Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,32
top of a badly crinkled note.
In cramped, severely spiked lettering, he had written: you are not weak.
Later, alone in the room beside a comatose Lou while Zeus took one of his infrequent breaks to shower and eat, I looked up the meaning of the knot of my phone.
Strength and power.
I clutched it so hard in my hands those next fretful days that the force of my hold cracked one of the thinly carved sections of wood. But it helped.
He never spoke of the gift, never even alluded to it.
Still, I knew it was from him, carved by his bloodstained, heavily tattooed hands. He was always whittling something, wood shavings caught at the ends of his hair and on the fabric of his jeans. It did strange things to me even at thirteen to imagine those big, killing hands carving something just for me.
“Open it, open it,” Cleo demanded breathlessly as she tiptoed through our floor picnic and the women plus Benny lying on the ground against the pillows and each other to reach my side.
I got to my knees on the carpet, absently petting a yowling Sampson as I accepted the box into my lap. My cat batted at the box with extended claws and made that almost ear-splitting meow again.
“Hush,” I told him. “You’re being rude in front of our guests.”
As if defending him, Delilah cooed from her cage.
My unfinished braid fell into disarray around my face as I bent to carefully peel off the black wrapping paper. My fingers encountered a little note taped to the box beneath it.
“‘And when he was come into his house, he took a knife, and laid hold on his concubine, and divided her, [together] with her bones, into twelve pieces, and sent her into all the coasts of Israel,’” I murmured, reciting the quote from Judges 19:29.
I looked up at my biker babes to gauge their reaction, but they all wore the same look of suspended disbelief. The air in the room was taut but still, like the calm before an ocean storm.
My fingers trembled slightly as I slowly sliced through the tape with the tip of my nail then dislodged the lid. It fell away to reveal delicate tissue paper, dark at the center.
The only sound was breath and a slithering hiss from Sampson that seemed to be a physical thing, a serpent baring its fangs.
My hand shook, my breath stuttered, because somehow, I knew that whatever lay inside the box was not going to be a gift.
“Wait, Bea,” Harleigh Rose whispered because we were all caught up in this frightening moment. “Let me call Lion.”
But I didn’t wait, because the paper was already parting and inside lay something that made hesitancy impossible.
A woman’s hand and forearm, the skin around the fingers chapped and tinged yellow from smoking.
I knew before I began to scream exactly whose arm it was.
Someone had killed Brenda Walsh and sent me one of the pieces.
Priest
I was distracted.
Which wasn’t completely uncommon.
Club meetings in the Chapel at the clubhouse were never exactly riveting unless we had serious shit at our doorstep. Since Irina Ventura was killed and Staff Sergeant Danner went down for killing Officer Gibson among a slew of other crimes, life had settled into a boring kinda routine most people equated with happiness.
I was just bored.
My gaze fixed to the stained-glass window behind Zeus as voices droned on around me. I’d put it there. That window. When I started making serious cash with the club, I’d had someone ship it all the way from arsehole, Ireland. It’d been cracked, the glass mottled and faded in places, but it was easy enough to get fixed. Now the window that had haunted my youth in a completely different kinda church hung in my safe haven, a Chapel only to the rebel bikers who preached brotherhood and loyalty, who prayed to no god but themselves.
It was another form of blasphemy that got me hard.
So, I was bored, but boredom was a harbinger of peace, and I told myself to enjoy it.
The truth was, it wasn’t antipathy that had me uncharacteristically disconcerted. No, I was distracted like a crow with a fucking shiny object, that shiny object being the crown of Bea Lafayette’s shining golden hair.
It wasn’t exactly the first time I’d been occupied with thoughts of the girl with the pink ribbon in her hair. In fact, I calculated—because I was bored and, admittedly, obsessive—the first time had been two years, three months, and twenty-seven days ago.