Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  I was used to it all.

  A den of iniquity if ever I’d seen the definition of it.

  Low rock pulsed through the space, my heartbeat thrumming to the same tempo as if I’d been entranced. I danced with my girls, with Lila dressed in all fringe, Maja with her Farrah Fawcett hairdo, and Hannah in a pair of assless leather chaps, only a sequined set of panties beneath it.

  Priest didn’t dance, and I didn’t ask him to, but his dark eyes watched me from the bar where he sat with Bat, Dane, and Wrath shooting the shit, and when a man from the T-Squad tried to claim me, Priest was out of his seat in a heartbeat.

  The poor T-Squad brother took one look at Priest barreling toward him and turned on his heel to get the hell away from me as fast as he could.

  I laughed and laughed, spinning in the mass of bodies, a little tipsy, but mostly just relieved to have one moment of fun, one second of total freedom I could only feel with The Fallen.

  With Priest.

  This was the reason I’d grown bored of being a good girl, they never had anywhere near as much fun as the bad ones.

  Priest arrived at my side, instantly slotting a hand into the back of my hair and fisting tight to pin my head in place. A second later, his mouth was on me, eating at my mouth, devouring the lingering laughter from my tongue until I forgot everything but the press of his body, hard and honed as a human weapon, against mine.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Axe-Man grunted from beside us, but he didn’t look sorry.

  For the first time since I’d known him, he looked ill at ease, his big body hunched and his Nordic features dark.

  Priest went into predator mode against me, his body moving into a tight lean like a whip about to strike out. “What’s up?”

  “Can’t get a hold’a Cleo,” he muttered, running a hand through his curling blond mane. “Said she had someone to see ’fore she joined us, but that was hours ago. Not like her to just not show up. You think I’m worryin’ over nothin’?”

  “No,” Priest and I said simultaneously.

  Then my man continued, “Bat was sayin’ Amelia didn’t come home this afternoon either. Said she was havin’ a meetin’ at church or some shit.”

  We all stared at each other, the party forgotten in the sudden thick, ominous silence descending upon us. As one, we moved to Bat at the bar.

  He saw us coming, his posture changing from a slouch against the mahogany bar, leaning into Dane, to the erect stature of a soldier about to be called to duty.

  “What’s up?” he asked instantly.

  “Both Cleo and Amelia are missin’,” Axe-Man said, worry high in his usually gruff tone.

  I reached over and clasped his hand, giving it a squeeze. I had to believe they were okay, and we were just being paranoid, but I’d learned the hard way that my hope was often misplaced.

  Bat’s eyes twitched as he pulled out his phone and dialled a number, obviously trying Amelia again.

  When there was no answer, he slammed the phone onto the bar top so hard, the screen cracked.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, but there was no gumption in my tone.

  Worrying was threading itself through every molecule, intuition screaming at me to find them as fast as we could.

  I knew Amelia was religious where Bat was not. I knew she’d attended my grandpa’s service for years, and I wondered if the fucking “Prophet” could have lured her in.

  Cleo went to Mass with me sometimes, but she wasn’t extremely devout. The only thing I could think of was…

  “She started seeing someone. At first I thought maybe it was one of the brothers or Eric because she was so secretive, but now…” I trailed off, feeling my heart fill with lead and drop to the pit of my stomach.

  “Get Z,” Bat barked at Carson behind the bar, then to Priest and Axe-Man. “Let’s roll out. Check their normal haunts. Call in if you find anythin’.”

  I tugged on Priest’s hand before he broke free to follow the orders. He gazed down at me with cold eyes, mind already tuned into the problem. I gave his hand another squeeze, and warmth started to seep back into the green.

  “Tell me we’re overreacting, and everything is going to be okay?” I whispered as terror cycled through me like the ocean’s vicious undertow.

  His eyes shuttered as he pulled me close to stamp a kiss to my mouth. “Not gonna lie to you, Little Shadow, not ever. You promise me right now you’ll stay here so I can focus on findin’ ’em, yeah? You stay here where no one can get you.”

  “I promise,” I swore, tears in my throat because I couldn’t shake the awful sense that the tragedies would just keep coming. “I’ll pray for them.”

  “You don’t need prayers when you got me,” he said matter-of-factly. “But if it makes you feel better, you kneel, and you pray for them until I can get to them.”

  I watched as the partygoers parted for the men like the Red Sea, and then I went to get my biker babes to hold a vigil. Unfortunately, over the years, we’d gotten all too good at those.

  Priest

  Kodiak and I found them the next morning after a night of the entire club and the T-Squad rolling out to search for them.

  The killer left a fairly obvious calling card.

  In the middle of one of Brian Potter’s wheat fields gone to mud in the winter season, a massive, crudely carved cross had been planted in the ground. Beneath it, crusted with dirt and dried blood lay Amelia Stephens and Cleo Axelsen.

  “Fuck,” Kodiak grunted from behind me as he drew close enough to see the bodies laid out in the mud. He hastened forward, dropping his big body between the two women to check their vitals. There was panic in every tense line of his body, a surprise given he was normally so stoic. When he looked up from Amelia, I knew from the obsidian sharpness of his gaze that she was dead.

  I ignored him to kneel beside Cleo. I saw the faint flutter instantly, as slight as a butterfly’s wing beneath the skin of her neck.

  “Get the truck,” I ordered my brother in a cold, calm voice. “Drive it into the field and bring it here.”

  “Why?” he asked, hunched over Amelia with an anguished expression on his face. “Fuck, man, she’s gone. Look what they did to her.”

  “Cleo’s not,” I told him without looking up, searching Cleo for wounds, finding seven, eight…eleven stab wounds. There was also no doubt from the way they’d torn her clothes to ribbons and the blood caked over her groin that they had abused her sexually too. “Get the truck now.”

  Kodiak stared at Cleo for a fractured moment, something shattering in his expression. Before I could order him to get his arse in gear, he leaned over Cleo to brush her matted hair back from her face tenderly, then shoved to his feet and began to loop across the field. He was swift, faster than any other man in the club, yet I still wanted to urge him faster.

  Cleo was dying in my arms.

  My girl’s best friend was bleeding out into the earth, so close to earning a spot beneath it. I shucked my cut, then my sweater, cutting the latter into rough strips with the edge of my hunting knife so I could craft a tourniquet for her right thigh above the three stab wounds gaping open there. The wink of white bone was visible through the harshly torn flesh, the broken edge of her femur sharper than my blade.

  This looked like the work of more than one man or the work of a man who’d gone manic with rage, the final threads of his sanity cut irreversibly. After spending the past few nights with Bea and running out after his accomplice in minimum clothing, the fucker might have deduced I was sleeping with his obsession. If he was so enamoured with Bea, so indentured to the idea of her as his “holy” wife, my corruption of her body and soul would be enough to shatter any remaining semblance of his lucidity.

  Amelia lay cold and dead beside me, pale eyes unseeing. It seemed she hadn’t survived the same wounds as Cleo though they were more meticulously done, the knife wounds clean and deep, perfunctory where Cleo’s were impassioned. Some old religious impulse urged me to close them, to place two of
the coins I kept in my pocket to her lids and bless her way through death.

  I didn’t.

  Cleo was still living, though barely, and I knew enough about death to know she had a slim chance of holding out.

  When I rolled Cleo just slightly to wrap a scrap of fabric around her left arm, I noticed the crumbled, blood-soaked note pressed between her body and the earth like some kind of fucked up dried flower.

  This one wasn’t typed, the words penned in cramped, almost illegible script. Most importantly, it wasn’t a Bible verse.

  Submit to my love, Beatrice, as it will heal your multitude of sins. Submit to be my wife, and I shall make you holy once more, for you have sinned and are corrupted by the Devil.

  The devil, of course, was me.

  When I found this man, and I would, I would stab him eleven times, cut him into twelve pieces, feed those to the wolves, but keep his goddamn head for myself and mount it on my fucking wall with a tent spike.

  He deserved to suffer in all the ways he’d made these women suffer.

  Made Bea suffer.

  Because I knew, staring at the blood-softened note on the ground as I tended to Cleo, that Bea would not recover from the responsibility she would mine from this.

  This was the work of a seriously fucked-up psychopath.

  The difference between us was that I was a psychopath tethered to the right path by good people who had somehow found a way to forge connections with me against all odds. This killer had got lost in the forest of his own fucked-up mind, and there was no getting out for him now. No one could reach him there.

  A rush of winter wind slammed into me, stirring Amelia’s hair beside me and dislodging another note, this one typed.

  “An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who brings shame is like rottenness in his bones.” Proverbs 12:4.

  Amelia’s death had been premeditated, Cleo’s had not.

  One was an act of his fucked-up faith, the other an act of passion.

  He was slipping.

  And when he fell, I would catch him in my deathly claws.

  I worked calmly, efficiently, cutting down on the bleeding in Cleo’s extremities, then pressing against the worst of the lacerations in her torso with hard pressure that made blood bubble up beneath my fingers.

  The pain spasmed in Cleo’s face, her lids trembling and blue.

  A second later, they fluttered open but unseeing, and a choked sob fell from her mouth.

  “Cleo,” I said, leaning down so she could see my face. “Cleo, it’s Priest. We’re gonna get you some help.”

  But those unseeing eyes, as light as the frost on the ground, didn’t register me. Instead, her lips moved, her breath through them mumbled with speech. I ducked closer, almost pressing my ear to her mouth in a mad bid to hear what she spoke.

  “I just…” she breathed wet and hoarse. “I just wanted to be closer to God…”

  “Cleo,” I demanded sharply, hoping to rouse her from her pain-induced stupor. “Cleo, can you tell me who did this to you?”

  I watched with cold, deep fury as blood trickled from her mouth and her lashes fluttered over blown-open pupils. She struggled just slightly, and even that seemed to take monumental effort.

  And then she stilled.

  So fucking still, her pulse even slower, so weak I had to dig for it in her bruised neck with the pad of my thumb and I found the faint thread of it still gently pulsing.

  I didn’t know the plump, sweet-faced daughter of my brother, Axe-Man, beyond the fact he’d adopted her years ago. Over the years, I’d noted she chewed her fingernails when she was nervous, that she referred to Axe-Man as Dad every time she spoke to him, like she was relieved and grateful to be able to do so, that she never swore and often carried around self-help books even at club parties. I knew all of this, but I’d never cared.

  I only worked tirelessly to save her now because of Bea, because they were best friends, and this death would break my sweet girl right down the fucking middle.

  This was the thing about other people and me. I saw them just fine, all those obvious ways they didn’t mean to express themselves but were helpless to avoid. The knowledge of them even lingered, catalogued and filed away in my head for future reference.

  But I didn’t care.

  I made Stella over at the diner nervous. Whenever I grabbed a bite with some brothers, which wasn’t often, she sent a male server to the table and always stayed behind the counter, probably ready to call the cops. Cressida asked me once when we went for lunch if it bothered me, and it honestly hadn’t occurred to me to care.

  Why the fuck would I care what Stella thought?

  Honest as hell, I didn’t care what happened to her—if she lived or died—so why would I care how she perceived me?

  Human beings and their many interactions were like math to me. I was a hell of a mathematician, but it wasn’t like the numbers fucking moved me.

  It was my job to take notes as I read people. To be deadly accurate in my assessment so that I could be, frequently, deadly in dealing with them.

  Only a few people actually existed in relation to me.

  Zeus.

  His family.

  King and Cress, now their infant son, Prince.

  Most of the brothers I gave more than a passing shit about, but only Nova, Bat, Axe-Man, Kodiak, and Blade could draw me into any kinda real conversation.

  So I cared about this girl dying in the mud not because she was a human being and I inherently owed her some kind of empathy. I cared because we were linked together by the few bonds I had. Bea, Axe-Man, the entire club I owed my second life to.

  “Don’t fuckin’ die,” I ordered her.

  A faint, wet rattle of her breath was my only answer.

  The rumble of the truck crunching over frozen ground grew louder behind me. I collected Cleo carefully in my arms so I was ready for Kodiak when he came to a dirt-flying, drifting stop a few feet from me.

  He flipped down the truck bed, took one look at me, and extended his arms. “Give ’er to me. You drive.”

  “I can handle it,” I told him, cocking my head as I studied the agitated way he bounced on his feet.

  “You can handle it,” Kodiak agreed, already reaching for her, carefully pulling her into his arms. “But you’re too close to death, and you don’t believe in shit. I’m gonna hold her, and I’m gonna pray for her.”

  My eyebrows cut into my hairline, but I didn’t argue. We were wasting time. Instead, I gestured for him to get in the bed of the truck, then closed the flap.

  “Amelia,” Kodiak called.

  “Leavin’ her for the cops,” I shouted out the window over the roar of the engine as I gunned for the street. “Gotta leave those dumb fucks some kinda crime scene.”

  I drove like a bat out of hell to the nearest hospital, but it was a twenty-minute journey, and I doubted Cleo Axelsen had twenty minutes to spare. Over the harsh rasp of the overtaxed engine, I could hear the murmur of Kodiak chanting in his native tongue the entire drive before we pulled to a screeching halt in the emergency bay of St. Katherine’s Hospital.

  The only miracle I’d ever been forced to believe in was Bea’s love, but when the hospital staff flooded out to get Cleo into surgery and found her still, somehow, breathing, I felt a stirring of faith as I stared at Kodiak covered in her blood in the truck bed reluctantly handing her over. There was sweat on his brow and a feverish gleam to his pitch-dark gaze, strands of his long hair glued to his face.

  When he tipped it up to me, catching my eye as they sped away with Cleo on a gurney, his expression was fierce as a warrior set out to conquer.

  “We’re gonna slaughter this motherfucker,” he said coldly.

  I arched a brow at him as I reached out to help him down from the bed, feeling a comradery I was rarely moved by. When he lashed out to grab me forearm to forearm, I tugged him closer and let the monster within me peek out in a feral grin.

  “I call fuckin’ dibs.”

>   Bea

  The entire waiting room of St. Katherine’s was filled, not for the first time, with The Fallen MC and their people. A murder of ravens clad in leather instead of feathers had descended on the orange chairs and cold linoleum floor, inactive with acute grief.

  Cleo was still in surgery after six hours, and the doctors had stopped coming to check in with Axe-Man. He sat alone on a chair against the back wall, thick thighs spread, big hands covering his entire bearded face so we wouldn’t see him weep.

  A grown man, a cold man, weeping for his daughter.

  I was helpless against the maelstrom of my own tears, seeing that and knowing my best girl was fighting for her life on an operating table.

  Because of me.

  Me, me, me.

  I buried my head in my hands, inconsolable as I sobbed and sobbed until I felt sick. I’d thrown up twice since we arrived at the hospital, the force of my sobs upheaving everything in my stomach.

  I couldn’t stop.

  Not when Loulou wrapped her cherry-scented arms around me, not when Cressida stroked my hair, and not when Harleigh Rose sat at my feet, wrapping a long arm around my legs to brace her cheek against me. Lila tried and Maja and Hannah and Tayline.

  I could not be consoled.

  Priest was out hunting for the killer with Kodiak, following whatever trail they could find back at the crime scene along with Lion and a select group of RCMP that Zeus cursed out as idiots for thinking the crimes would stop when Owen Burns was hospitalized.

  But I doubted even he could comfort me.

  I doubted he would even know how to try.

  But maybe that was the point.

  The shared grief and sympathy for my guilt were overwhelming. I didn’t deserve their grace, and the heaps of it they lay at my feet only made me feel like some false saint.

  I needed the intensity of Priest’s fixed gaze to tether my restless, fighting spirit, the hard edge of his love to wear down my self-loathing like a whetstone.