Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men 6)

I clung to the capacity of my mind the way a desperate, drowning man clings to the lip of a ship. It was the basis of my confidence, the crux I wanted my life to hinge upon.

So it damned me that in some ways, Priest was right.

I’d been a fool to sneak around some creepy motel room searching for a killer, even if I’d known that killer since I was a girl.

I’d been a fool to think that he could care about me.

A bitter little laugh plumed between us like toxic fumes.

Priest’s scowl tightened, the creases between his brow black lines like horns in the shadows. He gave me a little shake as if to rattle something loose in my head. “You don’t give a shit about your safety, but you care what I think about you. That’s the problem right there. I exist. I am a valuable tool. But I am not a man. Not like you think I am. Don’t go expectin’ anythin’ like that from the likes’a me. You get me? There’s nothin’ here, and there will be nothin’ here ’cause I got nothin’ to give.”

I swallowed thickly against the surge of disappointment that crawled over the back of my tongue bitter as bile.

Something in my expression made Priest even more frustrated, his thumb digging deeply into my pulse point. He studied me with those eerie, unblinking eyes for a long minute, the only sound the harsh rasp of my breath and the thud of my erratic heart I was sure both of us could hear.

“You’re an eejit,” he finally said gruffly, his eyes pinned to mine and so pale a green even in the shadows that they seemed to glow. Vaguely, I recalled eejit was Irish slang for idiot. “’Cause there’s a mess’a people who care for you and you’re willin’ to toss it away for nothin’. You fuck with your life, you fuck with theirs. You think your family hasn’t been through enough?”

“They feel the same way about you,” I said once I found my voice, somewhere in the depths of my roiling belly. “Everyone cares about you, Priest. Not…not just me.”

There was a second––blink and I would have missed it––when something like hunger flashed through his eyes. It wasn’t a visceral, physical yearning, but something more metaphysical.

It occurred to me that Priest’s greatest fear and greatest desire was accepting love and comfort. Perhaps he worried it would soften his edge, like a blade held too close to a flame. Maybe he’d been burned by it in the past and carried the scars under his skin like armour. Or, worst of all, I thought, maybe he had never experienced any kind of love at all.

“Loving me is a fate worse than death,” he warned me, hatches battened down so he was once again a living sculpture, breathing but unanimated.

I felt his words like a blow to my chest. I ached for this man, this man who believed he deserved so little.

Before I could stop myself, I stepped back slightly, just enough to loosen Priest’s grip on my throat, and then lurched forward, clumsily launching my mouth up to his. I landed awkwardly, my mouth parted around the surprisingly plushness of his lower lip.

I was kissing him.

Kissing Priest.

Like a struck flint, my body ignited in all-consuming flames. Thoughts burned clean to ash and all that remained was heat, fixed at the point of our contact.

For one glorious moment, the span of one monumental beat of my heart, Priest let me kiss him.

The next, there was a brief flash of pain at my lip, then I was moving.

Hand to my throat still, an iron collar, he propelled me back against the wall, and with a strange mixture of gentleness and rigidity, he pulled me forward and pushed me back again, as if to underscore his point.

Then he was on the other side of the narrow hall, staring at me like a cornered animal, vicious and unsettled.

We stared at each other in the grimy pink light.

I noticed, as I licked my lips, that he’d bitten me in his haste to get away. The tang of copper exploded on my taste buds. My hand flew to my mouth, thumb to the little, broken welt in my bottom lip. The pale pad came away smeared with red.

I looked over the small evidence of his violence into Priest’s eyes.

There was a vibrating stillness to his posture, a coiling of muscles and potential energy just waiting to explode into action. He cocked his head slightly to the left, eyes narrowing as he watched me.

Slowly, deliberately, I brought my thumb back to my mouth and delicate as a kitten, licked the blood off my flesh.

He growled.

A low, barely audible purr of noise rolling through his chest.

As if a string connected us, I found myself shivering with the vibration of that sound and let out a resonant hum of pleasure.