I turned on my heel, boot squelching in the blood, and stalked out of the barn, needing the cold air to remind me I should have a cold heart. Instead, the traitorous organ thudded in my chest like a bellows, blowing hot blood through my entire body. I was on fire with something for the first time in my life, with passion instead of calculated ruthlessness. This violence wasn’t just sport; it was necessity.
He deserved to die again and again for laying a single finger on the angelic head of Bea Lafayette. Scum like Cal should run from her, knowing instinctively he was too fucking inferior to be within spitting distance of a woman so pure of fucking soul.
I seethed against the side of the barn, leather back to the wet wood, the frigid fingers of the stormy night in my loose hair, whipping into my face. I welcomed the pain, but it didn’t ground me the way it should have, so I pulled out my switchblade and cut a long, shallow gash in both my palms, tracing old scars. When I fisted my hands at my sides, the melodic drip of blood to the concrete beneath my feet calmed me.
The shivering of my thawing heart quelled with the pain, but I fished my tin of hand-rolled clove cigarettes out of my jeans pocket to further the calm.
The moment I took a deep breath of the toxic stick, I exhaled like a monk at prayer and closed my eyes to relish in the light-headed haze. The next, I was flicking the cigarette to the ground and stalking to my bike, mind clear and intent on hunting down Sean motherfucking Walsh so I could feed him his own bollocks.
A steely grip on my forearm stopped me in my tracks, causing my boots to slide in the frosted mud. When I turned around, King was there, holding fast to me even as I pulled away, his face set with that Garro look of determination.
“Don’t go vigilante on this, Priest,” King urged.
I blinked at him in answer, face held otherwise still.
He didn’t get to tell me what to do, and he didn’t get to act like he knew me well enough to map my goals. The bastard had gone and died for months, leaving the entire club shattered by his perceived loss.
Many of the brothers hadn’t forgiven him yet.
Including me.
I wasn’t the kinda man to form close connections, but King meant something to me, carved into the icy walls of my heart, and thinking he was dead had haunted me. I was a soldier of The Fallen, the leased beast of Zeus Garro, and most importantly, the wall anyone should have to get through to get to his fucking family.
And I’d failed.
“Priest,” King repeated, pulling hard at me. “Don’t go off fuckin’ half-cocked. Something about this doesn’t ring right.”
When I turned around to swing a leg over my bike, King cursed. A moment later, he was on me, tackling me to the muddy ground. I grunted as I hit the soft earth, but I was already moving, rolling King onto his back before he leveraged me back onto mine. We went tumbling over the wet earth, our limbs lacking purchase in the slick, our intentions lost to the animal urge to overcome each other. Finally, I pinned him to the ground, reared back, and landed a punch to the square edge of his chin.
I snapped my teeth at him. “Only brothers get a shot’a reinin’ me in. Last I checked, you were a ghost.”
The starch went out of his muscles instantly, the cast of his features moving from snarl to shock.
I should’ve pressed my advantage, but there was something soft in his expression that made something sharp pierce through my thick skin.
“There it is, then,” King muttered, angling his chin up again like a taunt. “Go ahead, man. If you need me to pay some fucked-up penance ’cause it’s the only way you know, I’ll fuckin’ well pay it. Means we’re brothers again, you can beat me into the fuckin’ earth.”
His words slotted between my ribs like a well-placed dagger, but it was the resolve in his face that twisted the knife agonizingly beneath my flesh.
He knew me too well. I wanted him to apologize with a pound of fucking flesh because that was the way I’d been raised. Father Hannigan’s canes and ceremonial knives carving pieces out of my young, supple flesh.
No one knew even close to the full story of my childhood, and no one ever would, but King was a clever bastard, and he’d come close to guessing at it over the years.
Sickness bloomed like algae in my belly, turning my gut to acid.
I flung myself off King and rolled to a seat beside his prone form in the mud, leaning against the cold chrome of my Harley.