“Eloquent, if not boring last words.” I cocked my head to the side and twirled the blade slightly against his flesh, teasing open a small wound and a singular bead of garnet red. “Do you want to try again?”
He opened his mouth to say something, but it was too late.
With a flick of my wrist as graceful and studied as a dance movement, Patrick Walsh’s thick throat split open easily under my knife and his last words drowned in one last, gurgling gasp.
I sat back on my haunches to watch him die more comfortably.
The blood flowed so quickly from his dissected flesh, rushing like a broken tap over his white dress shirt into the waistband of his black slacks, around the sides of his belly to drip steadily––plink, plink––to the laminate.
I watched as his extremities grew pale and mottled like old wax paper, how his breath stuttered, stuttered, stopped, and his chest gave one last rattling rumble before it stalled altogether.
When it was done, I allowed myself one moment of reflection because I knew, if I didn’t now, I would suffer for it later.
“Though I walk in the valley of the shadow of death, no evil would I fear,” I blasphemed hoarsely. “For I am no longer Yours.”
Bea
They wouldn’t leave me alone. Every moment during my three-day stint in the hospital and every second since returning home to my small, pink heritage home just off Main Street, there was someone at my side. King and Cressida (because they were rarely parted) with their sweet baby, Prince, Harleigh Rose, Lila, and my best friend, Cleo, my sister or my mother and my grandpa. The Fallen didn’t linger long, but some of them came to check in, and Loulou, in a show of excessive protectiveness, even had Ransom do drive-bys at night to make sure I was safe.
I had no space, no privacy, and, most importantly, no Priest.
He was the only one in the entire thirty-four-man motorcycle club not to pay their respects to the prez’s injured sister-in-law. And that included the more irascible shitheads like Heckler, Wiseguy, and Skell.
It would have been a sign of disrespect from any other brother. Zeus would’ve had words with them and they’d come crawling up my stoop carrying a rumpled bouquet or a cold six-pack of beer in apology.
But Priest was different.
There was a feared awe and reverence surrounding the club’s enforcer. He was their death dealer, their toll collector, so there was respect there, but also a slight chill. Death was a word in every outlaw biker’s lexicon, but for Priest, it was almost a mantra. The other men couldn’t relate to him as easily as they could to each other.
And Priest, whom I strongly suspected after years of study was a clinical psychopath, could not begin to relate to them.
So he was given special dispensation from the normal social rules of the club. He flitted in and out like a ghost, never questioned, answering only to Zeus and, more recently, to King.
I’d always thought that for Priest, love wasn’t impossible so much as it wasn’t translatable. Whatever loyalty or kinship he felt for The Fallen and its brethren was communicated through action.
He’d hunted and tortured a man for Cressida.
He’d beaten the information out of an old enemy, Warren, who had betrayed Loulou to The Nightstalkers MC.
But would he ever show up at a hospital bedside or sing “Happy Birthday” in chorus with everyone else at one of the many parties held in the clubhouse?
Absolutely not.
These were the musings of a girl who had been obsessed with a mystery of a man for half a decade.
Before the accident, I’d be content with my daydreams and wanderings. I felt my obsession would always be intractably unrequited.
But now…
The cold viciousness in Priest’s eyes as he’d slit Brett’s throat and anointed my feet with his blood. The gentleness of his large, death-dealing hands cupping my broken body to his chest as he shielded me from the car blast and the tension in his jaw as he stared down at me, wrecked by the sight of my injuries…
Didn’t that have to amount to something?
I wanted to ask him.
I needed to know.
At the very least, I felt compelled to thank him properly. Not only because he’d saved my life and deserved that regard, but because the burgeoning psychologist in me wanted to see how he would react.
How would a man more used to death than life react to a woman thanking him for saving her?
The unasked question burned in me like a banked fire.
“What do you think, Delilah?” I murmured to my sweet ring-necked dove as I hand-fed her from where she perched on my shoulder.
She cooed happily in response and preened as I gently ran a finger down her silky throat.
“I think he might like me too,” I agreed on a whisper as Harleigh Rose and Loulou laughed over something in my kitchen. “I think it’s about time we find out.”