Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,6
of my blasphemy thrilled me as much as I could be thrilled by anything. It amused me to strip the skin off an enemy of The Fallen and hear them beg for absolution from God when I’d done much the same at my darkest moments of misery.
I knew, as they didn’t, that I was as close to God as they would ever come.
After all, I was the one who escorted them to their Maker.
I was on one such errand that dark, bitingly cold October night in Entrance, British Columbia. Autumn had descended swiftly that first week of the month, wrapping cold, cruel hands around the warm remnants of summer and killing it dead in a matter of days. Wind rushed through the flaming leaves and tore them ignobly from their trees. They crackled and flared brightly in swirls around my booted feet as I leaned against my 2009 FXSTB Night Train Harley, the matte black bike obscured perfectly in the shadows of the treelined suburban street. I was kitted out in black to match, a hoodie beneath my Fallen cut, leather gloves, and dark jeans.
It wouldn’t do to be seen or, even worse, noticed.
I was waiting, and I had been for three hours in the very dead of night when the rest of the good citizens of town were long gone to sleep.
I didn’t mind the waiting.
Predators never do.
It was an intrinsic part of the hunt. The lull before the strike.
It wasn’t passive or boring.
It was tension itself, energy gathering momentum to unleash itself at the right moment.
To a man like me, the waiting was as heady as that lingering moment before the first kiss, all electrifying chemistry and eager anticipation.
Not that I’d ever felt that way about a kiss.
Only about the woman I imagined kissing.
The woman who was everything kind and lovely, completely devoid of sin.
So, my opposite.
We might as well have existed on different planets.
Beatrice Lafayette saw everything through rose-tinted glasses, sometimes literally because she had a habit of wearing ridiculous sunglasses shaped like hearts and flowers.
I saw everything as it was and would be. Waiting to die, tinged in the grey rot of time.
She was not for me.
To even entertain ideas of kissing that full, cotton candy pink mouth could have amounted to one of the most disturbed thoughts to ever cross my admittedly extremely disturbed mind.
I tried not to let myself think beyond the possibility of a kiss.
Because I was not a soft man or a kind soul.
I was a killer fashioned by the hands of monsters. When I fucked, it was just as brutal as when I fought or just as coldly efficient as when I killed.
I liked to choke the breath out of a pretty neck to heighten pleasure, paint pale skin in livid red bites, and play with a pussy until it was swollen, drenched in so much cum it ran down my wrist and my partners begged me brokenly to stop.
There was no romance or flowers, no intimate smiles or…cuddles.
All things Bea would want.
Things she deserved.
So I thought about that kiss for a fleeting moment as I leaned against my bike, then considered what a nineteen-year-old girl might be doing on a Friday night while I staked out my prey.
Leaves crunched behind me, alerting me to someone’s presence.
I didn’t turn, didn’t even flinch when a massive frame moved into sight at my periphery.
“Looked for five minutes, could barely see you in the dark, and I was lookin’,” Wrath Marsden grunted as he crossed his arms and stared into the dead street before us. “Gotta admit, you’re good. Surprised your name’s not Ghost.”
I let out a sharp exhale that was as much effort as I was going to expend on my indignancy.
Wrath shifted beside me and irritation spiked through me. He was a big ass motherfucker, nearly as big as our prez, Zeus Garro, and he drew attention to himself through sheer size alone.
I was tall and compacted with lean, sharp lines of muscle, but I moved like a shadow while my brother lumbered like a bear.
“Don’t need you here,” I said, snapping open my curved Karambit blade while I fished the untouched block of cedar wood out of my pocket. I touched the tip of the steel to the soft wood without thinking, my fingers moving it with efficiency and purpose. I never knew what I would carve before I finished it. My hands spoke to the timber in a language I couldn’t translate in my head.