Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,5
that symbol. Life, death, and rebirth.
A sob rolled through me and fell out of my mouth, my spittle pink as it exploded against the glass.
“Priest,” I rasped then whimpered as something shifted in my chest and seemed to stab me through the heart.
“Quiet,” he ordered calmly as he adjusted his body, leaning forward, arms descending into the car through the hole my body had made so he could carefully brace my chest and grasp my hips.
I sobbed as he started to shift me, and he stopped on a vicious curse.
“Gotta get you out of here,” he said. “The car’s gonna blow.”
As if coaxed by his words, my ears tuned into the sound of dripping, the hiss of something essential escaping from the car as blood escaped from somewhere above my right ear.
“Be still and give me your weight. Let me do the work,” Priest demanded coldly.
A surgeon at work. He had no empathy for me at the moment because his entire mind was fixed on the problem.
I held my breath in answer, then felt it rip from me like torn Velcro as he hoisted me carefully through the windshield. He had to shift back on his knees to clear me from the wreckage, but then he twisted to sit on his ass and carefully collected my limp, throbbing body in his arms.
He was warm, and for a moment, I was confused by that. Wasn’t this Death? Was I not on the way to Heaven?
“I thought death would be harder,” I admitted as my head lolled against his arm, my mind spinning in the confines of my broken skull like loose marbles.
“Oh, it is,” he agreed. “You aren’t dying.”
“Feels like it,” I said as I realized I was crying and that the warm darkness in my right eye was blood.
“I know about death. I won’t let it take you.”
I frowned because I was certain he had been Death himself, but then the stabbing pain in my chest dug deeper, and I gasped before I forgot how to breathe entirely.
My world went black and white, then back into focus as he lowered us both to the sidewalk a good distance from the car. There was a calamitous sputter from the wreck, and the man only had time to curl over me protectively before there was a great boom as if a crater had opened in the earth.
I stared up at the man who was not Death, but my savior, watching as flames exploded behind him so his head was cast in a fiery halo.
Not Death.
Priest McKenna.
The Fallen MC’s ruthless enforcer.
The man without a heart.
Kneeling over me like a knight pledged to serve me, to keep me safe from all harm.
I blinked up at him, his hair the colour of the fire behind him, and let myself touch his bearded cheek.
“You saved me,” I managed to say even though my consciousness was circling the drain.
“No,” he said darkly as I closed my eyes and let my hand fall to the ground, giving up my fight against the hurt to embrace the blackness behind my lids. “I did this to you.”
Priest
This isn’t the story of a good man. A tale of redemption or salvation. I require none of the former and seek nothing of the latter.
This is a story of a man without a conscience.
A part of me wants to state I am also a man without a heart.
But a very wise girl once told me, even Death has a heart.
And didn’t that stick with me?
Once, a long time ago, I was more human than monster. Probably, I was born with psychopathic tendencies. My childhood in the Church only heightened them, stripping the flesh off my bones year by year until I was only bone.
When Zeus Garro, the prez of The Fallen MC found me, a bloodstained teen ravaged by scurvy and cramped from living in the hold of a freight ship for months, hiding behind crates, he took one look in my eyes and told me he thought I was a dead man walking.
He wasn’t wrong.
He was from a culture that bestowed unique names to their brethren, a new moniker for a new life. Usually, they evolved organically, a trait or funny story that gave birth to a new character, one clad in leather and inked with a tattered, winged skull.
There was no waiting for me.
I took the name of the monster who made me, who stripped me bare straight down to the dark heart of me, and made it mine.