Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,52

to claim the philosophy because my two sisters, Danae and Keelan, five and three years old respectively, died two days after my parents.

I buried them too.

They died because my parents were sinners.

This I was told by Father O’Neal, the local priest in our parish and the man who ultimately took me into the church for sanctuary when I was orphaned.

I wore his name on my middle finger bracketed by the names of my dead kin on either side, penned in Gaelic, the ink bleeding now, so old and poorly done that my brother, Nova, who ran The Fallen’s tattoo parlour, had begged to redo it for me.

I would not let him.

The tattoos I wore burned into my skin were not art.

They were not even scars.

They were living pain, hurts I chose to see every day because I lived them every day.

This was my self-inflicted torture.

I was equal opportunity about pain. I liked to give it only slightly more than I liked to receive it.

It reminded me, after all the horrors of my life, that I was alive, if only to feel it.

All I ever knew was angst so it became my only joy.

I felt it then, sitting on that night dark beach with cold in my bones and pain the only feeling in my chest. Usually, it didn’t hurt to open a vein like this, alone in the shadows. To be isolated was to be safe. In control of my own environment, separated from the scrutiny and emotional outflow of others. It was in company that I suffered.

So, why did I feel acid in my gums, coursing through my muscles as I sat in the wind and rain and paid my own kind of penance.

Why did I feel so alone in a way I never had before?

Alone in a way that felt unholy and wrong.

Without thinking, I looked up through the sleet at the window to the second-story guest bedroom in Z’s house.

The room was dark, the night darker between us, but I had the eyes of a predator, and I saw what stood in the window between the curtains.

Bea.

Watching me.

Always.

Much the way I watched her.

It should have shocked me, the little ways we mirrored each other, the slight similarities between two such vastly different personalities.

Yet it didn’t.

It underscored why I didn’t believe in religion. In the archaic notion of good versus evil, heaven versus hell. Because I was death and the devil, ruler of life’s underworld, and Bea? Not even an angel fallen from God’s own palace could be so bright and exquisite as her.

How was it possible that we could even co-exist on the same planet, let alone fall into something that was more than that?

That was more than anything.

Before her, I had lived only to feel the pain I felt was my atonement and then, after Zeus, to serve the only family I’d ever really known.

Now, I lived for them still.

But if I had a metaphorical heart in my chest, it only beat for her.

Mo cuishle. My heartbeat.

I watched her through the rain, unable to see her expression but knowing somehow that she was calling for me, a siren luring me deeper into our shared fantasy.

I blinked hard and looked away.

She was mine, mine, mine in a way that echoed with every beat of my heart, but she could be owned wholly by me without sex, without greater intimacy.

I could protect her until my dying breath, stalk her through her life the way she liked to shadow me when she could. I could just exist as she existed, and the pleasure of that, of not being utterly alone, would be enough for me.

So much more than enough.

To have more was to sin in a way even I as a seasoned sinner was hesitant to do.

Because I would ruin her.

I would eviscerate her morals to ash until she giggled when I brought her a dead man’s head just because he had wronged her. I would burn away her inhibitions until she begged me to desecrate all the holy places of her body with my tongue, my cock, and the cold edge of my steel.

I would, I knew, steal all her goodness, gluttonous as I was for her, greedy and depraved as I’d been born and made. I would devour her entire soul until she was just a husk.

Alive, but dead.

Like me.

And there was no fate worse than death than that for my sunny Shadow.

So I evaded my nature, ducked around the pitfalls of temptation, and exacted all of