Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,31

now with The Fallen exactly what was and wasn’t family.

“I’ve never known you to be cruel,” I whispered to my sister because something like brutal disappointment was choking my throat. “But you left Priest out of that hospital room where our family and the club gathered like they always do when someone’s hurt. You took that from him, and he didn’t deserve it.”

Finally, the impact of her actions seemed to hit Lou like a metric ton of bricks. Her features cracked down the middle, sorrow seeping through the fissures.

“You don’t get to choose what kind of bad a man can be or what ways rebellion is acceptable to you. You fell in love with a man most people would consider a monster,” I reminded her.

Instantly, anger fired her face with resolve. “Zeus is the best man I know. He does everything for our family.”

“So does Priest!” I shouted, almost vibrating with something that felt like more than just righteous anger for the Irish enforcer.

It felt like anger for me. As if Lou was attacking me in her assessment of him.

Because I secretly identified with Priest’s cold, dark mind, like the empty, creaking corridor of a haunted house?

Or because I secretly identified so much as his, the only person who dared to walk that frightening hall?

“How can you condone the way someone acts without even trying to understand their motivation?” I asked her. “We aren’t the people we used to be, Loulou. Our lives aren’t black and white. It’s unfair of you to judge Priest because he doesn’t make sense to you.”

“And he does to you?” Her eyes narrowed, scraping back my skin with her teeth and nails like the skin of an orange, trying to see inside my flesh.

“Maybe,” I dared, fisting my hands on my hips, trying to look forbidding in fuzzy slippers and a frilly white nightgown.

“Honey,” Cressida said soothingly, standing up from her seat where she’d been breastfeeding Prince. She handed him gently to Harleigh Rose, who took him eagerly, almost reverently, then moved to take me loosely in her arms. I looked up into her classically pretty face and tried not to be swayed by the wisdom in her gaze. “You know I get the fascination with him. He’s a broken man, but his pieces are beautiful. It’s hard not to be intrigued.”

“It doesn’t matter what I am,” I defied, even though my heart clunked like shoes tumbling in the dryer. “What matters is that Lou owes Priest an apology.”

We stared at each other then, my sister and me. If she was surprised I didn’t capitulate to her stubbornness the way I usually did, conflict adverse as I was, she didn’t show it. Instead, we locked eyes, mine only two shades paler than her cerulean blue, and we erected a wall between us.

If the wall had a name, it would have been Priest McKenna.

The doorbell chose that moment to ring throughout my little house.

“I’ll get it,” Cleo declared, popping to her feet instantly and then practically diving toward the door to escape the tension.

“Saved by the bell,” Harleigh Rose muttered to Lila, who giggled under her breath.

“Hey, Bea, you got a present,” Cleo crowed as she returned to my shabby chic parlour with a long, flat paper-wrapped box in her arms. “From a secret admirer!”

I blinked, but the women around me exploded into a flurry of teasing remarks and laughter.

“Who is it?” Benny asked me. “You never said a thing.”

“There’s nothing to say,” I responded quietly, trying to force down the hope savaging the inside of my chest.

Could it be?

Priest?

No. No, of course not.

He wasn’t a man of flowers and romancing.

He was a man of blood oaths and calculated seduction.

But he had given me presents before.

Two of them.

The Celtic cross dagger I always kept on my person, and the carved wooden Dara knot I kept in my keepsake box on the bedside table. He’d given me that knot after Loulou, Harleigh Rose, and I escaped the fire at Zeus’s cabin when I was only thirteen. Loulou had been lying in critical condition in a hospital bed, and Priest had found me, curled up in a ball on the floor in the corner of the handicap washroom sobbing my weight in saline. I still don’t know how he found me, and when he did, he almost instantly disappeared. When I opened the door later, after severely dehydrating myself, then washing my red face, I found the Dara knot on the speckled laminate floor outside the door on