Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,142

rode through the night, the world a chaos of blurring colours in shapes flying by us, unable to touch us, made the frenetic fear inside me subside further.

Priest grunted in response, but when he gently slid me down the long line of his body to the asphalt, his eyes were fierce on mine.

“Honestly?” he mocked in a way that was almost tender as he grasped my chin in firm, tombstone tattooed fingers. “I’m gonna help more. Now, get on my bike, Little Shadow, I’m gonna take you home.”

For the first time in hours, tears prickled the backs of my eyes not because of sadness but because of joy. I’d dreamt most of my mature life of going home to Priest, and that had nothing to do with sharing a shelter and everything to do with feeling at home just like this, pressed to his strong, leather-clad back on his Harley surging fearlessly through the dark.

Bea

He didn’t take me home.

At least, he didn’t take me to my pink heritage home off Main Street that I’d painstakingly turned into my haven after moving out of Phillipa’s house two years ago.

He took me to his place.

I was shocked when he pulled to a stop in the warehouse district in a long, gravel alleyway between two massive industrial structures. Theoretically, of course, I’d known Priest had a place to crash, but no one in the club seemed to know where that was. It was almost a running joke between the biker babes, guessing where a man like him would call home. A graveyard, a morgue, an underground bunker…

A warehouse seemed fitting.

Mutely, I followed as he collected his bags and my hand before leading us to a door under a flicking light in the side of the otherwise window-less steel frame. He used three keys and a complicated alarm system I recognized as one of Curtain’s creations before we finally proceeded into a glass antechamber that overlooked the warehouse's interior. Wooden crates, barrels, and steel storage containers were organized meticulously within.

I looked up at Priest in silent question.

“Weapons,” he said, and that was it.

We descended a long, zig-zagging staircase that made me realize just how wholly exhausted I was, and then we reached another door with yet another series of locks and alarms.

My man didn’t fuck around.

I was shocked by the inside of his apartment. Not the industrial ducts and exposed pipes, the lack of furniture, the spotless expanse of his steel cabinet kitchen, the woodworking station, or the knife-throwing target board set up along one side of the space beside a rack of display weapons.

That all made perfect sense.

It was the entire corner taken up by a library set with a single chair and reading lamp that drew me in. He let me explore, moving away to organize his saddlebags, leaving me to examine his personal space.

The trust took my breath away. That he would leave me in his haven, a place so few people even knew about. That knowing me and my psychological studies, he would let me roam and poke and prod into this sanctuary, into his innermost thoughts displayed as those few important things he would harbour in such a space…

I was crying again, annoyed with myself for being so emotional. I felt like one raw, stripped wire, exposed to every small interaction with anything I encountered.

And this was massive.

Monumental.

My loner, my psycho, a man who believed he was too close to death to love anyone, had let me loose in his home.

I was only human.

So, while I cried, I took advantage.

My fingers trailed over the spines of some familiar volumes, different versions of the Bible, The Tipitaka, the Quran, and The Tanakh and The Talmud. Most, though, I hadn’t read and barely recognized beyond the fact that they were clearly all religious texts.

He even had an incredibly old edition of King James’s Bible in a hermetically sealed glass box on a lone table between bookshelves. I leaned over it, tracing my fingers along the script on the open pages.

“My mother’s.”

His voice startled me so badly, I nearly choked on a scream. Hand to my breast, I turned to him with wide eyes. “You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

Ignoring my dramatics, he stepped closer so he was half an inch from pressing against my back. The space between us vibrated like a struck tuning fork. I’d turned the lamp on to illuminate the dark corner, and the warm light cast Priest in an orange glow, his hair pulled back by