Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,22

this cruel, claiming embrace.

And then, it was over.

Even though our only points of contact had been our fused mouths and that straining, edgy hand on my neck, my body felt sluiced with ice water when he pulled away.

I watched, still mired in the aftershock of that earth-shattering kiss, as he wiped that cruel, lovely mouth with the back of his hand. As if he needed to be rid of my taste from his lips.

Boy, that hurt.

He stared at me, so completely dispassionate, I wondered woozily if I’d hallucinated the entire embrace. When he moved, it was back into the bathroom, his gait efficient and controlled as he disappeared behind the door. I watched through the thin crack between the door and its hinges as he pushed the shower curtain back and bent to retrieve something heavy from the basin of the bathtub. He reappeared moments later with a large black plastic wrapped shape hefted over his broad shoulder.

There was no mistaking the shape of the body within it.

Or the slight splatter of blood on the white tape holding it closed.

In the hand not occupied in keeping the dead body balanced on his shoulder, Priest held a leather saddle bag, the white top of a bleach bottle poking out of the flap.

I pressed myself to the wall and my hand to my stomach as he maneuvered past me in the narrow space without hesitation.

Not one blink or acknowledgment of my presence.

Without a single look back, Priest stepped over the broken door to the room and exited with his bagged corpse into the ink dark of night.

I watched him go with my broken fingers unconsciously dipped in the blood of my torn lip, anointing the cast with my blood.

It didn’t taste like blood in my mouth. It tasted like faith, like distilled divinity. It tasted this way, I knew with dawning rightness, because it tasted like us.

Bea

When I was little, God was my best friend.

I was a lonely child. My sister was mostly in the hospital, my parents preoccupied with their respective social lives, our rotation of European nannies the only constant presence in my life.

So, my Grandpa became my closest familial bond and with him came God.

He was my grandpa’s first love, even before my grandma, who passed on when I was only six.

The first consequential book I read was the Bible and then, when I finished that and expressed interest in more, my grandpa gave me the Quran, the three sacred texts of Judaism referred to as the Tanach, and the Sutras of Buddhism. I can still remember being small, my legs too short to reach the floor when I sat in the pews, kicking my Mary Janes back and forth as I asked my grandpa all the spiritual questions of my youth.

Was there one God or different Gods for different religions?

Why did God let people die?

Where did they go?

Why was there so much suffering if God was good?

Why did God make Loulou so sick?

My grandpa didn’t mind my critical questions. He was patient, calm, and filled with gratification as he spoke about his Christian God. Even later, after Loulou was diagnosed for the second time with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, after our father hit her for loving the wrong man and cast her out of the house, after he himself was revealed to be corrupt and then murdered in cold blood, my grandpa maintained that God was good, but he did not castigate me for distancing myself from the Lord.

By the time I was a teen, God was not my best friend. I’d shed that romanticism along with my perception that my father was a hero and my mother a princess, as well as that childish notion that good people deserved good things.

I’d learned the truth of life. That there was no great power looking out for you, no fate preordained in the stars that controlled your life to the letter.

Life was more luck than destiny, more choice than subjugation.

Life was quite simply what you made of it.

I’d determined to make mine happy, no matter the setbacks.

Still, I attended First Light Church every Sunday for service to listen to my grandpa preach about the finer points of his religion, about love and charity, about community and acceptance. I loved to sit in the same front pew I had as a girl, close my eyes, swing my legs and listen to that melodic, reverent cadence of his voice pulling wisdom from the Bible. I loved the echoing silence hovering in the peaks