Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  Tabitha Linley’s maiden name was Havisham.

  That was how Curtains found the records, dug deep in the Entrance archives.

  It was the perfect place to take Bea, utterly secluded from civilization and impossible for her to escape from on foot.

  I walked out the door as soon as Curtains spoke the coordinates, already armed to the teeth and ready to get my Little Shadow back where she belonged. I was swinging on my Harley, about to shove my helmet on when Kodiak, Wrath, and Bat appeared at the mouth of one of the garage bays. They each wore Kevlar beneath their cuts as their choice of weapons glinted in the silver light.

  “We’re comin’,” Bat declared.

  I stared hard at them as something moved in my chest, something painful and newborn, too vulnerable to weather moments like this.

  Zeus emerged from the clubhouse with his arms crossed, bearded face somber as shit. “Take ’em, Priest. You need all the help you can get. Stayin’ here to coordinate the rest’a the men, but we’ll be right fuckin’ behind you.”

  Burning down my throat like I’d sucked back holy water, and it rebelled against my sinner’s form.

  Zeus pushed off the doorframe and stalked down the stairs until he was just a few paces from my bike. Under his furrowed brow, his silver eyes cut through my flesh and bone straight to the shadowy cavern at the heart of me.

  “How many times since you came to us have you had our backs?” he questioned low, just for me. “How many times you put yourself on the line for this club? Got no doubt, you can slaughter this motherfucker the way he deserves, but Priest, for fuck’s sake, let your family help you for once.”

  There were words in my throat, but I didn’t know how to give them air and voice enough to speak, so I just jerked my chin at my prez, the man who’d taken me in at seventeen and given me purpose.

  Zeus, being Zeus, got me.

  “Roll out,” he called to the others, who moved instantly at his order to their bikes lined up beside mine.

  Wrath started his engine, his huge body and bike almost crowding me.

  Words bubbled up my throat, and I decided not to curb them. “Thanks,” I grunted.

  A grin flickered in his beard, but his voice was tight when he said, “Woulda given anythin’ to have the chance to save my woman. I’m thinkin’, we’d been brothers back then, you’d’ve done the same.”

  My nod was tight as I revved my engine and peeled out of the lot, my brothers following me without hesitation. If I’d been a praying man, I would’ve prayed with everything I had Bea wouldn’t meet the same tragic end as Wrath’s girl, Kylie.

  The snow was thigh-deep in places, clutching at my water-logged denim, making progress through the thickly treed hills slow and taxing. We knew the cabin's general proximity, but after two hours of searching the mountainside, we’d yet to come across any kind of human structure. The logical voice I’d relied on my entire life was failing me. It was not because of emotional paranoia, but because I knew how a man like Seth Linley worked and I knew my woman.

  She wouldn’t give in.

  He wouldn’t give up until she did or she was dead.

  She’d been gone for seventeen hours, and I wasn’t sure how long Seth’s patience would last.

  My gaze cut through the darkness highlighted only by the military-grade flashlight I swept through the close trees. The sharp scent of resin and pine underscored the burning wintery air that whipped through the trunks and tore at my clothes, my cut flapping like a bird’s wings.

  We’d spread out to cover more ground an hour ago, each of us taking control of a quadrant on the hilltop. We were about thirty minutes apart at a guess, connected by shortwave radios, but so far, we’d found shit all.

  Then I saw it, just an inkblot in the snow, a dark splotch followed by three tiny drops.

  Blood.

  I trudged through the deep snow to the blood trapped under a light layer of new snow, my hunter’s instincts trilling.

  “Got somethin’,” I muttered into the radio before checking my watch for the coordinates to relay to my brothers. “Headin’ in.”

  “Wait for us,” Bat replied. “I’m close, twenty minutes out.”

  “Not leavin’ her for one more second than I gotta,” I grunted. “I’ll see ya when I see ya.”

  I switched my radio off so the noise wouldn’t draw unwanted notice, and then I moved forward from the blood splatter, deeper into the thicket of trees. Silently, I prepared my weapons, a Wilson Combat handgun and my fixed blade dagger held at the ready, the flashlight in my mouth as I spotted a clearing through the interminable mass of trees.

  After a few minutes, I reached the threadbare hem of the forest and stopped, transfixed by the run-down wood cabin in the clearing backed by a rushing river. A light flickered in the crude cut-out wooden crosses in both doors.

  I slinked forward in the snow, the crunch of it only a whisper beneath my careful tread.

  Five yards out, I heard the screams.

  Not the high, sharp notes of new trauma, but the almost keening, animal cries of a person sustaining ongoing pain.

  My heart rate slowed, my vision clarified, and whatever feelings I had previously grew frostbitten.

  I was not a man now.

  I was a killer.

  Bea was not my woman, but an objective.

  This was the way I operated, and this was the only way I’d get her out of there safely.

  I was three feet from the structure when the light behind the crosses flickered. Someone was at the door. Quick as a breath, I ducked and flattened myself against the wall beside the door, obscured by it swinging open as someone moved outside.

  I had an instant, just that, to make a choice.

  I lunged out of the dark just as the doors swung shut behind Tabitha Linley. She had only half a second to inhale to scream when I caught her in my arms before I banded a gloved hand across her throat to muffle her.

  We waited, her pathetic struggles absorbed by my body tightening around her like a cobra.

  Inside, the soft wails continued punctuated by the slap, slap of impact.

  The sound haunted me. I recognized it instantly.

  A whip against soft skin.

  Seth was whipping Bea for her sins the way Christ was flogged by the Romans.

  There could have been a better plan, perhaps, with more time and thought. But I refused to let Bea linger another moment in that room without me, alone with her suffering.

  I pressed the edge of my clip-point blade to Tabitha’s neck, and for the first time in ten years, I willingly entered a place of religion, however unsanctified.

  Bea

  When the pain stopped, I slowly crawled out of the mental cave I’d hidden my subconscious in to avoid the worst of the agony. With awareness came a surge of fire licking at my back, the dull burn of it around my wrists where rough rope held my arms spread from the eaves on either side of Seth’s fucked-up, makeshift altar.

  Moments later, I peeled my eyes open, the room lit by bright industrial blubs and warmed by space heaters, and discovered why Seth had stopped his torture.

  Priest stood in the doorway between the two crosses like some violent, vengeful angel all in black, his knife pressed so hard to Tabitha’s neck, blood already flowed down a substantial cut.

  A sob broke through my lips as relief punched through me.

  Priest was there.

  He’d actually found me.

  His eyes were dark shadows beneath his brow, making him skeletal and inhuman as he faced off with Seth. Both of them were expressionless, two psychopaths locking horns.

  “I should have known you’d come,” Seth said blandly, idly flipping the blood-soaked leather flogger in his hand as he moved out from behind me to face the door and the man looming in it. “If she is an angel, you’ve always been Satan trying to lure her into sin.”

  “She’s not Eve; you’re not Adam.”

  “No.” Seth smiled then, that classically handsome face creasing beautif
ul. It still hurt to know I’d been so wildly unaware of his madness. “I’m God’s voice on Earth.”

  Priest raised a single brow. “Then in the spirit of fuckin’ delusion, I’m the hands of Death.”

  Seth laughed, delighted. “And I suppose you think I won’t hurt you because you have a knife at my wife’s throat.”

  In answer, Priest wedged his knife deeper into her neck, making her whimper behind his hand clamped around her mouth.

  Seth didn’t even flinch.

  “By all means, do what you must. My one true wife is Bea. Really, you’d be doing me a favour.”

  Priest blinked once, his mind working fast and hard, then the next second, his blade was slashing across Tabitha’s throat. She collapsed to the ground, hands to her split neck, gargling as she bled out.

  Seth didn’t move an inch, his face almost peaceful as he considered Tabby. “You did well in this life, Tabitha. You were a good servant of God.”

  Tabby’s eyes were wide with horror as her husband just stared at her. Blood bubbled from between her fingers and seeped from her gaped mouth. Quickly, so quickly, the woman I’d once loved who betrayed me, died on the floor of her husband’s church.

  Priest didn’t pause for dramatic effect. His gun was raised, trained on Seth in an instant.

  Again, my tormentor seemed unfazed.

  Priest couldn’t see the reason, the small person behind me holding a knife to my back.

  Seth smiled. “Billy, why don’t you show this man why he won’t shoot me?”

  Billy Huxley moved out from the shadow of my body, his knife point still pressed hard to my side. He was trembling, the point of the blade vibrating against my skin, but there was so much resolve in his eyes.

  His father was dying.

  His mother had been killed.

  He was so lost, and unfortunately, Seth had been the one to find him.

  When I’d regained consciousness after Seth dragged me back to the chapel from the woods, Billy had been the one tending to my head wound, mopping up the blood with a dirty cloth.

  He’d apologized softly, looking haunted but afraid.

  Otherwise, he didn’t respond to my attempts to reach him, always looking to Seth for affirmation.

  That hurt almost more than the flogging. I felt I’d failed him in letting this happen, that I’d been too wrapped up in my own goings-on to recognize a lost soul when I was faced with one. I had no doubt that he was terrified and clinging to the only stable thing he’d known these past few months, Seth and his God.

  Priest stared at the child, jaw flexed, gun still raised.

  “It seems we’re at an impasse,” Seth said with glee. “Why don’t you put down the gun?”

  Priest cocked his head in consideration, his eyes flicking up to mine.

  I didn’t know what to say or do to reassure him. I didn’t want him to drop the gun. I wanted him to shoot Seth in his stupid fucking face, but I also wanted him to spare Billy.

  I had no idea what he would do, so I was shocked when he dropped the gun to the packed earth and lifted his hands in surrender.

  “Priest!” I shouted as Seth laughed lightly and stepped forward to grab the gun, training it on my man.

  Of course, it was too late. Seth leveled Priest’s gun at him calmly. “This is almost too good to be true, but I should have had more faith. God always rewards his disciples.”

  He continued to babble on about being the chosen one as he escorted Priest to one side of the room before directing him to spread his arms wide in a gesture of supplication. Priest obeyed every order, his face almost lax, completely placid.

  My heart thrummed in my ears.

  Where was my ferocious killer? What was his plan?

  “Seth, stop,” I cried out, wrenching painfully at my bonds.

  He smiled over his shoulder at me as he retrieved a tool kit from one of the pews and plucked out a hammer and nail. “Hush, Bea, I want this corrupt soul to watch as I bring you into the light. Then when you’ve finally been cleansed, you’ll watch as I kill him.”

  “No, please, don’t hurt him,” I cried out. “I promise I’ll do what you want.”

  “Will you?” he asked in that low, deep monotone that sent chills down my spine. “I doubt you will. I think you believe you love this sinner, but your good heart has led you astray. Maybe it will do you good to see him hurt.”

  Without hesitation, he placed a nail in the middle of Priest’s palm and hammered it home through his flesh into the wall with a dull, meaty thwack.

  Priest hardly flinched, holding still, his face utterly immobile even when Seth hammered another nail into the right hand, a matching set of crucified palms.

  Satisfied, Seth stepped back to survey Priest spread out for him the way I imagined he did as a surgeon clinically diagnosing his patients. Bile surged up my throat at the idea of Seth’s hands on anyone, but mostly on Cleo, operating on her after he’d been the one to ruin her as if it was some sick joke.

  I couldn’t stand the thought of Seth adding more scars to Priest’s riddled flesh, taking perverse pleasure in his pain.

  “He isn’t alive enough to feel anything. How can you think I have feelings for someone like that?” I cried out, trying to lace my voice with disdain. “Are you alive?” I addressed Priest in an angry yell. “Truly? Or are you just a breathing husk? So married to death, your life is as narrow as a coffin.”

  “Oh, bravo,” Seth said without feeling as he clapped his hands together. “You’re terrible at lying, Bea. It’s that good heart of yours. Now, be quiet while I teach this man an important lesson about wickedness, or I’ll have Billy find a way to quiet you with that knife, hmm? You’ll learn, but a good wife always obeys her husband in all things.”

  “I’m not your wife,” I spat, tugging at the ropes through the blistering pain. “I’ll never be anything of yours except a fucked-up obsession.”

  Seth leveled me with a cool glare. “We’ll see how you feel when he’s gone.”

  I struggled, but Billy moved the knifepoint away from my skin so I wouldn’t accidentally impale myself.

  “Please, Billy honey, you don’t need to help him,” I beseeched again. “He’s a very bad man.”

  “I know,” Billy whispered on a warbled breath, tears in his eyes. “He killed my mum. He told me he’d kill me too if I didn’t help.”

  “Oh, Billy.” I sobbed, terror and hopelessness moving through me like poison, leaving an acrid, chemical tang on my tongue. “Trust me, Priest won’t let that happen.”

  Billy didn’t look convinced, which was fair because when I glanced over at him, Seth had cut open his shirt with Priest’s own knife and was dragging the edge clean through his skin while he explained where the vital organs are.

  “If I stabbed you just here,” Seth said almost lovingly as he stared at the blood seeping down Priest’s torso. “You’d survive, but the pain would be exceptional.”

  “Do it, then,” Priest offered dispassionately.

  Seth stalled, confusion flickering across his face.

  Priest answered his unspoken question. “You can hurt me as much as you want, motherfucker. So long as you aren’t hurting Bea.”

  “Ah, you think you’re in love with her,” he taunted, digging the blade an inch into Priest’s left side just below his ribs.

  “I know nothing about love, but I know about death. And I am not afraid to die for her,” Priest stated, his eyes finding mine over Seth’s shoulder.

  They were a deep, clear green in the yellow light of the construction lamps. I could read everything in that blank expression, the love he felt but couldn’t explicitly voice, the resolve he had, and most of all, the confidence.

  I breathed deeply, the dirty, bloodstained white gown torn to ribbons at my bloody back fluttering under my throat with my exhale. I’d been right. He did have a plan.

  Seth’s entire body seemed affected by a swift change brought on by Priest’s declaration, his muscles curling his frame in on itself,
his muscles straining too tight. When he plunged the dagger into Priest’s side and twisted, he did it with a little hiss of pleasure.

  “There are so many ways to kill in the Bible,” Seth explained as he left the knife in Priest’s torso and leaned close to preach in his face. “I wonder which God and I will decide on to kill you.”

  A smile sliced bloody and raw across Priest’s face before he lunged forward, snapping his teeth at Seth’s neck. They landed on the side of his throat, and with one vicious jerk of his head, he tore a mammoth chunk out of the fleshy column.

  Seth stumbled back, hands clutched to his throat, blood sluicing through his fingers and down his dark sweater with his mouth open in surprise.

  Priest spat out the ragged lump of skin and grinned manically. “I doubt you’ll get the chance,” he finally replied with red-painted teeth, blood dripping from his lips as he smiled that feral animal smile.

  I watched a red light dance through the cross-shaped windows on the front doors and land shakily on Seth’s leg.

  Seth followed Priest’s gaze down to the red circle and blinked.

  A moment later, a shot tore through the damp wooden doors and punctured Seth’s right thigh. He screamed in agony as he fell to the ground, clutching the profusely bleeding wound.

  Priest moved quickly then, wrenching his hands off the wall, then absently pulling out the nails drilled through his palms as if they were splinters. The broken doors crashed open, Kodiak and Wrath storming inside with raised guns.

  Billy froze at my side.

  “Billy?” Priest asked over Seth’s pitiful wails as Wrath went to secure him. “Put down the knife, kid, yeah?”

  He did no such thing, shaking so hard the knife pricked my dress and the skin beneath on my hip.

  Priest took a step forward, but Billy held the knife up and pressed it against my belly in threat.

  “Hey,” my man called, his voice suddenly soothing, soft, and liltingly Irish. “I once knew a man like Seth, who pretended to be a priest when he was really a monster. He did this to me when he thought I was bad,” he indicated the scars gleaming through his torn shirt. The blade was still in his belly, and he moved gingerly around it but didn’t make a move to pull it out. “He told me, ‘A worthless person, a wicked man, goes about with crooked speech, winks with his eyes, signals with his feet, points with his finger, with perverted heart devises evil, continually sowing discord; therefore calamity will come upon him suddenly; in a moment he will be broken beyond healing.’ Do you know which Bible verse that is?”