by Cole McCade
He regarded her steadily—then let the riding crop fall. He stood, moving with that slow, controlled menace.
“Ask,” he rumbled, and she realized she’d signed her name to a contract with the Devil himself, and damned her own soul. “I cannot promise it will not come at a price…but ask.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WILLOW FELT LIKE A CHILD, as Priest settled her into the passenger seat of the car and buckled her into her seatbelt.
But she’d felt like a child as he’d salved and splinted her ankle, too. As he’d fed her, placating her snarling stomach with a simple meal of store-bought croissants stuffed with blue cheese and toasted in the oven. As he’d dressed her, wrapping her up in one of his button-downs that hung on her like a dress, giving her a belt so she could wrap it until it draped like some kind of throwback eighties fashion from a time when shirt-dresses and big hair had been a thing. She hadn’t put the firefly necklace on. He hadn’t made her. She’d only slipped it into the breast pocket of the shirt, then let him lift her into his arms and carry her out into the garage because she couldn’t make the walk herself.
One way or another, she was always helpless. Whether she was tied up or dealing with a twisted, swollen ankle, she was always fucking helpless, at his mercy, and she hated it.
Maybe that was why he’d agreed to this. Agreed to take her out of the warehouse without keeping her in cuffs or on a leash or whatever other degrading thing he’d find next. Because even if she broke her promise and tried to run, she’d get two steps before her ankle gave out on her and left her writhing on the ground and at his mercy.
God, she was so stupid. She kept doing things without thinking, her animal brain overriding reason and sense. But nothing said she had to keep her word. Nothing except what he might do to her, if she broke her promise and he caught her again.
It was just a question of how much she was willing to risk, when her chance came again.
Priest settled the seat belt strap against her shoulder, fixed her with a lingering look, then shut the car door. He’d been oddly silent—not one mocking comment, strange question, promise or threat, as if he’d wrapped himself up in a cocoon and buried even what little parts of himself he let her see. Yet she’d seen enough to know this car must belong to a stranger, not to him; it was too shiny, too flashy, too loud, when Priest was made of silent nights and the sound of moonset on a dark horizon. The interior was meticulously clean, spotless and upholstered in butter-soft leather. A chain dangled from the rear view mirror, dog tags twisting and spinning as the car shifted and rocked with the weight of Priest opening the driver’s side door and slipping inside.
She reached up to catch the tags, stopping their sway, then turned them over and read the name engraved on them. “Vincent A. Manion.” She frowned, then glanced at him, eyes widening. “That’s you.”
“Vin,” he corrected softly. “No one calls me Vincent.”
“Only Priest?”
“Mn.” Quiet. Closed.
She searched his face, but he gave away nothing—not merely expressionless, but shut away, shut down, his usual apathy replaced by something defensive and cold. There was something about this subject. Something about his name. And she wondered if Priest was something to hide behind; as if, as long as he was Priest and not Vin, he wasn’t a person and didn’t have to care about the things he did.
“Why?” she ventured.
He made a low, derisive sound and slipped the keys into the ignition. “A nickname is a nickname. I told you about seminary school. Or are you looking for a different story, little one? One that will let you believe I’m a good man?”
“Wanting to believe that wouldn’t make it true.” She looked away again, and let the dog tags slip from her fingers. She felt as if she were walking on thorns and only hoping if she was delicate enough, she wouldn’t bleed. “How are you U.S. military when you’re foreign?”
“Dual citizenship,” he said flatly. Then that harsh, defensive edge in his voice softened. He slipped the keys into the ignition. “My father was American. Navy SEAL.”
“Following in Daddy’s footsteps.”
“Something like that.” He fell silent, and she thought he would stay that way—until he added, a strange undercurrent of regret in his voice, “Though my unit always ‘gave me shit,’ as Americans say, for being half squid.”
She made an amused sound. “No Navy for you, then.”
“Marines.”
“Semper fi.”
Tension settled over him, cold and closed away. “No,” he said. “Not always.”
She said nothing as he started the Firebird’s engine—a snarling, angry thing that roared like a lion. No, this wasn’t Priest’s car by a long shot. He wasn’t the kind of predator who roared to defend his territory. He was the silent beast who stalked the shadows, stealth and quickness ending his prey before they even knew he was there.
The car backed out of the warehouse; he pressed a button on the remote clipped to the sun visor, and the door ground down. Willow’s stomach hitched up in strange knots as the growling vehicle eased into the night-dark streets. One day inside that warehouse had felt like months, and the world looked strange and surreal and new, and she couldn’t help being afraid—afraid and miserable, when she didn’t even know if she could stand to have the one thing she’d asked him for.
But as he shifted gear and the Firebird’s roar softened to a quiet, steady purr, she risked a glance at him. “…was? Your father, I mean.”
“Was,” he confirmed. His gaze trained straight ahead, fixed on the road, blank and half-lidded; he spoke as if the words belonged to someone else, another person’s story that he was entirely detached from. “Killed in action in El Salvador when I was a boy. My mother committed suicide not long after. My younger brother and I were sent home to Venice to live with my grandmother.”
Willow fidgeted with the hem of the shirt that was now her dress, staring down at her bandaged fingers and wondering that she hurt for the little boy Priest had once been. Wondering, too, if that was why he was the way he was now. If experiencing loss so young had taught him to close off his emotions and detach himself, depersonalizing until he could be so cold, so strange, so unpredictable and yet so self-contained.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“It is life. I barely remember them, and I loved Venice. It is a city of history, of stories, of a thousand bridges.” And for a moment, he smiled. “I still remember Carnivale, and my first date under the Bridge of Sighs.”
“What’s the Bridge of Sighs?”
“A bridge connecting the courthouse to the former prisons of Venice.” A softness crept into his voice—a softness and a warmth, something she might call nostalgia, turning that husky, dark voice into honey. “During the time of the Inquisition and many other periods of strife in Venice’s history, it was said that the condemned would see their loved ones for the last time through the windows of the bridge, and sigh with longing.” He glanced at her sidelong; his eyes caught the street lights until they glowed like the golden globes of stars against the deep. “Legend has it that if you kiss someone you love under the bridge, you will be together forever.”
“Oh,” Willow breathed softly. She could almost picture it, these grand stone bridges and the silhouette of lovers against the glimmering pools of Venice’s canals. “That’s shockingly romantic.”
“Giselle and I broke up a week later.”
“…and then you had to go and make it terrible.” But she couldn’t help smiling, watching him in the constant interplay of light and shadow. “Is your brother still in Venice?”
“Si. He keeps the family home. I think he’s a chef now.”
“You don’t know?”
“I keep him safe by avoiding contact. No ties.” Priest’s mouth tightened. “No one who could be hurt, if someone traced me to him.”
“It’s a little frightening, imagining two of you.”
“Vaughn and I are nothing alike. We barely ev
en look alike.” He sighed with something close to fond exasperation, if he could even feel such a thing. “He is our mother’s son. A gentle, soft soul. He cares for things too much.” Another sidelong look, thoughtful, discerning. “You would probably like him far better than you like me.”
It doesn’t matter if I like you, Willow thought. This isn’t that kind of situation.
She tore her gaze from his and reached up to brush her fingers along the upper curve of the window and the safety handle. “Is this Vaughn’s car?”
“How do you know it is not mine?”
“It doesn’t suit you,” she said. “Too loud. Too flashy.”
“Strange how you know me,” he said.
He said nothing else until they’d eased around a corner, slipping into the light early evening traffic through the Nests; it was so ordinary it was jarring, and she wondered if anyone would glance in the car window and think the handsome man and pretty girl were out on a date, instead of guessing that he was a murderer who’d kidnapped her and was only now granting her what might well be a death row inmate’s last request.
“It’s Hart’s,” he said abruptly. “Gabriel. The only other surviving member of my unit. Idiota just…left it here with the keys in it, when he disappeared.” He took one hand off the steering wheel and curled it around the rosary that dangled from his chest. “The keys, and this.”
“He was holding on to it for you?”
He inclined his head with a soft sound of affirmative. “Of course, firefly. Someone had to keep my faith, when I couldn’t.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. So she said nothing, wrapping her arms around herself and looking out the window, wondering if this was the last time she’d ever see these streets. She let the window down a little, enough to let the night air in, whipping past in sharp little slices that brought the scents of the river, the factories. Wet concrete steamed in the evening heat; it must have rained a little while ago, probably one of the gusting, quick showers so common over the river. Even the sweltering stink of trash in the summer was welcome and familiar, when it was something other than the smell of four cement walls around her and blood creeping across the floor.
The dog tags swayed in her peripheral vision, catching the evening light and throwing it back in silvered shards. She should have trusted her first guess. Military, but whatever had happened to him…it had cut scars in him so deep they went down to the bone. Cut away whatever had made him a man, until the trappings of humanity had withered and left only the monstrousness of layers on layers of painful, dark scar tissue.
“I should’ve known you were military,” she said, talking more to the silence than to him. “They do something to you in the service. Something that really messes you up. And you act like you’re noble, but you’re not. Cops and military are statistically most likely to beat and murder people, including their families. Did you know that? They make you killers, and you don’t know how to stop.”
He considered, tapping his fingers against the stick shift, then admitted, “You may be right.” His gaze darted to the dangling dog tags, then away. “But I never claimed to be noble. I am what I am, and what I am is angry.”
“So you do have emotions.”
“Some. More than you would think.” Was that a note of accusation in his voice? No. No, that wasn’t accusation. That was pain. As if the wounds under all that scar tissue had never stopped bleeding. And they bled into his voice as he continued, “The violence of military men is merely anger at a world that taught them what everyone else already knew: that they are all red meat in the end, and everyone can suffer. We men, we never look beyond the blinders that make us secure in our place in the world. We never look down enough to see the people we’re walking on. Ah, si…but we know we’re lifted above others, and we resent being brought down low to everyone else’s level. We resent having our superiority ripped away from us by a war that makes us small, and painfully aware of our own vulnerability and mortality.”
She stared at him. “Is that why you do what you do? Because you’re angry at having your privilege knocked out from under you?”
“No. If I felt that way, I would hurt women. Children. Minorities. I would hurt the people who are already hurt, for giving me their pain.” For a moment his fingers tightened on the steering wheel, enough that the leather squeaked, before relaxing. “No. I wish to hurt the ones who know nothing of true pain. I wish for them to feel this, too. To understand the suffering they so unthinkingly cause to others, and then overlook as if it is not real.” He trailed off. He was beautiful in his pensiveness, in the shadows and light playing across his face, in the melancholy that made of him a dreaming thing. “In pain, we are all equal. If they will not lift others up, I will bring them low.”
“You…you make it sound like what you do is normal.”
“What makes you think it is not, firefly?”
“Because it isn’t.” Yet her mind touched on a hard crimson memory, dripping so sticky, so dark, the tinny smell of blood in her nose. She breathed faster, trying to chase it away, but she couldn’t expel what wasn’t there, what wouldn’t leave her when it was embedded deep in her brain, a phantom she could never banish. “If it was normal, I…I…”
“You…what?”
She clenched her fingers harder in the hem of the shirt, bunching them up until the wounds under her bandages stung. “Nothing.”
“Tell me,” he coaxed softly. “Please.”
No.
Because maybe this was the ugliness he wanted from her. Maybe this was the darkness he sought inside her, the thing that made her like him. The secret self she wouldn’t even look at head-on, the screaming, violent thing drenched in so much red.
Maybe that would end this game. This game where the waiting was almost as bad as the fear of dying, and she couldn’t stand it anymore.
She uncurled her hands and spread them against her thighs. Under the redness of her knuckles they were scarred, so scarred. Little marks all over, old burns, old slashes on her pale, pale flesh. Her palms were toughened, her fingers rough. She wet her lips, nerving herself to open her mouth. To speak, as if she were standing at confessional and Priest was a man of the cloth and not the Devil himself.
“Not all these scars are from working with my hands,” she said softly. “I…people used to call me a violent child, you know that?” Then she laughed, a wet and strangled sound. “Of course you don’t know that. You look at me and all you see is this whimpering, frightened thing caught in your net.”
“Are you certain that’s all I see?”
“…it’s what anyone else would see. Anyone who knows me now.” She curled her fingers again, then looked away from scars that proclaimed a written record of her crimes. First at him…but when she found him watching her once more, she fixed her gaze out the window and on the street signs, the tail lights, the hulking shadows of buildings settled into themselves at night like gargoyles crouched to stand guard. “It was only one time. One incident. But hurt one girl, and suddenly I’m this little beast. Even if I never felt like a beast, ever…though sometimes my body made me feel like a monster. But this one time…one time…”
“You broke?” he prompted, and she wondered how he knew her so well.
“…yeah.” A hard pressure in the center of her chest, like something was calcifying. “Everyone has a break point, I guess. And when I hit mine after years and years of torment, suddenly everyone pointed and labeled me as wrong. Bad. Violent. Abnormal.” Yet the memories, ten years old, were still sharp and fresh and new: the wary looks, the slimy knowledge that the whispers all around were about her, and that fucking nickname. Willy, Willy-Boy, Big Boy Willy. She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself. “Violence isn’t normal to the human condition, Vincent.”
“Perhaps not. But pleasure in violence is.”
“It isn’t.”
“No?” That lilting voice taunted. “Why do you think the highest media ratings center around murder, war? Why do y
ou think we are drawn to gristly, ghastly stories? Why do you think we exoticize and fetishize sex as an erotic metaphor for violent power struggles and death?” He said it as softly as a prayer, and with the same reverent cadence. “We are a voyeuristic species always in conflict with itself. Empathy and sadism ever shifting in the balance.”
“If that’s true, then my balance tips toward empathy,” she said firmly. “Even if yours doesn’t.”
“Is that so?” One hand left the steering wheel; one graceful, square fingertip touched under her chin, and she reluctantly met those cunning eyes. “How did it feel, when you hit your break point?”
She wanted to drop her gaze, but couldn’t. It would feel like a lie, like hiding from the truth inside herself, but still she could only say, “I don’t want to answer that.”
“Be honest with me, firefly.”
God, why did he ask her things that way? In that way that compelled her to answer. As if, if she gave him one more piece of herself, he’d…he’d start to care. He’d start to value her life, to…
To what?
All she wanted was for him to care enough to let her go…wasn’t it?
Answering him was easier than answering that, and finally she straggled out, “…good. It felt good.” Shame and relief in admitting that, as she looked into fox-gold eyes that held no judgment; only that quiet, contemplative interest. “It…it felt good to hurt her the way she hurt me. She made my life a living hell for years, and then those years added up into a single moment and I…I gave it back to her, all at once.”
“And in your sadism, you taught her empathy.” He traced his fingertip along her jaw, skimming lighter than breath and yet his warmth sinking deep into her pores. “You taught her to understand how you felt. There is balance there, too.”