This was him, scars and all.
He wanted to scare me away almost as much as he wanted my acceptance. The war of conflict shining in his eyes, wrestling in his twitching jaw.
His flesh was a ruin of scars. So many, I couldn’t begin to count them. My fingers fluttered between us like a butterfly afraid to land. His hand whipped out and grasped my wrist so quickly, so painfully I gasped.
He wielded my fingers like an artist with a brush, carefully using my fingertips to trace the thick lacerations carving up his belly, the whirling of burned flesh flaming up his chest, distorting his left nipple, the smooth trail of poorly healed skin that had burned away half of the hair leading down from his navel to his groin. Even his thighs were gashed and knitted back together, a long slash like a ladder mutilating the skin, clearly having been inadequately stitched back together. The flesh pulled over the strong swell of his muscle and I realized it must’ve pained him all the time.
Tears blurred my vision as he used me to trace every inch of his body. His hold was too tight, but I didn’t complain. It was a kind of cleansing for him, I thought, standing in the steam and water, exposing himself to my touch like a form of healing torture. So I swallowed the bile that rose in my throat at the sight of my beautiful Priest’s mutilated body and I endured along with him.
When his front was finished, he turned and braced his arms against the tiled walls to let me explore his back alone. He shuddered viciously at my first touch, as I trailed my fingers lightly along the massive tattoo of The Fallen’s flaming skull and tattered wings inked into his scared back.
“It’s not as bad,” he explained in a ragged, war-torn voice as I thumbed the ridge of a long scar. “He liked to look me in the eye when he forced me to pay his fucked-up penance.” He paused, breathing so heavily his pants rose above the rush of water. “You see, mo cuishle. This is why I am a monster. This is why I do not have a heart. Father O’Neal cut it out of me.”
A sob bubbled up my throat and exploded between us. I ached so fiercely for this big, achingly exquisite, irrevocably broken man that each breath I took felt like a blade to my heart. Unable to resist, I wrapped myself around his tapered waist, pressing my entire length to his scarred back, brushing my hands over the boxed muscles in his abdomen, knowing I’d never forget the exact way in which they’d been defaced.
He let me hug him, but his voice was a weapon when he lashed out, “I will not have your pity, Bea. I am not some broken victim. On my seventeenth birthday, when that motherfucker tried to rape my arse with a branding iron to exhume the devil, I impaled him on that spike and then cut him to ribbons with the same knife he’d used for years to cut the evil out of me.”
He spun suddenly, sending me flying for a moment before he caught me and crushed me to his chest, one hand collaring my throat and canting my chin up so I was forced to meet his searing gaze. “I killed him just as surely as he killed me. And when two of the parishioners caught me trying to flee, I killed them too.”
“If they weren’t dead, I’d fly over there and kill them myself,” I said honestly, trying to fill the screens of my eyes with the eloquence of my emotions. “You know Father O’Neal was a horrible man, a man who didn’t know anything about God, right? People try to subvert religion so often for their own gains. To use it as an excuse for their greed and sinfulness.”
“God,” Priest said the word bitterly, spitting it into the steam. “I will never believe in such a thing again.”
“Okay,” I agreed easily. “But then why do you have so many religious texts? Why did you marry King and Cressida? Why will you marry Lion and H.R., Nova and Lila? I think you want to understand how someone could love God in a healthy way. How He might heal someone or forgive someone who deserves it.”
“I don’t deserve it,” he retorted immediately. “I never did, and I certainly don’t now. I’m a killer, Bea. As Father O’Neal always believed, I’m a son of Death.”
“Even Death has a heart,” I pressed, moving my hand over the disfigured skin at his heart even though he bared his teeth at me. “You have one, Priest, you can’t hide it from me anymore. You love Zeus for taking you in, you love the club for giving you a healthy home and accepting you exactly as you are, killer and all. You love me.” I took a deep breath, feeling shaky and nauseous and filled with so much love I was close to bursting at the seams, everything inside me sluicing down the drain. Priest watched me raptly as tears began to fall. “You love me. I don’t care if you can’t ever bring yourself to say the words. What you told Lion today is true. You’re a man of action, not words, and you’ve shown me again and again that I’m in your heart.”