Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men 6)

Zeus, being Zeus, got me.

“Roll out,” he called to the others, who moved instantly at his order to their bikes lined up beside mine.

Wrath started his engine, his huge body and bike almost crowding me.

Words bubbled up my throat, and I decided not to curb them. “Thanks,” I grunted.

A grin flickered in his beard, but his voice was tight when he said, “Woulda given anythin’ to have the chance to save my woman. I’m thinkin’, we’d been brothers back then, you’d’ve done the same.”

My nod was tight as I revved my engine and peeled out of the lot, my brothers following me without hesitation. If I’d been a praying man, I would’ve prayed with everything I had Bea wouldn’t meet the same tragic end as Wrath’s girl, Kylie.

The snow was thigh-deep in places, clutching at my water-logged denim, making progress through the thickly treed hills slow and taxing. We knew the cabin's general proximity, but after two hours of searching the mountainside, we’d yet to come across any kind of human structure. The logical voice I’d relied on my entire life was failing me. It was not because of emotional paranoia, but because I knew how a man like Seth Linley worked and I knew my woman.

She wouldn’t give in.

He wouldn’t give up until she did or she was dead.

She’d been gone for seventeen hours, and I wasn’t sure how long Seth’s patience would last.

My gaze cut through the darkness highlighted only by the military-grade flashlight I swept through the close trees. The sharp scent of resin and pine underscored the burning wintery air that whipped through the trunks and tore at my clothes, my cut flapping like a bird’s wings.

We’d spread out to cover more ground an hour ago, each of us taking control of a quadrant on the hilltop. We were about thirty minutes apart at a guess, connected by shortwave radios, but so far, we’d found shit all.

Then I saw it, just an inkblot in the snow, a dark splotch followed by three tiny drops.

Blood.

I trudged through the deep snow to the blood trapped under a light layer of new snow, my hunter’s instincts trilling.

“Got somethin’,” I muttered into the radio before checking my watch for the coordinates to relay to my brothers. “Headin’ in.”

“Wait for us,” Bat replied. “I’m close, twenty minutes out.”

“Not leavin’ her for one more second than I gotta,” I grunted. “I’ll see ya when I see ya.”

I switched my radio off so the noise wouldn’t draw unwanted notice, and then I moved forward from the blood splatter, deeper into the thicket of trees. Silently, I prepared my weapons, a Wilson Combat handgun and my fixed blade dagger held at the ready, the flashlight in my mouth as I spotted a clearing through the interminable mass of trees.

After a few minutes, I reached the threadbare hem of the forest and stopped, transfixed by the run-down wood cabin in the clearing backed by a rushing river. A light flickered in the crude cut-out wooden crosses in both doors.

I slinked forward in the snow, the crunch of it only a whisper beneath my careful tread.

Five yards out, I heard the screams.

Not the high, sharp notes of new trauma, but the almost keening, animal cries of a person sustaining ongoing pain.

My heart rate slowed, my vision clarified, and whatever feelings I had previously grew frostbitten.

I was not a man now.

I was a killer.

Bea was not my woman, but an objective.

This was the way I operated, and this was the only way I’d get her out of there safely.

I was three feet from the structure when the light behind the crosses flickered. Someone was at the door. Quick as a breath, I ducked and flattened myself against the wall beside the door, obscured by it swinging open as someone moved outside.

I had an instant, just that, to make a choice.

I lunged out of the dark just as the doors swung shut behind Tabitha Linley. She had only half a second to inhale to scream when I caught her in my arms before I banded a gloved hand across her throat to muffle her.

We waited, her pathetic struggles absorbed by my body tightening around her like a cobra.

Inside, the soft wails continued punctuated by the slap, slap of impact.

The sound haunted me. I recognized it instantly.

A whip against soft skin.

Seth was whipping Bea for her sins the way Christ was flogged by the Romans.

There could have been a better plan, perhaps, with more time and thought. But I refused to let Bea linger another moment in that room without me, alone with her suffering.

I pressed the edge of my clip-point blade to Tabitha’s neck, and for the first time in ten years, I willingly entered a place of religion, however unsanctified.

Bea

When the pain stopped, I slowly crawled out of the mental cave I’d hidden my subconscious in to avoid the worst of the agony. With awareness came a surge of fire licking at my back, the dull burn of it around my wrists where rough rope held my arms spread from the eaves on either side of Seth’s fucked-up, makeshift altar.