bed and settled myself between her thighs.

  “Wh-what are you doing?” she asked softly, a little hitch of excitement in her breath as I brandished the straight edge blade above her pussy.

  “I’m gonna shave you bare,” I told her as I placed the hot, wet cloth over her pussy and watched her shiver. “Then I’m gonna eat you until your leakin’ honey all over the bed, and you’re so swollen you can barely take my fingers. After all’a that, I’m gonna wedge my thick cock inside you and fuck you till you’re filled up with my cum.”