Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,170

to think it was encouraged in the Bible, but it was a factor of my life with the club, and standing there bleeding and woozy, saved by men who people assumed were villains, I knew I’d stay.

I loved Priest. Every single dark shadow and nook in his complicated mind and fragile heart. I wanted to see the depths of his ruthlessness. I wanted to witness him decimate a man who had decimated so many lives and tried to kill ours.

It wasn’t pretty.

There was no romanticism in torture. The colour of the blood he spilled was red, and there was a lot of it as Priest beat him until he confessed his crimes. Bat held his phone as the recorder. He confessed to the murders, confessed to seducing those women with his charms, and then with his piety before killing them for some perceived sins. He gushed about marrying Tabitha in Saskatoon and discovering the church, about moving away from his criminal family ties to drugs and sin to become reborn in God’s vision.

He talked about the Walsh’s, his aunt Brenda and uncle Patrick. He told me how easy it was to use their vendetta against Priest to manipulate them into helping him frame Priest for murder, how simple it was to get his cousin, Sean, to find someone to ‘teach me a lesson’ about what happens to sinful girls in that bathroom at Sugar nightclub. He spoke about how all criminals deserved to be expunged from the planet and all women brought under the heel of devout men.

He told Priest I was meant for better things than him.

Knives came out after that, weapons that Priest wielded like an extension of himself, cutting away and carving up bits of Seth until he wept and babbled in tongues about God and his own divine right. It was a symphony of cracking bone, slick, wet flesh parting to cold steel, and human cries decreasing in volume to whimpers and groans.

Not once did Seth show remorse.

Not even when death was looming, when he was one open wound hanging from the ropes muttering about God and Ruth and angels.

Priest gave him the opportunity to apologize, to exhibit grief, but Seth only laughed in his hair with blood dripping from his mouth. Some men were monsters straight down to their core, and Seth was one of them.

When it was done, when Priest ended things with his hands inside of knives and a quick, ruthless twist of Seth’s neck, he turned to me, splattered with blood, gloved hands slick with it, face a mask of stone carved into human form. He didn’t move to me or make a sound. He just stood there, more Death than man.

I walked to him instantly, carefully peeling off one glove so I could hold his naked hand.

Together, we walked out of the diseased chapel with Wrath and Bat following.

Kodiak waited outside with Billy, who was still shaking, but no longer crying.

We all stood facing the run-down wooden structure filled with evil masquerading as God, and when Wrath moved forward with a small canister of gasoline to drench what remained of the cross-carved doors, I knew it was right to raze it to the ground.

Bat handed me a skull-embossed lighter without looking at me, eyes trained on the building. A moment later, Priest handed me a small knob of carved wood, a tombstone he’d carved with “The Prophet” etched into the wooden grave. I held the cold metal and the warm wood in my hands for a long moment, Priest’s strong body pressed into my shoulder with his hand on my neck.

And then I flipped the light open, sparked the flame with my thumb, and tossed it with the wooden tombstone against the doors.

We stood in the light of the flames as they ate up the evidence of so many crimes until the wail of sirens and the whomp, whomp of a helicopter sounded in the lighting dawn.

By the time the police came, all that was left were the survivors and ash.

Priest

Things happened quickly after that.

Bea was rushed to the hospital for her wounds while Bat, Kodiak, Wrath, Billy, and I were escorted to the Entrance Police Department for questioning. An EMT had wrapped my skewered hands and taped gauze over my stab wound, but I wasn’t in critical enough condition to get out of questioning, and I was eager to see this shit through the bitter fucking end.

They held us at the station for almost twenty hours, trying to untangle the