Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men, #6)

by Darling, Giana

  “I love you,” I told him, feeling the words were so inadequate when it came to what we shared. “I love you with everything I am.”

  Priest blinked at me the way he always did when I was effusive as if he couldn’t quite acclimatize to my professions or the truth of them. Then he shifted, a slow uncoiling of lean muscles so that he lay half-propped on a bulging forearm facing me.

  “You are my whole heart,” he explained factually without a shred of intonation. “And so is this baby.”

  He placed his large, death stamped hand on my belly, splaying his fingers. I read the names of the deceased on each knuckle, the newest addition on his thumb a constant reminder of what we’d been through.

  Linley.

  Surprisingly, it wasn’t a painful reminder when I caught a glimpse of it as I often did, but a powerful one. It was a seemingly insurmountable obstacle we had overcome together, and maybe it was strange, but I was proud of that.

  We were quiet then for a time, both sinking deep in our own thoughts. We weren’t a couple who watched television or went out drinking at bars. We were the people who threw knives at the old cross Priest had transplanted to my backyard, the couple who practiced self-defence for fun on the pink-patterned carpet in our living room, and the pair that sat quietly together while he whittled or read and I studied for classes.

  It wasn’t exactly a quiet life we led or a normal one, but it was the only life I’d ever wanted.

  His hand was still on my belly when, minutes later, my abdomen contracted so hard it made my teeth ache as they ground together against the pain. He could feel the tightening of my womb under his fingers, and seconds later, I was being lifted up in his arms, extra weight and pregnant belly and all as easily as if I was a sack of flour.

  “Our stuff,” I cried out, looking over his shoulder as he stalked away from our blanket and picnic basket.

  “I’ll send the prospect to pick it up when we get to the hospital.”

  I sighed dramatically, but he ignored me as he walked through the long, swaying grass to cut straight to the parking lot.

  It had been months since I’d been on the back of his bike. I missed it, but I loved the fact that Priest drove us in my pink 1982 Fiat 124 Spider. He didn’t give a crap what anyone thought of it, so he was completely unfazed by the idea of folding his long body behind the wheel and transporting us around in the pink car. Boner had made a joke about it once but met with Priest’s stone-cold stare, he hadn’t uttered one again.

  Only when I was tucked in the passenger seat with my belt buckled and Priest behind the wheel did he finally look at me again like I was human. I didn’t take it personally. This was the makeup of his brain, to tackle problems systematically.

  “If this is it, in a handful of hours you’ll have given me the greatest gift I’ve ever known and always feared,” he murmured as he squeezed my thigh before placing it on my headrest to check behind him as he reversed the car. “Thank you, mo cuishle.”

  I patted his hard thigh, then gave it a reciprocal squeeze as I stared out the window to hide my happy tears.

  * * *

  * * *

  Thirty-seven hours.

  Of course, no child of Priest would be easy.

  The little devil took his time, and nothing we did would rush him.

  “He likes it in there, safe with you,” Priest guessed at one point as he mopped my sweaty brow and fed me ice chips with his fingers. “Don’t blame him. The world’s not an easy place.”

  “You’ll protect them,” I said because I knew he would do anything and everything to make sure our baby had the best life possible, a different kind of life than Priest had suffered through.

  He grunted, but there was a softening to his mouth as he unpeeled a strand of hair from my slick cheek.

  The entire club was outside in the waiting room of St. Katherine’s, this time, waiting for a birth instead of a possible death. Loulou filtered in to hold my hand and make me laugh to take my mind off the pain and Phillipa too, though she was nervous around Priest even though she tried not to be. We were working on our relationship—my mum, sister, and I—being open and honestly communicative for the first time in our lives. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it in the end to try to earn each other’s love and loyalty instead of just assuming it by proxy.

  At thirty-six hours, Dr. Rosen declared we needed to do an emergency C-section because my cervix couldn’t seem to dilate enough, and the baby was in distress.

  Priest almost knocked over the table of medical instruments in his haste to get me out of the private room and into surgery.

  “I’m scared,” I confessed as they set me up in the operating room, a sheet veiling my belly from sight. Priest’s hand was gripped in mine so tightly, I might have been causing him physical pain, but of course, he didn’t say a thing.

  He leaned close to my face in his blue scrubs, beard obscured by a mask, a cap over his long, thick mane of copper hair so his eyes were all I could see. Those pale green eyes ringed in a thick black circle I’d learned was called a limbal ring.

  “You are not weak,” he reminded me, voice full of vigor as if he could pass the strength of his conviction to me through tone alone. “You never were and now, after everythin’, you’re even stronger. You’re gonna do this, my Bea. You’re gonna bring our baby into this world.”

  I clung to his hand, to his gaze, the entire time they operated.

  And then, twenty minutes later, the doctor declared we had a baby.

  A baby boy.

  I was crying before I even saw him because of the look on Priest’s face. He could see beyond the veil where I couldn’t, his gaze fixed on a single point that must have been our baby in the doctor’s arms.

  “Oh,” he said, a single, small exhale of sound.

  But that one syllable was so profound, a tiny halleluiah.

  The entire expanse of Priest’s hard featured, perpetually scowling face was alit with love, palpable love and awe, utter worship.

  “He’s…” he tried to explain to me as they cleaned and checked baby McKenna’s vitals. He shook his head, unable to find the words for the emotions he felt. “He’s just like you.”

  “He looks like me?” I asked, so eager to see him my heart clenched.

  “No,” he whispered, leaning down to kiss my hand he held through his mask. “He’s an angel like you, not at all like me.”

  “Priest, if he’s half you,” I argued as they finally brought my baby over swaddled in a blue blanket to lay him on my chest.

  Priest was there instantly, helping move the fabric of my hospital gown so the baby could place his red little cheek on my naked skin. He hesitated, a tombstone tatted finger gently, so gently, smoothing over that plump cheek.

  I gazed down at the light face, eyes squeezed shut as he fussed, then settle slightly against me. He had such a little fist, half the size of his dad’s one finger, and a small smattering of hair on his head the same shade of antique copper.

  “He looks like you,” I murmured, feeling love turn over every molecule in my body, turning me from plain old Bea Lafayette into something greater, made whole and invincible by my love for his baby and this man.

  “Like you,” Priest argued lowly as he peered down over us, smoothing back my sweaty hair while he ran his finger over the baby’s downy head.

  “Both of us, then,” I declared on a weepy light laugh. “Look at how beautiful we are together.”

  Priest kissed my head, and I knew he didn’t have language for the unprecedented feelings roiling through him.

  “What should we call him?” he asked me a moment later.

  We hadn’t decided on baby names. I wanted to meet our little McKenna before we decided on anything, perhaps romantically thinking the right name would come to us like a lightning strike.

  I should have trusted my instincts because one did.

  “Azrael,” I said reverently, anointing his forehead with the touch of my finger. “Azrael Axelsen McKenna.”r />
  A little smile, small and newborn as our baby, flickered at the edges of Priest’s mouth. “The Angel of Death.”

  “You and me,” I repeated as Azrael made a little mewing sound. “I think he likes it.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “The benevolent angel of death seems about right. The product of life and death.”

  I hummed, exhaustion and bone-deep contentment softening my body into sleepy wakefulness.

  “Thank you,” Priest said again, tipping his head down so he could look me directly in the eye, his entire hand tenderly palming the back of Azrael’s head as he moved. “Thank you for bringin’ me back, for givin’ me so fuckin’ much to live for.”

  Tears sluiced down my cheeks, cleansing and renewing as a baptism. I pulled my man close to me, pressing a kiss to his beautiful, unsmiling mouth as we both held our baby close, and I knew that no matter our unconventionality, the sins of our past, or the tribulations that faced us in our future, my psycho and I were deserving of a soft epilogue and a very fucking happy ending.

  * * *

  * * *

  Thank you so much for reading DEAD MAN WALKING!

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  If you loved reading about the dark, sexy, age-gap between Priest and Bea, you will love The Fallen MC’s President, Zeus Garro’s taboo love story! Discover what happens when the Prez of The Fallen MC saves the life of the mayor’s daughter and their lives become entangled for good…

  * * *

  “Taboo, breathtaking, and scorching hot! I freaking loved WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE.”—Skye Warren, New York Times bestselling author

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  One-Click WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE now!

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  Turn the page for an excerpt…

  Welcome to the Dark Side (The Fallen Men, Book #2) Excerpt

  I was a good girl.

  I ate my vegetables, volunteered at the local autism centre and sat in the front pew of church every Sunday.

  Then, I got cancer.

  What the hell kind of reward was that for a boring life well lived?

  I was a seventeen-year-old paradigm of virtue and I was tired of it.

  So, when I finally ran into the man I’d been writing to since he saved my life as a little girl and he offered to show me the dark side of life before I left it for good, I said yes.

  Only, I didn’t know that Zeus Garro was the President of The Fallen MC and when you made a deal with a man who is worse than the devil, there was no going back…

  A standalone in The Fallen Men Series.

  Welcome to the Dark Side Excerpt

  I was too young to realize what the pop meant.

  It sounded to my childish ears like a giant popping a massive wad of bubble gum.

  Not like a bullet releasing from a chamber, heralding the sharp burst of pain that would follow when it smacked and then ripped through my shoulder.

  Also, I was in the parking lot of First Light Church. It was my haven not only because it was a church and that was the original purpose of such places, but also because my grandpa was the pastor, my grandmother ran the after-school programs, and my father was the mayor so it was just as much his stage as his parents’.

  A seven-year-old girl just does not expect to be shot in the parking lot of a church, holding the hand of her mother on one side and her father on the other, her grandparents waving from the open door as parents picked up their young children from after-school care.

  Besides, I was unusually mesmerized by the sight of a man driving slowly by the entrance to the church parking lot. He rode a great growling beast that was so enormous it looked at my childish eyes like a silver and black backed dragon. Only the man wasn’t wearing shining armour the way I thought he should have been. Instead, he wore a tight long-sleeved shirt under a heavy leather vest with a big picture of a fiery skull and tattered wings on the back of it. What kind of knight rode a mechanical dragon in a leather vest?

  My little girl brain was too young to comprehend the complexities of the answer but my heart, though small, knew without context what kind of brotherhood that man would be in and it yearned for him.

  Even at seven, I harboured a black rebel soul bound in velvet bows and Bible verse.

  As if sensing my gaze, my thoughts, the biker turned to look at me, his face cruel with anger. I shivered and as his gaze settled on mine those shots rang out in a staccato beat that perfectly matched the cadence of my suddenly overworked heart.

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  Everything from there happened as it did in action movies, with rapid bursts of sound and movement that swirled into a violent cacophony. I remembered only three things from the shooting that would go down in history as one of the worst incidents of gang violence in the town and province’s history.

  One.

  My father flying to the ground quick as a flash, his hand wrenched from mine so that he could cover his own head. My mother screaming like a howler monkey but frozen to the spot, her hand paralyzed over mine.

  Useless.

  Two.

  Men in black leather vests flooded the concrete like a murder of ravens, their hands filled with smoking metal that rattled off round after round of pop, pop, pop. Some of them rode bikes like my mystery biker but most of them were on foot, suddenly appearing from behind cars, around buildings.

  More of them came roaring down the road behind the man I’d been watching, flying blurs of silver, green and black.

  They were everywhere.

  But these first two observations were merely vague impressions because I had eyes for only one person.

  The third thing I remembered was him, Zeus Garro, locking eyes with me across the parking lot a split second before chaos erupted. Our gazes collided like the meeting of two planets, the ensuing bedlam a natural offshoot of the collision. It was only because I was watching him that I saw the horror distort his features and knew something bad was going to happen.

  Someone grabbed me from behind, hauled me into the air with their hands under my pits. They were tall because I remember dangling like an ornament from his hold, small but significant with meaning. He was using me and even then, I knew it.

  I twisted to try to kick him in the torso with the hard heel of my Mary Jane’s and he must have assumed I’d be frozen in fright because my little shoe connected with a soft place that immediately loosened his grip.

  Before I could fully drop to the ground, I was running and I was running toward him. The man on the great silver and black beast who had somehow heralded the massacre going down in blood and smoke all around me.

  His bike lay discarded on its side behind him and he was standing straight and so tall he seemed to my young mind like a great giant, a beast from another planet or the deep jungle, something that killed for sport as well as survival. And he was doing it now, killing men like it was nothing but one of those awful, violent video games my cousin Clyde liked to play. In one hand he held a wicked curved blade already lacquered with blood from the two men who lay fallen at his feet while the other held a smoking gun that, under other circumstances, I might have thought was a pretty toy.

  I took this in as I ran toward him, focused on him so I wouldn’t notice the pop, the screams and wet slaps of bodies hitting the pavement. So I wouldn’t taste the metallic residue of gun powder on my tongue or feel the splatter of blood that rained down on me as I passed one man being gutted savagely by another.

  Somehow, if I could just get to him, everything would be okay.

  He watched me come
to him. Not with his eyes, because he was busy killing bad guys and shouting short, gruff orders to the guys wearing the same uniform as him but there was something in the way his great big body leaned toward me, shifted on his feet so that he was always orientated my way, that made me feel sure he was looking out for me even as I came for him.

  He was just a stone’s throw away, but it seemed to take forever for my short legs to move me across the asphalt and when I was only halfway there, his expression changed.

  I knew without knowing that the man I’d kicked in his soft place was up again and probably angry. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and a fierce shiver ripped down my spine like tearing Velcro. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I started to scream just as the police sirens started to wail a few blocks away.

  My biker man roared, a violent noise that rent the air in two and made some of the people closest to him pause even in the middle of fighting. Then he was moving, and I remember thinking that for such a tall man, he moved fast because within the span of a breath, he was in front of me reaching out a hand to pull me closer…

  A moment too late.

  Because in that second when his tattooed hands clutched me to his chest and he tried to throw us to the ground, spiraling in a desperate attempt to act as human body armour to my tiny form, a POP so much louder than the rest exploded on the air and excruciating pain tore through my left shoulder, just inches from my adrenaline-filled heart.