“Little Shadow.” The voice slithered out of the darkness. “One day, following me will lead to your death.”
A shiver skipped down my spine, a rock flung against water. “I could probably say the same for you. I seem to attract a certain kind of man.”
“Killers, all of us,” Priest agreed in that voice that could scare a seasoned criminal. “Like moths to an eternal flame.”
“Light needs darkness in order to shine,” I reminded him, feeling suddenly fearful in a way he probably hadn’t anticipated.
My fear was not rooted in violence. Priest would never lay a finger on me I did not want. My fear was almost claustrophobic, as if my love was this great overflowing thing trapped in a room of ice. No one had ever yearned as I did for a spring thaw.
“I’m not poetry, Bea. I’m savagery. Don’t pretend what we both know; no words can pretty up the ugliness of what I am.” He sounded so cruel then, so condescending and old. I’d always been aware of the age difference—our personalities only proved to heighten it—but I’d never felt so young and girlish standing there with hope in my hand like a wilting flower.
“I don’t need a reason to murder. I kill because I am capable of killing. It is my art, and in its own way, because of that, it’s also my soul. I need death to remind me why I’m alive. This is me, Bea. Stained in blood and sin with zero fucking regrets.”
“The heart of a killer can still love,” I pressed, but it felt like pressure on a mortal wound, blood bubbling up too fast beneath my fingers. Futilely, I pressed harder. “Even Death has a heart.”
He cocked his head, eyes blank behind his blink, hardly humouring me. “In storybooks maybe.”
“In the Bible,” I protested. “Satan has human qualities. He sins because he is the most human of them all. He lusts and loves.” But religion was not the way to reach this man, so frantically, I continued. “Hades loved Persephone so much he ripped open the earth to steal her light for himself in the Underworld.”
The glimmer was faint, but enough. I used it as the North Star through his wintry heart’s landscape.
My hands on his were sweating slightly with my angst.
“You stole me away the moment I saw you,” I told him. “You didn’t mean to, but a crater opened up in the earth beneath my feet, and I fell into your world, desperate to be in it and in your arms.”
Swallowing the hard knot in my throat, I turned to face him. He dropped the hand holding the gun to his side, then seeing my gaze, he shoved it into the holster beneath his cut.
Gingerly, unsure of his response, I reached forward to collect his empty hands. They were cold and heavy in mine, but he let me lift them between us even though his stance was rigid.
He had such beautiful hands—long tapered fingers, thick and lightly furred with russet hair the same reddish-brown as the freckles marring the skin that wasn’t covered in dark ink. The tombstone tattoos were rendered beautifully, the names and dead clear even in their small script. I ran my fingertips over them, feeling the grooves in the skin, rubbing my nail over the names: Mam, Pa, Danae, Keely, O’Neal, Mute, Garrick, King. So many people he’d lost or killed, all worn on his skin like deliberate scars. There were those too, though, the wounds that had never healed to invisibility. Thin lines crisscrossed his palms in varying shades of nude, white, pink, and livid red, the latter fresh and obviously self-inflicted. A cicatrix in the shape of a whorl like some strange burn, the skin silky and fine. They were large, strong hands, murdering-men hands, but they had only ever brought me peace. They were storytelling hands, more eloquently speaking to Priest’s bleak history than his lips had even given service too.
A killer’s hands had never been so loved.
I stared up at his shadowed gaze as I brought the heft of one to my mouth, pressing a firm kiss to his palm that unfurled his stiff fingers like a blooming rose. Then I did the same with the right, then held them together so I could run my lips over those bruised, bloodied knuckles.
When I pulled away, his blood was on my mouth.
Anointed by his sins, I stared up at him clear-eyed and brimming full of intention. “The only nightmarish part in all of this is the idea that you’d leave me in the dark alone. I’m here, Priest. Even before you, I was here. I’m the sister-in-law of The Fallen MC prez. I’m in this life whether you like it or not. Loving you isn’t a worse fate than death. The idea of not loving you? That’s what makes me feel like I’m dying.”