Priest just blinked slowly in answer.
A smile flickered around my sister’s lips. “Okay, then.”
“Jesus, you can smell the testosterone from the street,” Lion Danner announced as he parted the crowd behind him with some officers following. “If you lot are done showing off for the townsfolk, you mind telling me how you saved the damn day?”
Zeus laughed his great, bellowing laugh, drawing the attention of everyone who wasn’t already listening, though there were few. “Seems the damned saved the pious today. Maybe they’ll think twice next time they campaign against the club, eh?”
“Wouldn’t hold your breath,” Seth muttered from behind me, then smiled when I turned. “Just wanted to check on you, Bea.”
A growl built in Priest’s chest. I slapped my hand against it.
“I’m fine, thanks, Seth. I’m more concerned about you! You were a hero in there.”
He beamed at me, his face classically handsome even covered in soot. “You’re too sweet. Tell me you’ll still come to dinner tonight with Phillipa. We need to band together in times of trouble like this.”
I bit my lip, aware that Priest was still as death beside me. He didn’t want me to go. I didn’t want to go. But I wouldn’t cease being who I’d always been just because I was in love with a man who didn’t believe in some of the things that were dear to me. Seth, Tabby, Eric, Grandpa, my community at First Light were all important parts of my life, and I owed it to both them and myself to continue to prioritize them.
I tipped my head up to look at Priest, who was already gazing down at me, his face utterly expressionless. I thought, maybe, it wasn’t because he was unmoved by the idea of me leaving his side, but because he didn’t want to impose his own thoughts of the matter onto me.
In its own way, I thought that was awfully sweet.
“Drop me off and pick me up?” I asked softly, for some reason not wanting Seth to be in on this little moment.
Maybe because it felt so concrete, a normal conversation between a girlfriend and a boyfriend.
Priest’s hand dug into the back of my head and tugged once, just hard enough to make it sting in a way that reminded me how much I loved when he pulled my hair like that seated deep inside me. I flushed then squirmed when his eyes grew dark with lust.
“Wait outside while you do your thing,” he agreed, his eyes flicking up to shoot a glare at Seth. “But that arsehole puts a single hand on ya, I’m breakin’ in the damn door and slittin’ his throat.”
“That’s reasonable,” I confirmed, knowing my eyes were sparkling, that my entire body was bowed toward his like a magnet caught in his pull.
“She’ll be in good hands,” Seth replied in a way that implied I would be in better hands than I could’ve been with Priest.
My man didn’t even grace him with a look. Instead, he reached into the pocket of his hoodie beneath The Fallen cut and produced something that flashed silver. It was a small switchblade in glittering steel wrapped up paradoxically in a pink bow. I recognized it as one of the many I kept in a box beside my bedside table. It warmed me to think of Priest plucking the velvet length from the wicker basket while he watched me sleep. There was something about the contrast, the knife and the pink bow, that perfectly symbolized us. Violence harnessed by purity, romanticism tempered by discipline. It wasn’t the first weapon he’d given me, and I knew it wouldn’t be the last. It was just another in a long line of actions that Priest had taken to show me that he cared for me in his own dark and broken way.
“You are not weak,” he repeated the mantra softly, coarsely, palming my throat in one hand even though it made Seth gurgle in protest. “You’re strong enough to make a dead man walkin’ feel, Bea. You remember that you’re ever in a bad place and I can’t get to you fast enough, yeah? You remember not even the reaper of The Fallen can scare you, and then you motherfuckin’ defend yourself.”
When I only accepted the knife mutely, mouth trembling with the effort to hold back my sudden tears, Priest crowded closer, blocking me from Seth’s view. The hand on my neck moved up to grasp my chin to bring my gaze to his, which was bright with purpose, savage with a violent kind of truth he felt in his core.
“I’m a killer,” he reminded me quietly, words murmured into my open mouth like a carefully placed communion wafer. I felt it dissolve sweetly on my tongue. “You’re a killer.”
As I grasped the knife in my cold hand, felt the weight and rightness of it in my grip and remembered how scared my entire community had been locked in a burning church, I decided unequivocally that if I was faced with the serial killer that terrorized us, I’d kill him myself.