Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men 6)

Fear skittered through me. “And you thought you’d expand west?”

He blinked at me, thinking, assessing whether to trust me. “Maybe.”

Suddenly, our flirtation, the slight frizz of attraction fell flat between us because I knew this boy sitting beside me either had a death wish or lacked a brain.

“Have you heard of The Fallen MC?” I asked softly, barely above the patter of water on the metal roof. “This is the territory of their mother chapter. I don’t think they’ll take too lightly to infringement on their land, especially when it’s their backyard.”

Brett laughed, his teeth flashing in the darkness, tinged orange by the lights on the dash. “We’ve been setting up shop in Vancouver for months now, and they haven’t done fuck all. We’re not afraid of them.”

“You should be,” I said flatly, suddenly and adamantly uninterested in him.

Foolishness was not sexy.

There was a difference between being dangerous and in danger, a fine line that Brett didn’t seem to know he was straddling.

“Bea…” he said from beside me, but whatever he might have wanted to tell me was lost in a cacophonic roar.

One moment, I was staring out the passenger side window, fingering the silver streaks of rain on the pane of glass while we listened to the hard beat of Imagine Dragons streaming through the speakers.

The next, there was a terrible, ear-splitting crack and boom.

Then all I knew was pain.

It was too immediate to pinpoint where it originated, how Brett had lost control of the car on the rain-slicked road or if someone had barreled full speed into us. I had no eyes to see, no body to save myself from the all-consuming pain. It felt as though I lived inside a flame because everywhere burned. I thought I might be screaming, but then the hurt finally hit its apex and blessed black descended.

When I came to again, there was wind in my hair and rain on the skin of my right hand. I was unbearably cold after the heat of the fire that had consumed me. When I tried to stir, I realized my body was half in, half out of the car.

Not through the door.

But through the windshield, shattered completely, but somehow intact, crumpled around my body, both soft and sharp.

Pain ripped through my torso as I moved, breath wet and rattling as it exploded through my throat.

Idly, fogged by pain and shock, I wondered if I was going to die.

There was blood somewhere. I could smell the copper tang. It could have been mine.

It could have been Brett’s, who was silent and somewhere behind the crushed glass in the driver’s seat.

I opened my mouth to speak his name, but only blood came forth, salt and iron on my tongue.

A sound drew me from myself. I angled my head, each minute movement hideously painful, to see a man walking toward the car. He was tall, all in black, covered in it as if cloaked.

I marvelled distantly that Death was there to receive me.

He walked purposely but not hurried, not panicked. I wanted to scream at him to hurry because there was pain and so much fear in my heart.

I didn’t want to die.

I’d thought about it all my life, imagined its embrace, if it was warm or cold, sweet or shocking, but I found myself completely unprepared for it.

I wasn’t even twenty-one.

I had a mother who had already lost her husband and her reputation.

A sister who had already been through more than a person should in a single lifetime.

They didn’t deserve to mourn me.

Not yet.

“Help,” I croaked as the man drew close. The fingers on my oddly tingling hand twitched as I tried to reach for him.

He didn’t say a word. Instead, face blotted out by the ink of night on a street without lamps, he cocked his head as if studying me.

Then suddenly, an explosion of economic movement, he was on top of the car, heavily booted feet braced on the hood. I whimpered when he bent low and reached for me.

Death, death, death, I thought frantically.

I was going to die.

Only, the hands that reached for me were not ghostly.

They were lean, strong muscles over long bones, the skin white against the black of tattoos stamped on the knuckles, the back of the palm.

Blearily, I blinked at the sight of the Triquetra stamped on one hand.

I knew that symbol. Life, death, and rebirth.

A sob rolled through me and fell out of my mouth, my spittle pink as it exploded against the glass.

“Priest,” I rasped then whimpered as something shifted in my chest and seemed to stab me through the heart.

“Quiet,” he ordered calmly as he adjusted his body, leaning forward, arms descending into the car through the hole my body had made so he could carefully brace my chest and grasp my hips.

I sobbed as he started to shift me, and he stopped on a vicious curse.