Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,125
into one whole, shining thing that my inexperienced mind wanted to call love.
“Oh, Priest,” she gasped, drawing my attention to her dipped head, to the skin she’d revealed to her gaze on the inside of my arm.
There was a cacophonic clang in my ears as all my shields slammed down within me. I was up, pushing her off, backing up with a growl in my throat, teeth bared before I could think to stop myself.
I was panting even though I’d recovered from my orgasm, my chest tight and growing tighter. Shooting pains arrowed up my arms into my chest, reminding me that this and only this was a reason to feel.
Pain.
That was why I was alive.
To feel it.
“Priest,” Bea called, sitting up on her knees, dishevelled hair curling around her sweet face, a vicious red bite mark marring the long column of her throat, clusters of love bites like red roses on her breasts. So marked by me.
Marked as I was marked, but so different too.
Her marks would fade.
Her marks were made from whatever love I could dredge up inside me to give to her.
“Priest,” she tried again. “It’s okay.”
It wasn’t.
She’d seen only a glimpse of the tapestry of history I wore on my skin, but it was too much.
Without saying another word, I turned on my heel and went to the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I hammered my hands down on the porcelain, fighting to breathe, but my eyes caught on the raised hem of my shirt, on the mottled skin at my wrist.
My vision went red, then blinding white.
I crushed my forehead into the already broken mirror, felt pain slice across the skin and warmth flood down into my right brow.
It wasn’t enough.
The blade I’d used on Bea lay on the back of the sink. My clumsy, numb fingers found it, gripping it so hard the handle cut into my palm.
I sliced my left palm, then my right, sighing in relief at the crystal-clear pain.
I breathed, fisting my hands, the blood seeping through my knuckles.
Drip, drip, dripping into the sink.
The door opened behind me, Bea’s pale head slowly slotting inside the gap. Her bottom lip was between her teeth, but her chin was tipped defiantly. She was scared to disturb me yet determined to bring me comfort in any way she could.
My brave Little Shadow.
I blinked at her, the only concession I was capable of giving, but of course, she understood. We watched each other in the reflection of her broken mirror as she moved to me and gently, so gently her touch was just a whisper, wrapped her arms around my middle before taking my big, scarred hands in the palm of hers. The tears that pooled in her eyes were not the kind of tears I liked to make her cry.
“You do this when you remember, don’t you?” she asked in a whisper I felt through the cotton covering my shoulder. “You need the pain to forget?”
“No.” I fisted my hands again, her little ones cupping my knuckles. “I need pain to remember.”
“Can’t you tell me what happened to you?” It was a question without pressure, floating between us in a way that defied gravity.
She would let me ignore it, maybe, but the question would linger under her fingernails, a splinter she couldn’t get out. She was a curious girl, one of the more brilliant things about her, and I was the most monumental enigma she’d ever come across.
Of course, I fascinated her.
But how did I give words to things that no vocabulary could properly express? To speak of them was to belittle them inherently, to get it wrong in the telling was a cross I couldn’t bear.
So, I just stared at her in the webbed glass, my blood pooling in her palms.
She studied me, lip between her teeth, for a long moment.
“Self-harm isn’t the answer, Priest,” she murmured finally, curling her hands over mine so my fingertips pressed into the slices on my palms. I shuddered from the pain, but I liked it, and she knew that.
She sucked in a sharp little breath, steeling herself. “Would you…would you at least let me hurt you, instead?”
I arched a red brow at her, watching as she blushed that fine wine-tinged flush. “How would a little thing like you hurt big bad me?”
She bit her lip, hiding briefly behind my shoulder before finding the courage to say. “I think I know something that might help?”