Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  My grief, though, was nothing to Bat’s.

  He’d arrived at the hospital on a chorus of shouts, yelling at anyone and everyone to tell him what room his wife was in.

  She wasn’t in the emergency room, a poor male nurse had to tell him. She was in the morgue.

  I’d never seen a bomb explode, but I imagined it happened like that.

  Bat grew so still with vibrating tension the air around him began to pulse as if he was collecting all the energy in the room to him.

  We braced.

  Not a single person moved. Not even Zeus, who knew him best.

  It was obvious why the moment he shattered.

  With a warrior’s cry, he bent to one of the chairs bolted poorly to the wall and started to rend it from the wall. To my shock, it yielded to his brutal force, tearing from the wall with a spray of plaster and dust. Loose in his hold, Bat swung it like a baseball bat into the wall above the empty space it had inhabited, banging it again and again until rubble littered his feet, the chair was a mangled mess, and a hole the side of a child was blown through the wall.

  He stood there then, heaving in a breath like he was a man in a burning, smoke-filled room, fired with rage so he wouldn’t drown in grief. His eyes rolled madly around the room as he panted, looking for a place to lay his grief.

  Harleigh Rose, once abused and now keenly scarred by male violence, shifted behind my legs in a small gesture of fear.

  It was Dane, not Zeus, who stood to wave a red flag in front of The Fallen’s stuck boar.

  He stood slowly, unraveling the long, broad expanse of him. There was nothing meek in Dane Meadows, every inch of him a well-honed human weapon, but the way he stepped forward was a gesture in submission to Bat’s rage. He didn’t mean to douse that fire, his body language screamed, he only meant to contain it.

  Bat growled as Dane drew closer, searching madly now for someplace to run or hide, something to destroy with the fixed point of his rage. As Bat lunged for another chair, Dane lunged too, tackling him hard to the cracked linoleum. They struggled powerfully, Bat throwing a brutal punch to Dane’s jaw before he could be pinned then rolling expertly as soon as he was prone so Dane was on the defensive.

  These were two men skilled in the art of war and combat.

  They brutalized each other.

  No one stopped them.

  Zeus stood at one point, ready to interfere if he had to, but he held up a staying hand when Nova tried to do the same. A nurse picked up a phone at the nurse’s station to call the cops, but King was there suddenly sweet-talking her into letting this scene play out.

  Bat had just lost his wife, and his twin boys had just lost their mother.

  For a man like him, a brother of The Fallen and a war vet, the knowledge he hadn’t been able to protect his woman no matter the flaws in their relationship was toxic to his system.

  So he fought.

  And Dane let him take it out on him.

  It felt like hours, but it was probably only ten minutes by the time Bat stopped moving almost violently, his still so sudden I gasped. Dane was behind him, having tried to secure him in a headlock, but the moment he felt his friend’s motionlessness, he stopped too.

  Then, gentle as a whisper, his hold turned into a cradle.

  Soft as a summer breeze, he pressed the side of his jaw to the back of Bat’s head and rucked his huge body back against him in an iron-clad hug.

  The tenderness deflated him like a balloon, his tattooed limbs melting into the hold. He blinked blindly down at the floor as he rasped out, “Tell me this is just another nightmare.”

  “Can’t do that, man,” Dane said gruffly, tears in his own eyes, one already swelling from a well-landed punch. “There’s no waking up from this.”

  Bat’s entire face contorted, but he didn’t cry. It seemed almost that he couldn’t. But his eyes were red-rimmed, too dry in their sockets and his breath hiccoughed through his lungs.

  “Bat brother,” Zeus said finally, moving forward to crouch before him. “I’m gonna take you home to your boys, yeah? We’ll tell ’em together.”

  Bat’s dark eyes closed, pain suffused in every inch of him. He nodded on a shuddering inhale.

  Z and Dane took him home to tell his sons they lost their mother.

  I cried harder.

  I also prayed.

  I prayed to my god, not the God this madman hid behind.

  I prayed to the deity who had been my best friend as a girl, to the God my Grandpa introduced me to and loved so fully.

  I prayed to Him that this madness would stop. I prayed to him with every ounce of my soul for the power to do something to stop the horror.

  I apologized too, so deeply, ripping the regret from my heart with claws so my entire heart felt shredded. I apologized for whatever sins I had committed that brought this down on our heads.

  I threw up again when he didn’t answer, in Cressida’s purse because I couldn’t make it to the bathroom, and she held it open for me.

  “Don’t worry, honey,” she said sweetly when I tried to tell her I was sorry. “With a baby, I’m used to it. I am worried about you, though. You can’t possibly take this on, my darling girl. You aren’t Atlas. This is too big a load for you to carry.”

  “It’s me,” I told her, the words scraping painfully up my tear-savaged throat. “It’s me he wants, and he did this for me or to me or because of me. I don’t know which, but it comes down to me.”

  I thought of Cleo again, her sweet face breaking open with laughter as we danced in my kitchen on one of our sleepovers, as she braided my hair, as I did her makeup because she always screwed it up. I thought of all the years of our friendship and wondered how she would ever forgive me.

  If she would even get the chance to stay alive and try.

  “Beatrice.”

  I looked up through blurry eyes to notice that Seth had come out to give us an update on Cleo. Axe-Man was standing near him, every inch of his six-foot-four frame made small with his sorrow.

  “News?” I whispered.

  Seth’s handsome face was pale as he took in the sight of me curled up in my chair. He moved forward and squatted beside Harleigh Rose so we could be at eye level. His were clear and calm. He was in doctor mode, focused on saving a life.

  “I’m hesitant to make promises, but it’s looking good. We managed to stop the bleeding and repair most of the damage to her major organs. Now it’s a matter of her will to survive the night,” he said softly, repeating the information just for me. “I’m truly sorry, Bea.”

  My smile was a mangled thing on my face. “Thanks, Seth. I feel better knowing you’re in there looking after her.”

  “I’m doing my best for you,” he joked, but it fell flat between us because he wasn’t particularly funny, and I wasn’t capable of laughter.

  “I’m praying,” I admitted, staring down at my hands.

  “Good,” he said, patting my hands. “Only God can help her now.”

  There was a clamour at the automatic doors. I turned just in time to see Priest, Lion, Kodiak, and Wrath power down the hall, faces set in grim unison.

  Priest’s eyes were already on me, instantly finding me like a compass pointing true north. They swept up and down, cataloguing every single thing about me in that brief survey. His mouth tightened.

  Then he noticed Seth in his scrubs bent beside me, and his entire face transformed with untamed viciousness.

  “Think I told you last time I saw your ugly fuckin’ mug that if you put a hand on my woman I’d slit your fuckin’ throat,” he said, the words so arctic I could almost see a chill in the air.

  Seth cocked his head as he regarded my psycho, assessing the threat level maybe, or more likely, because Seth was a cocky man used to getting his own way, just lingering at my side to bug the hell out of Priest.

  When he didn’t immediately pull away, I moved my hands out from under him and stood.

  I should have said thank you again to the doctor who had helped
to save my best friend. I should have at least said goodbye.

  I didn’t.

  Because suddenly there was no one else in the room but Priest and myself, safe in the shadowy embrace of our connection.

  “Priest,” I whispered past the obstruction in my throat as I went to take a step and landed on a wobbly leg, falling forward.

  I was sick with grief and dehydrated from all the crying, nothing in my belly because I’d thrown up everything I had to give. It wasn’t surprising I collapsed.

  It also wasn’t surprising that Priest caught me.

  I was up and in his arms, tucked into his side with my bum supported by a strong hand and an arm wrapped around my torso before I could even think of falling. I tucked my sore nose into his throat, wishing it was clear enough to breathe in his clove and tobacco scent. His warmth and unyielding body against mine were enough to dry the trickle of wet still leaking from my eyes.

  “Takin’ her home,” Priest told someone, probably my sister.

  “She needs family,” Loulou protested, but it was weak because she was as devastated by this as everyone else, as helpless as anyone to do anything about this tragedy.

  “She needs me,” he said simply, intractably.

  And then he turned on his heel and left, not stopping until Lion called out and caught up with us.

  “A second?” he asked of Priest.

  I peeked out from my haven between Priest’s beard and leather collar in answer to Lion’s request.

  His eyes were so verdant a green they instantly held me transfixed. I’d forgotten somehow how deeply magnetic Lion was, as if the force of his goodness magnetized him.

  He bent closer to me, a tanned hand hovering over hair for an instant before he awkwardly, sweetly, tucked a piece behind my ear.

  “Gotta say this, Bea, because I know what you’re goin’ through, and I know who you are. This shit is not on you, you hear me?” He read the obstinacy in my eyes, and his voice went deep, dark. “This. Is. Not. On. You. Wanna know how I know that? Because I got a father who corrupted an entire force against the club my woman’s a serious part of. I’m the son of the man who shot King nearly dead, the son of a man who lied and murdered to put Zeus behind bars. You think I don’t know what it’s like to live half-choked with guilt?”

  I was lost in his somber gaze, shivering with the cold shock of his words. Of course, he knew, and what a horrible cross to bear.

  “You can tell me this is different, and it is,” he continued resolutely. “It’s different because you don’t know a thing about this madman who has decided to end lives for sport. I knew my father, so I should have done something a lot sooner than I did to take him down. I had the power, and I’ll bear the guilt of that for the rest of my fuckin’ life. But you? You’re helpless here, Bea. As fucked and horrible as it is to say, you gotta know, this asshole has stripped power away from us all, but especially you. The only thing you can do is forgive yourself. Be fuckin’ kind to yourself. He wants to damage. He wants you isolated so he can snatch you up and make you his. But I gotta tell you”—he sucked in a deep breath and looked up at Priest then back to me—“you are not alone. You are loved, you are strong, and your entire community is gonna come back from this. Including Cleo because that girl knows she’s got everything to fight for, and all of it is waiting for her in this room.”

  My heart shuddered as Lion’s words fought for purchase.

  Priest clutched me tighter, and I knew he was glaring at Lion. “Pretty speech.”

  Lion shrugged, a little grin playing with his mouth even though his eyes were tired. “Knew she wouldn’t get it from you, so I figured someone should make it.”

  “I’m a killer, not a poet or a cop. What I got is action, not words. Bea knows I’m gonna chop this motherfucker into little pieces and tie each one with a motherfuckin’ pink bow for her,” Priest said, bored of the conversation now, already moving again.

  “Thanks, Lion,” I called over Priest’s shoulder as he walked us out the sliding front doors of the hospital. “Please, keep telling H.R. to keep me up to date on everything.”

  He tilted his chin in acknowledgment, a wry smile on his handsome face.

  “Honestly, he helped,” I admitted to Priest as we walked across the parking lot to his bike. There were still some patches of snow on the ground, but we weren’t due for more snow for another week and I knew Priest road his Harley whenever he could. The idea of clinging to him now while we rode through the night, the world a chaos of blurring colours in shapes flying by us, unable to touch us, made the frenetic fear inside me subside further.

  Priest grunted in response, but when he gently slid me down the long line of his body to the asphalt, his eyes were fierce on mine.

  “Honestly?” he mocked in a way that was almost tender as he grasped my chin in firm, tombstone tattooed fingers. “I’m gonna help more. Now, get on my bike, Little Shadow, I’m gonna take you home.”

  For the first time in hours, tears prickled the backs of my eyes not because of sadness but because of joy. I’d dreamt most of my mature life of going home to Priest, and that had nothing to do with sharing a shelter and everything to do with feeling at home just like this, pressed to his strong, leather-clad back on his Harley surging fearlessly through the dark.

  Bea

  He didn’t take me home.

  At least, he didn’t take me to my pink heritage home off Main Street that I’d painstakingly turned into my haven after moving out of Phillipa’s house two years ago.

  He took me to his place.

  I was shocked when he pulled to a stop in the warehouse district in a long, gravel alleyway between two massive industrial structures. Theoretically, of course, I’d known Priest had a place to crash, but no one in the club seemed to know where that was. It was almost a running joke between the biker babes, guessing where a man like him would call home. A graveyard, a morgue, an underground bunker…

  A warehouse seemed fitting.

  Mutely, I followed as he collected his bags and my hand before leading us to a door under a flicking light in the side of the otherwise window-less steel frame. He used three keys and a complicated alarm system I recognized as one of Curtain’s creations before we finally proceeded into a glass antechamber that overlooked the warehouse's interior. Wooden crates, barrels, and steel storage containers were organized meticulously within.

  I looked up at Priest in silent question.

  “Weapons,” he said, and that was it.

  We descended a long, zig-zagging staircase that made me realize just how wholly exhausted I was, and then we reached another door with yet another series of locks and alarms.

  My man didn’t fuck around.

  I was shocked by the inside of his apartment. Not the industrial ducts and exposed pipes, the lack of furniture, the spotless expanse of his steel cabinet kitchen, the woodworking station, or the knife-throwing target board set up along one side of the space beside a rack of display weapons.

  That all made perfect sense.

  It was the entire corner taken up by a library set with a single chair and reading lamp that drew me in. He let me explore, moving away to organize his saddlebags, leaving me to examine his personal space.

  The trust took my breath away. That he would leave me in his haven, a place so few people even knew about. That knowing me and my psychological studies, he would let me roam and poke and prod into this sanctuary, into his innermost thoughts displayed as those few important things he would harbour in such a space…

  I was crying again, annoyed with myself for being so emotional. I felt like one raw, stripped wire, exposed to every small interaction with anything I encountered.

  And this was massive.

  Monumental.

  My loner, my psycho, a man who believed he was too close to death to love anyone, had let me loose in his home.

  I was only human.

  So, while I cried, I took advantage.

  My fingers trailed over the spines of som
e familiar volumes, different versions of the Bible, The Tipitaka, the Quran, and The Tanakh and The Talmud. Most, though, I hadn’t read and barely recognized beyond the fact that they were clearly all religious texts.

  He even had an incredibly old edition of King James’s Bible in a hermetically sealed glass box on a lone table between bookshelves. I leaned over it, tracing my fingers along the script on the open pages.

  “My mother’s.”

  His voice startled me so badly, I nearly choked on a scream. Hand to my breast, I turned to him with wide eyes. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

  Ignoring my dramatics, he stepped closer so he was half an inch from pressing against my back. The space between us vibrated like a struck tuning fork. I’d turned the lamp on to illuminate the dark corner, and the warm light cast Priest in an orange glow, his hair pulled back by a bit of leather string, locks of red hair falling over his brow. He was achingly gorgeous but even more so in the shadows. I reached up hesitantly, suddenly needing to feel him to ensure he was real and not just some figment of my imagination.

  There was a slight flinch when my fingers trailed along his beard, but he didn’t move away from my touch. Like the wild animal he was, it was taking time to acclimatize him to my gentle handling, but that small feat felt monumental to me.

  On a day when my heart felt rent in two by the tragedy of Amelia and Cleo, Priest was allowing me farther past his defences than he ever had before. Idly, I wondered if he was doing it to distract me from my pain and guilt, but then I decided I didn’t care.

  “Your mother’s?” I repeated to goad him along.

  Priest’s pale eyes glowed, striated with darker strands of green like fallen pine needles in a clear lake. There were graveyards in those eyes, haunted eyes that few people could hold for long in any kind of stare. I found them lovely, melancholy, and peaceful as walking through a cemetery at dawn when the sky is giving birth to day in direct contrast to the eternal dead.

  “Mam,” he said lowly, voice deep as if dredged up from some forgotten well. “Her name was Aoife. She had hair like mine.” He reached up absently to brush back a piece of that copper hair behind one ear. A grim reaper was tattooed beneath it on the skin at the side of his neck, and his fingers went there next as if shaking hands with it. “She was the first to die.”