Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,166

of there safely.

I was three feet from the structure when the light behind the crosses flickered. Someone was at the door. Quick as a breath, I ducked and flattened myself against the wall beside the door, obscured by it swinging open as someone moved outside.

I had an instant, just that, to make a choice.

I lunged out of the dark just as the doors swung shut behind Tabitha Linley. She had only half a second to inhale to scream when I caught her in my arms before I banded a gloved hand across her throat to muffle her.

We waited, her pathetic struggles absorbed by my body tightening around her like a cobra.

Inside, the soft wails continued punctuated by the slap, slap of impact.

The sound haunted me. I recognized it instantly.

A whip against soft skin.

Seth was whipping Bea for her sins the way Christ was flogged by the Romans.

There could have been a better plan, perhaps, with more time and thought. But I refused to let Bea linger another moment in that room without me, alone with her suffering.

I pressed the edge of my clip-point blade to Tabitha’s neck, and for the first time in ten years, I willingly entered a place of religion, however unsanctified.

Bea

When the pain stopped, I slowly crawled out of the mental cave I’d hidden my subconscious in to avoid the worst of the agony. With awareness came a surge of fire licking at my back, the dull burn of it around my wrists where rough rope held my arms spread from the eaves on either side of Seth’s fucked-up, makeshift altar.

Moments later, I peeled my eyes open, the room lit by bright industrial blubs and warmed by space heaters, and discovered why Seth had stopped his torture.

Priest stood in the doorway between the two crosses like some violent, vengeful angel all in black, his knife pressed so hard to Tabitha’s neck, blood already flowed down a substantial cut.

A sob broke through my lips as relief punched through me.

Priest was there.

He’d actually found me.

His eyes were dark shadows beneath his brow, making him skeletal and inhuman as he faced off with Seth. Both of them were expressionless, two psychopaths locking horns.

“I should have known you’d come,” Seth said blandly, idly flipping the blood-soaked leather flogger in his hand as he moved out from behind me to face the door and the man looming in it. “If she is an angel, you’ve always been Satan trying to lure her into sin.”

“She’s not Eve; you’re not Adam.”

“No.” Seth smiled then, that classically handsome face creasing beautiful. It still hurt to know I’d been so wildly unaware of his madness. “I’m God’s voice on Earth.”

Priest raised a single brow. “Then in the spirit of fuckin’ delusion, I’m the hands of Death.”

Seth laughed, delighted. “And I suppose you think I won’t hurt you because you have a knife at my wife’s throat.”

In answer, Priest wedged his knife deeper into her neck, making her whimper behind his hand clamped around her mouth.

Seth didn’t even flinch.

“By all means, do what you must. My one true wife is Bea. Really, you’d be doing me a favour.”

Priest blinked once, his mind working fast and hard, then the next second, his blade was slashing across Tabitha’s throat. She collapsed to the ground, hands to her split neck, gargling as she bled out.

Seth didn’t move an inch, his face almost peaceful as he considered Tabby. “You did well in this life, Tabitha. You were a good servant of God.”

Tabby’s eyes were wide with horror as her husband just stared at her. Blood bubbled from between her fingers and seeped from her gaped mouth. Quickly, so quickly, the woman I’d once loved who betrayed me, died on the floor of her husband’s church.

Priest didn’t pause for dramatic effect. His gun was raised, trained on Seth in an instant.

Again, my tormentor seemed unfazed.

Priest couldn’t see the reason, the small person behind me holding a knife to my back.

Seth smiled. “Billy, why don’t you show this man why he won’t shoot me?”

Billy Huxley moved out from the shadow of my body, his knife point still pressed hard to my side. He was trembling, the point of the blade vibrating against my skin, but there was so much resolve in his eyes.

His father was dying.

His mother had been killed.

He was so lost, and unfortunately, Seth had been the one to find him.

When I’d regained consciousness after Seth dragged me back to the chapel from the woods, Billy had been the one tending