But sitting there hip-deep in mud talking about shit that couldn’t have been written in books under stars that felt all-seeing that night, it truly felt like our King had returned.
Bea
Okay, so I followed him.
In my defense, I was worried.
Also, curious.
After seeing the tidy leftover of Priest’s violence with Patrick Walsh at Purgatory Motel, then his barely leashed aggression with Eric when he thought he was involved in the serial killings, I had a strange yet insistent need to witness Priest in his element.
It was perverse, maybe, but it was like being with an athlete and not watching his games.
I wanted to see the full extent of who this man was so I could love every single inch of his soul.
Angelwood Farms was a setting that had a place in The Fallen lexicon, but no one had expressly talked about it with me, and I had certainly never visited. From the outside, the towering white barn, fields of freshly tilled soil, and a pen filled with snuffling pigs almost looked the picture of pastoral peace.
But I could hear the screams from where I stood in the shadows of the forest off to one side of the road leading up to the buildings. The sound of the wind rushing flat across the fields and the rustle of it in the trees combined with the screams was oddly stirring.
When they stopped, I watched Priest stalk from the building, King following, then their short tussle in the mud. Logically, I knew watching two muscle-bound, gorgeous men fight like heathens shouldn’t arouse me, but it did.
I wanted very much to be mud bound with Priest heavy on top of me, almost crushing the breath from me so every short pant was something like a bullet from the compressed chamber of my lungs. Something a little dangerous. It was the flint to the spark in my gut, that danger. I wanted a man most people feared to drill me just a little too hard into the dirt.
By the time they finished their mostly quiet requiem, and the rest of the men had filtered out of the barn like demons from the bowels of hell, I was edgy with lust and impatient for action.
It was almost too good to be true that Priest was left behind, leaning against his great metal bike with his muddy boots crossed, face a dark collage of drying earth and human blood, smoking one of his hand-rolled clove cigarettes. I could imagine the scent because I’d stolen one once when he’d left the battered vintage Irish breakfast tea tin on the bar top at the clubhouse during a party a few years ago.
The earthy musk of tobacco leaves, the sharp hit of cloves, and the muted notes of something kind of sweet, like amber or vanilla.
I’d smelled it before bed for so long, the paper had disintegrated under the natural oils of my reverent fingers like the pages of Grandpa’s ancestral Bible. Even then, I’d collected the debris into an old Hello Kitty tin and slept with it under my pillow.
I was a girl obsessed and without shame. For a moment as I watched him with hungry eyes, devouring the dull glint of his red hair in the low light of the cloud-covered sky and the single lamp over the barn doors, I wondered why it was so taboo for a woman to have such an intensity of feeling, but so sexy for a man to be so possessed with longing.
I didn’t care if it made me creepy or mad.
I was in love with a psychopath, after all. I figured I needed a pinch of madness to suit him so well as I did.
My gaze fell to my hands, the carved Dara Knot I fingered gently, rubbing my thumbs on the cracks I’d put there in my times of turmoil the way Priest had meant me to.
You are not weak.
With Priest, I didn’t feel weak. I didn’t feel as though my femininity, my sweetness, or my innocence made me silly or trifling. They made me strong, forged in love and kindness, and wasn’t that so much more forceful than hate or trauma?
I was going to prove it, I’d determined, by making my broken Priest happy.
By making him fall in love with me too.
When I looked up from replacing the Dara Knot in my pocket, he was gone.
I blinked, wondering for one wild moment if I’d imagined the entire scene.
But then there was cold, hard pressure at the back of my head.
I’d never had a gun held to my skull before, but it was unmistakable. A sense of calm overtook me, a sensation like drowning, the pressure against my body of all that water above me, the knowledge I wouldn’t make it to the surface, the hard stop of my breath, and the muted roar in my ears.