Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,81

flatly, leaving the knife in his gut, ready to unzip his belly with it and pull out his innards like I’d promised Bea I would. “Why did he want you to do that shit?”

“He-he didn’t say,” he panted.

I crashed my fist into his face, sending it careening to the left. “Try that again.”

“Priest, brother,” Zeus tried to soothe me. “Don’t kill ’im yet.”

I couldn’t, wouldn’t be soothed. The image of the fuck’s hands on Bea’s pure, gorgeous flesh, the way he’d marked her fragile face with a vivid bruise, the fact that if I hadn’t been there, she might have been taken for only the third time in her fucking life by a worse kind of monster than me…

Fuck.

My eyesight tunneled.

I grabbed Cal fucking Mulligan’s fleshy cheeks in a tight grip and brought my snarling face an inch from his own. “You tell me everythin’ you fuckin’ know in the next ten seconds, or I’m gonna spend the next ten hours killin’ ya so slowly, all you’ll remember of your pathetic fuckin’ life is pain.”

“He paid me five grand to hurt ‘the pretty blond girl’ that spends all her time with Priest McKenna,” he spewed through his heaving breaths. “Told me I could find her by hanging out around Hephaestus Auto for a few hours. That you worked there.”

I stilled as everything in me centered around this new information.

Not the serial killer.

This wasn’t him. This wasn’t his gig or his motivation.

This was someone else entirely.

And just that easily, I knew who the fuck it was.

“What was the name of the man who sent you?” I demanded. When he hesitated, eyes rolling in his head like loose marbles looking for help from my witnessing brothers he would never get, I warned, “You tell me now, I’ll kill you in five hours instead.”

Cal’s bloody, torn lower lip warbled, his belly shaking under the blood like red Jell-O. Watching a man come apart at the seams was a special kind of headiness.

“W-Walsh,” he cried. “Sean Walsh.”

Adrenaline fizzed in my blood, urging me to hunt down Sean Walsh and splay him open with my knife, skin flesh from muscle, muscle from bone, then whittle those into pretty fucking trophies for my fucking mantel.

“Sean Walsh,” I repeated just in case Curtains hadn’t heard.

A forgotten Walsh relative out to avenge his dead kin.

“He met me outside First Light Church,” Cal sang like a fucking canary. “After a meeting.”

“Didn’t know they held Rapists Anonymous,” Wrath muttered darkly. “Woulda made a point to hang out outside those buildings too if I’d known.”

The crack of his knuckles resonated through the barn.

Cal Mulligan sobbed louder.

“Enough,” Zeus ordered, already turning to clap a hand on Curtains’ shoulder and look over it at the computer screen. “Shut it down.”

“Gladly,” I said with one of my small curdled smiles.

Sinuously, I ripped the Karambit from Cal’s belly and dropped into a kneel in the pool of blood on the floor. A second later, his small cock was in my hands, the knife curling and cutting like butter through the appendage.

His howl rang through the damp wooden structure and sang through my blood.

“Leave him,” I snapped as Wrath moved forward to lever him down from the ceiling. “Let the motherfucker bleed out.” I flashed that little grin at Cal as he whimpered and shouted with pain. “This is my kinda mercy. Be grateful for it.”

I turned on my heel, boot squelching in the blood, and stalked out of the barn, needing the cold air to remind me I should have a cold heart. Instead, the traitorous organ thudded in my chest like a bellows, blowing hot blood through my entire body. I was on fire with something for the first time in my life, with passion instead of calculated ruthlessness. This violence wasn’t just sport; it was necessity.

He deserved to die again and again for laying a single finger on the angelic head of Bea Lafayette. Scum like Cal should run from her, knowing instinctively he was too fucking inferior to be within spitting distance of a woman so pure of fucking soul.

I seethed against the side of the barn, leather back to the wet wood, the frigid fingers of the stormy night in my loose hair, whipping into my face. I welcomed the pain, but it didn’t ground me the way it should have, so I pulled out my switchblade and cut a long, shallow gash in both my palms, tracing old scars. When I fisted my hands at my sides, the melodic drip