Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,165

rest’a the men, but we’ll be right fuckin’ behind you.”

Burning down my throat like I’d sucked back holy water, and it rebelled against my sinner’s form.

Zeus pushed off the doorframe and stalked down the stairs until he was just a few paces from my bike. Under his furrowed brow, his silver eyes cut through my flesh and bone straight to the shadowy cavern at the heart of me.

“How many times since you came to us have you had our backs?” he questioned low, just for me. “How many times you put yourself on the line for this club? Got no doubt, you can slaughter this motherfucker the way he deserves, but Priest, for fuck’s sake, let your family help you for once.”

There were words in my throat, but I didn’t know how to give them air and voice enough to speak, so I just jerked my chin at my prez, the man who’d taken me in at seventeen and given me purpose.

Zeus, being Zeus, got me.

“Roll out,” he called to the others, who moved instantly at his order to their bikes lined up beside mine.

Wrath started his engine, his huge body and bike almost crowding me.

Words bubbled up my throat, and I decided not to curb them. “Thanks,” I grunted.

A grin flickered in his beard, but his voice was tight when he said, “Woulda given anythin’ to have the chance to save my woman. I’m thinkin’, we’d been brothers back then, you’d’ve done the same.”

My nod was tight as I revved my engine and peeled out of the lot, my brothers following me without hesitation. If I’d been a praying man, I would’ve prayed with everything I had Bea wouldn’t meet the same tragic end as Wrath’s girl, Kylie.

The snow was thigh-deep in places, clutching at my water-logged denim, making progress through the thickly treed hills slow and taxing. We knew the cabin's general proximity, but after two hours of searching the mountainside, we’d yet to come across any kind of human structure. The logical voice I’d relied on my entire life was failing me. It was not because of emotional paranoia, but because I knew how a man like Seth Linley worked and I knew my woman.

She wouldn’t give in.

He wouldn’t give up until she did or she was dead.

She’d been gone for seventeen hours, and I wasn’t sure how long Seth’s patience would last.

My gaze cut through the darkness highlighted only by the military-grade flashlight I swept through the close trees. The sharp scent of resin and pine underscored the burning wintery air that whipped through the trunks and tore at my clothes, my cut flapping like a bird’s wings.

We’d spread out to cover more ground an hour ago, each of us taking control of a quadrant on the hilltop. We were about thirty minutes apart at a guess, connected by shortwave radios, but so far, we’d found shit all.

Then I saw it, just an inkblot in the snow, a dark splotch followed by three tiny drops.

Blood.

I trudged through the deep snow to the blood trapped under a light layer of new snow, my hunter’s instincts trilling.

“Got somethin’,” I muttered into the radio before checking my watch for the coordinates to relay to my brothers. “Headin’ in.”

“Wait for us,” Bat replied. “I’m close, twenty minutes out.”

“Not leavin’ her for one more second than I gotta,” I grunted. “I’ll see ya when I see ya.”

I switched my radio off so the noise wouldn’t draw unwanted notice, and then I moved forward from the blood splatter, deeper into the thicket of trees. Silently, I prepared my weapons, a Wilson Combat handgun and my fixed blade dagger held at the ready, the flashlight in my mouth as I spotted a clearing through the interminable mass of trees.

After a few minutes, I reached the threadbare hem of the forest and stopped, transfixed by the run-down wood cabin in the clearing backed by a rushing river. A light flickered in the crude cut-out wooden crosses in both doors.

I slinked forward in the snow, the crunch of it only a whisper beneath my careful tread.

Five yards out, I heard the screams.

Not the high, sharp notes of new trauma, but the almost keening, animal cries of a person sustaining ongoing pain.

My heart rate slowed, my vision clarified, and whatever feelings I had previously grew frostbitten.

I was not a man now.

I was a killer.

Bea was not my woman, but an objective.

This was the way I operated, and this was the only way I’d get her out