Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,66
Bea was everything light and good, of course, she wanted to lavish that on me. I could ignore those words, mostly, turn my head so they blew unheard past my year like a shout into the wind.
But touch?
My skin was only so seasoned. The feel of those soft, small hands tipped always in some outrageous shade of pink? They would devastate my walls, pull them down stone by stone until my barriers were all in ruin.
I couldn’t be exposed.
Not again.
Memories rattled in their chains, flashes popping behind my lids.
The scent of dank, molding earth sharp in my nostrils, the feel of mud beneath my knees as I bent prostrate in prayer before a false god.
Pain, explosions of it across my flesh as if my very body was a battlefield, the Somme, craters blown out of muscles and fissures cracked into bone.
My hand slapped out against the wall of the warehouse beside my door to brace against the onslaught. I tried to tamp down the nausea that swelled high in my belly, lapping acid at the base of my throat, but I knew it was futile.
Seconds later, I turned my head and threw up on the frosty grass beside the gravel walkway. The putrid mess steamed in the freezing air, a reminder that my body wore more than just the scars they’d carved into my skin. I was diseased by my past. It was a cancer inside me, eating away at everything good I tried to produce. Sometimes, like when Bea tried to touch me with her soft, tapered fingers, I could literally feel it gnawing at my bones.
I spit out the last of the acidic waste, then wiped the back of my hand across my mouth before I started to unlock the door to the warehouse. It was heavily alarmed with motion sensors, cameras, and multiple locks. A Fort Knox for me and my demons, as necessary to keep things out as it was at times to keep me locked within.
But then I saw it.
Such a little thing.
Someone else wouldn’t have taken note. But I was The Fallen enforcer. I’d killed more men than I could ever tattoo the names of on my knuckles, and I knew I’d kill a hundred more. I was a predator through and fucking through. There was little in my environment I didn’t catalogue, few times I missed something however small a change, in those settings that were both familiar or unfamiliar to me.
So, I noticed.
The patch of darker grass beside the derelict garage at the edge of my property.
It was a space I didn’t use, leaving it purposely in disarray so that people would think the building next to it was just as abandoned and ravaged.
It could have been anything, maybe the drain-off from the day’s earlier rainfall or the leftover of an animal passing through.
But I knew somehow it was blood.
Some people had an affinity for music and math; mine was more elemental.
They say blood doesn’t have a smell, but I could smell it. More, I could sense it. Maybe because I’d spilled it one too many times and been consequently cursed to know it intimately ever after.
I stalked over to the shed, my heart beating like a steady metronome in my chest.
There was blood on that grass then, moving closer, blood on the door, wrapped around it’s open edge like bleeding fingers had fought to open it.
My thoughts whirred.
I dropped to the ground carefully and stuck my head closer to the crack between it and the asphalt. My nose pricked, stung by the metallic tang.
More blood.
“Fuck.”
I hopped to my feet and flipped open my disposable cell. It only rang once before Zeus picked up with a laughing, “Priest, my brother.”
Children laughed in the background, the faint trill of Loulou’s voice talking to one of her babies.
Family.
The cancer inside me ate away with its vicious, poisoned teeth.
“Got a problem,” I said, cutting to the quick, careful not to get blood on my boot as I stalked around the building, looking for a forced sign of entry.
It was there at the second garage bay, the corrugated metal lipped and distorted by what had to have been a crowbar.
“Give it to me,” Zeus ordered, the humour stripped from his words. All business now. All Prez.
“Seems someone’s been into the garage on my property,” I told him calmly as I went back round to the front. My boots crunched in the frost-tipped grass, drawing my eyes to other prints that might’ve been left in its mold.