Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  The warehouse apartment was almost too cold to be habitable, but that wasn’t why I shivered. I held my breath as I waited for more of this veiled history to unravel.

  His Adam’s apple bobbed harshly in his strong throat, but he continued, eyes still fixed on the open Bible as if he was reading from the pages.

  “I was ten years old that winter and it was a wet one.” He’d dropped the biker speech I’d always heard him affect, his voice richer with the Irish brogue he usually tried to quell. “There wasn’t much to our life and home. We were poor. Da worked as a labourer at any farm that would take him and Mam stayed home with me and girls.”

  His eyes flickered to me, gauging my reaction to the reveal that he had siblings. I kept my face carefully stoic, controlling my breath because I knew he could read more into a person than just their expression.

  “Danae and Keely were four and six, still so wee. Pneumonia was common enough, especially in our home. You could feel the wind through the slates of wood.” His hand spread unconsciously as if he could feel the breeze move through his fingers. “Mam got sick first so she couldn’t take care of the girls. I tried, but we didn’t have the right medicines or the money to buy them. Da came home one day and the lot of us were sick, even me. We prayed.” He paused, jaw flexing, brows angled steeply over his eyes, pitted like a skull’s with deep shadow. “We prayed because that was our only fucking recourse. Other families, they had neighbours to help them. We were a religious county with a priest who was beloved. Father O’Neal. He dictated everything that happened and he could be benevolent.”

  His hard-bitten laugh scuttling shivers down my back.

  “Never with us. My parents had me out of wedlock, when they were too young and even poorer than we were later, too poor to marry. Father O’Neal never forgave them for that. He wouldn’t even marry them when the time came that they could. He made us pariahs and when Mam died, then Da right after, my sisters a few days later, no one lifted a hand to help us.”

  He stopped suddenly as if he’d run into a mental wall. I didn’t push him to continue. I just stood there an inch away from touching him though I was desperate to wrap him in my arms. I wanted to respect this sacrifice he was making, summoning old demons just to show me why they existed.

  “You’re cold,” he noted dispassionately. “Come.”

  He didn’t touch me as he moved away to the back of the mostly open space to the only closed off room. I followed, floating over the floor feeling like a ghost mired in his past, watching it play out without the ability to do anything to stop it.

  When I entered the bathroom, Priest was turning on the shower in a huge glass enclosure. Immediately, steam began to curl around him.

  “Take off your clothes,” he ordered blandly as he adjusted the temperature and stepped back to close the door to the shower.

  He watched me with arms across his vest in his Hephaestus Auto hoodie and black jeans, bare feet oddly erotic braced against the dark tile, strong and beautifully arched. Looking at them, I understood the sexual, submissive impulse to worship someone’s feet. I wanted to wash them and tend to them, thankful for their strength and surety as they carried Priest through his life to me.

  I undressed for him, hands clumsy and weak as I shed the pink sweatpants and UBC hoodie I’d donned after the barbecue when everything had turned to chaos. Beneath, I wore white underwear patterned with little peaches.

  Priest’s jaw clenched at the sight when I revealed it to him, but he did not move toward me, even when I was fully nude.

  “Get in,” He tipped his chin to the steaming shower.

  I was trembling, my emotional equilibrium compromised, but I did as he said. The hot, punishing stream of water felt like a Godsend against my aching shoulders, my tear swollen face. I closed my eyes and tipped my head into the spray.

  So, I wasn’t prepared for Priest to step into the shower behind me.

  I was even less prepared when the naked skin of his torso pressed against my back and his bare arms wrapped solidly around my waist. My mouth fell open on a gasp swallowed up by the rush of water as I looked down at his exposed forearms.

  Mottled with terrible scars.

  There were tattoos here and there, obviously done to avoid the scar tissue, but most of his skin was already tapestried with horrific markings. He shuddered violently as I slowly wrapped my arms around his on my belly, hugging those marred limbs tenderly.

  We stood like that for a long time under water that was a shade too hot, scalding my skin to a high, sensitive flush.

  Finally, he pulled away and began to perfunctorily wash my hair. His hands were efficient, clinical almost as they worked the suds of his masculine scented shampoo into my thick locks, rubbing hard and deliciously at my scalp. It was such a juxtaposition, this beautiful act done in such a cursory way. But it was so Priest, my psychopath tending to me in a way that was entirely outside his wheelhouse, but doing it anyway because he was keenly observant enough to know I needed it.

  “After I buried them in the back, it was days before anyone came looking for survivors. I wasn’t sick anymore, but I was hungry and weak. When Father O’Neal arrived, I was delirious. He looked to me like some heavenly being come to save me.”

  Another hard, clanking laugh like hollow bullet casings falling to the tile floor.

  He finished washing my hair and tilted me gently forward under the water before continuing his story in that hollow voice.

  “I lived on a cot in one of the antechambers in the local church. There was this massive stained-glass window above me, an angel with yellow hair being dragged to earth by the hands of Satan.”

  “That’s the one at the clubhouse,” I interjected before I could help myself, soothed into a trance by Priest’s hard hands washing every inch of my body.

  “It haunted me there, I thought it should haunt me here,” he explained obtusely. “I did chores for the church. Their little errand boy. Soon I became a kind of servant for everyone in the parish. Father O’Neal lent me out to his devotees when they were particularly worthy.” He paused for so long I didn’t know if he would continue.

  Then, when he did, I wished he hadn’t.

  “They didn’t abuse me, at first. It was only when I hit puberty at twelve that Father O’Neal claimed I wasn’t capable of being saved. That I would always be an abomination in the eyes of God. A monster born out of wedlock pledged to Satan since birth.” His voice was chilling, dead and cold as the arctic tundra. I shivered, trying to move away, but his hands grew more punishing on my body, kneading into my flesh as he washed me too clean. “First, he made me practice self-flagellation, hoping I could beat the devil out of myself. When that didn’t work, he yielded the whip and then a knife, trying to cut it out of me.

  “The parishioners lived and breathed his holiness. They followed by his example. I was kicked like a dog in the streets, beaten by teenagers for sport. I learned to defend myself quickly, but whenever I hurt others, Father O’Neal punished me bitterly.”

  His tone took on a dazed, almost dreamy quality as he sunk deeper into the past. He didn’t notice when I leaned back against him in a silent offer of support or when I muffled my tears in an open palm.

  “His favourite way to torture me was to hold one of the lit votive candles against my skin while I recited whole Bible passages. If I got one word wrong, he chose a new spot on my flesh to burn and it all began again.”

  “Oh, Priest,” I whispered, the agonized cry caught in my hands.

  Inexorably, he rotated me slowly to face him. I kept my eyes closed until I was fully turned, bracing myself for the sight that would meet me.

  But nothing could brace me for the sight of him naked but for the cloak of scars he wore as regally as a king his mantle. He stood there before me with his chin tilted, shoulders pinned back, feet braced apart in proud defiance of my pity.

  This was him, scars and all.

  He wanted to scare me away almost as much as he wanted my acceptance. T
he war of conflict shining in his eyes, wrestling in his twitching jaw.

  His flesh was a ruin of scars. So many, I couldn’t begin to count them. My fingers fluttered between us like a butterfly afraid to land. His hand whipped out and grasped my wrist so quickly, so painfully I gasped.

  He wielded my fingers like an artist with a brush, carefully using my fingertips to trace the thick lacerations carving up his belly, the whirling of burned flesh flaming up his chest, distorting his left nipple, the smooth trail of poorly healed skin that had burned away half of the hair leading down from his navel to his groin. Even his thighs were gashed and knitted back together, a long slash like a ladder mutilating the skin, clearly having been inadequately stitched back together. The flesh pulled over the strong swell of his muscle and I realized it must’ve pained him all the time.

  Tears blurred my vision as he used me to trace every inch of his body. His hold was too tight, but I didn’t complain. It was a kind of cleansing for him, I thought, standing in the steam and water, exposing himself to my touch like a form of healing torture. So I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat at the sight of my beautiful Priest’s mutilated body and I endured along with him.

  When his front was finished, he turned and braced his arms against the tiled walls to let me explore his back alone. He shuddered viciously at my first touch, as I trailed my fingers lightly along the massive tattoo of The Fallen’s flaming skull and tattered wings inked into his scared back.

  “It’s not as bad,” he explained in a ragged, war-torn voice as I thumbed the ridge of a long scar. “He liked to look me in the eye when he forced me to pay his fucked-up penance.” He paused, breathing so heavily his pants rose above the rush of water. “You see, mo cuishle. This is why I am a monster. This is why I do not have a heart. Father O’Neal cut it out of me.”

  A sob bubbled up my throat and exploded between us. I ached so fiercely for this big, achingly exquisite, irrevocably broken man that each breath I took felt like a blade to my heart. Unable to resist, I wrapped myself around his tapered waist, pressing my entire length to his scarred back, brushing my hands over the boxed muscles in his abdomen, knowing I’d never forget the exact way in which they’d been defaced.

  He let me hug him, but his voice was a weapon when he lashed out, “I will not have your pity, Bea. I am not some broken victim. On my seventeenth birthday, when that motherfucker tried to rape my arse with a branding iron to exhume the devil, I impaled him on that spike and then cut him to ribbons with the same knife he’d used for years to cut the evil out of me.”

  He spun suddenly, sending me flying for a moment before he caught me and crushed me to his chest, one hand collaring my throat and canting my chin up so I was forced to meet his searing gaze. “I killed him just as surely as he killed me. And when two of the parishioners caught me trying to flee, I killed them too.”

  “If they weren’t dead, I’d fly over there and kill them myself,” I said honestly, trying to fill the screens of my eyes with the eloquence of my emotions. “You know Father O’Neal was a horrible man, a man who didn’t know anything about God, right? People try to subvert religion so often for their own gains. To use it as an excuse for their greed and sinfulness.”

  “God,” Priest said the word bitterly, spitting it into the steam. “I will never believe in such a thing again.”

  “Okay,” I agreed easily. “But then why do you have so many religious texts? Why did you marry King and Cressida? Why will you marry Lion and H.R., Nova and Lila? I think you want to understand how someone could love God in a healthy way. How He might heal someone or forgive someone who deserves it.”

  “I don’t deserve it,” he retorted immediately. “I never did, and I certainly don’t now. I’m a killer, Bea. As Father O’Neal always believed, I’m a son of Death.”

  “Even Death has a heart,” I pressed, moving my hand over the disfigured skin at his heart even though he bared his teeth at me. “You have one, Priest, you can’t hide it from me anymore. You love Zeus for taking you in, you love the club for giving you a healthy home and accepting you exactly as you are, killer and all. You love me.” I took a deep breath, feeling shaky and nauseous and filled with so much love I was close to bursting at the seams, everything inside me sluicing down the drain. Priest watched me raptly as tears began to fall. “You love me. I don’t care if you can’t ever bring yourself to say the words. What you told Lion today is true. You’re a man of action, not words, and you’ve shown me again and again that I’m in your heart.”

  He laughed hard again, the end note cracking in two. “Mo cuishle, you are my heart.”

  “I’ll keep it safe,” I pledged as I cried tears for him, the wet disappearing instantly in the shower torrent. “I promise, it will always be safe with me. I don’t care if you’re a killer, if you are scarred physically and mentally by your tragic, brutal past. I love all of you, and no line you could cross would make me change my mind about that, okay?”

  When he didn’t respond, his eyes hot and heavy as coals burning in his skull, I shook him. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he agreed impassively, as if it didn’t mean anything when it meant absolutely everything. “Okay, Bea. You keep my heart safe, and I will keep you safe.”

  I trembled, fear rushing in as I thought of the serial killer, of his tenacity to strip my life of love so he could step in and plug in the holes with his mad need.

  “He’s coming for me,” I whispered. “He wants me to be his.”

  “You’re mine,” Priest vowed darkly, dipping down as he squeezed my throat to remind me just how owned I was by him. “If he has to learn that the hard way, he will.”

  He kissed me then, sealing my lips with his promise and eating up the sobs from my tongue like they were sweets. Touching his naked flesh, knowing I finally had all of him wrapped up in my limbs, tangled irrevocably in my heart, made me dizzy with want, and when his fingers found my sex, I was already wet.

  He grunted. “Good to know this doesn’t disgust you.”

  “We all have scars, Priest,” I murmured as he bit into my neck and pumped his thick fingers inside me. “You just wear yours on your skin.”

  He moaned into my neck and lifted me easily by the hips to pin me against the shower. When he slid into me to the hilt, I cried out, the throbbing heat of him both settling me and soaring within me simultaneously.

  “This is why I fuck you bare,” he explained over a series of short, hard thrusts that made my womb clench. “He beat me so bad, there’s no way anything will ever come of it. But knowing I’m inside you like this, coming in this tight, sweet cunt makes my fuckin’ head spin. Makes me feel like a fuckin’ conqueror, like I was never someone’s victim.”

  I cried out in passion and empathy, clutching his hair so tightly it unraveled from the leather hair tie and spilled across my chest as he bit my nipple and held me high to fuck me deeper.

  “You’re the angel with the yellow hair that haunted me from the stained-glass,” he confessed before biting hard into my neck, grunting as I spasmed around his driving shaft.

  “Yes,” I hissed as his cock hit that spot inside me that made me see spots. “I’ve always been yours, just waiting for you.”

  “Don’t believe in fate,” he protested as he tongued my pulse point. “But fuck me, if I don’t believe in you.”

  He crushed his mouth to mine, his love searing from my lips down my spine where it exploded into flames between my thighs. I climaxed so hard, my vision went dark, and Priest savagely ate the little breath I could muster from between my lips as he drove harder inside me, chasing his own orgasm.

  Moments later, I felt the flood of heat at the entrance to my womb as his dick kicked inside me, triggering a second, smaller climax to roll through me.

  Shattered, I hung limp in his arms, head lolling on his strong shoulder as he spent inside me then pinned me against the wall to regain his equilibrium. After a couple of minutes, he pulled away to check my face for trauma.


  “How’re you doin’, Little Shadow?” he asked, husky and tired.

  I loved knowing I’d made such a strong man grow soft, if only for a moment, if only with me.

  “Better,” I confessed as he turned off the water and carried me to the sink where he sat me down to retrieve towels. I watched him walk on that powerful, sensual gait like a predatory animal to the closet where he pulled down two dark towels, completely unselfconscious even barring his myriad of scars to me. They glinted against his pale, freckled skin like artifacts half unearthed in the dust of some ancient ruins. I pledge then to excavate each and every one until those painful stories were unearthed from his memories and laid properly to rest.

  When he returned to perfunctorily dry first me, then himself, I stopped him from lifting me up again with a hand to his chest and told him the truth of what he’d done for me. “If you can survive what you went through and end up the most beautiful man I’ve ever known, I know I can survive this. Thank you for giving me that conviction. I know it cost you a lot.”

  Priest blinked at me, expression completely unreadable. Then he moved forward, grabbed my hand, and placed a swift kiss to the palm before turning around, buck naked, towel discarded on the wet tile to stroll into the bedroom.

  “Sometimes, the cost is worth the reward,” he tossed casually over his shoulder without looking at me before he disappeared out the door.

  I sat there for a long while, legs dangling over the porcelain sink, wondering if it was Priest’s close association to death that gave him this magical ability to turn the darkest days of my life somehow to gold.

  Bea

  I sat at the microphone breathing.

  The podcast was officially on the air, the recording sign blinking unobtrusively over the door to the exit.