Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,146
me.”
He spun suddenly, sending me flying for a moment before he caught me and crushed me to his chest, one hand collaring my throat and canting my chin up so I was forced to meet his searing gaze. “I killed him just as surely as he killed me. And when two of the parishioners caught me trying to flee, I killed them too.”
“If they weren’t dead, I’d fly over there and kill them myself,” I said honestly, trying to fill the screens of my eyes with the eloquence of my emotions. “You know Father O’Neal was a horrible man, a man who didn’t know anything about God, right? People try to subvert religion so often for their own gains. To use it as an excuse for their greed and sinfulness.”
“God,” Priest said the word bitterly, spitting it into the steam. “I will never believe in such a thing again.”
“Okay,” I agreed easily. “But then why do you have so many religious texts? Why did you marry King and Cressida? Why will you marry Lion and H.R., Nova and Lila? I think you want to understand how someone could love God in a healthy way. How He might heal someone or forgive someone who deserves it.”
“I don’t deserve it,” he retorted immediately. “I never did, and I certainly don’t now. I’m a killer, Bea. As Father O’Neal always believed, I’m a son of Death.”
“Even Death has a heart,” I pressed, moving my hand over the disfigured skin at his heart even though he bared his teeth at me. “You have one, Priest, you can’t hide it from me anymore. You love Zeus for taking you in, you love the club for giving you a healthy home and accepting you exactly as you are, killer and all. You love me.” I took a deep breath, feeling shaky and nauseous and filled with so much love I was close to bursting at the seams, everything inside me sluicing down the drain. Priest watched me raptly as tears began to fall. “You love me. I don’t care if you can’t ever bring yourself to say the words. What you told Lion today is true. You’re a man of action, not words, and you’ve shown me again and again that I’m in your heart.”
He laughed hard again, the end note cracking in two. “Mo cuishle, you are my heart.”
“I’ll keep it safe,” I pledged as I cried tears for him, the wet disappearing instantly in the shower torrent. “I promise, it will always be safe with me. I don’t care if you’re a killer, if you are scarred physically and mentally by your tragic, brutal past. I love all of you, and no line you could cross would make me change my mind about that, okay?”
When he didn’t respond, his eyes hot and heavy as coals burning in his skull, I shook him. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he agreed impassively, as if it didn’t mean anything when it meant absolutely everything. “Okay, Bea. You keep my heart safe, and I will keep you safe.”
I trembled, fear rushing in as I thought of the serial killer, of his tenacity to strip my life of love so he could step in and plug in the holes with his mad need.
“He’s coming for me,” I whispered. “He wants me to be his.”
“You’re mine,” Priest vowed darkly, dipping down as he squeezed my throat to remind me just how owned I was by him. “If he has to learn that the hard way, he will.”
He kissed me then, sealing my lips with his promise and eating up the sobs from my tongue like they were sweets. Touching his naked flesh, knowing I finally had all of him wrapped up in my limbs, tangled irrevocably in my heart, made me dizzy with want, and when his fingers found my sex, I was already wet.
He grunted. “Good to know this doesn’t disgust you.”
“We all have scars, Priest,” I murmured as he bit into my neck and pumped his thick fingers inside me. “You just wear yours on your skin.”
He moaned into my neck and lifted me easily by the hips to pin me against the shower. When he slid into me to the hilt, I cried out, the throbbing heat of him both settling me and soaring within me simultaneously.
“This is why I fuck you bare,” he explained over a series of short, hard thrusts that made my womb clench. “He beat me so bad, there’s no way anything will ever come of it.