Or we had been.
Now, I wasn’t so sure she even existed anymore.
If maybe, before Priest saved me, he was the one to break me. If I’d learned anything the past few years, it was that broken wasn’t bad. It was a step along the road to healing and growth, a pause in the inevitable evolution of ourselves over the course of our lives. Priest had broken me out of my shell, and now that I was free, I vowed I would never go back.
When I pushed open the door to the Linley’s, he was there. Standing up from his recline on his Harley, he was already moving toward me, pulled to me as if by some gravitational force.
The force of love, my romantic heart whispered.
I didn’t care what name I gave to it: love, worship, obsession.
It all boiled down to one thing, one feeling that struck me the moment he clutched me in a hard, possessive embrace right there on the Linley’s stoop. The feeling that with Priest, every piece of me, dark and light, sweet and bitter, saintly and sinful was glued together by his acceptance into a beautiful mosaic. That feeling that with him, I’d never been so beautiful and whole. We were two broken halves that locked together in a way that could never be undone.
Priest
Christmas threw up in Bea’s little pink house. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, my Little Shadow had managed to decorate her space with an explosion of seasonal décor. A snowman at the base of her white Christmas tree decorated in pinks and golds emitted a recorded version of carols when she pressed a button that timed the flashing tree lights to the music. There was a series of crystal reindeer cantering across her coffee table, fake snow, and fir-shaped candles on the dining room table, and pink tinsel on the beam across the kitchen. Sampson was curled up on that velvet couch playing with a candy cane pillow, and Delilah’s cage was even partially draped with greenery and red ribbon.
Setting foot in the place nearly made my balls shrink back up into my body.
“You like it?” she’d asked as she tossed her keys in a little Santa Claus bowl on her side table before making her way down the hall. “The girls helped me this morning when they came over for breakfast.”
I didn’t answer both because she’d disappeared down the hall and because I didn’t have a single fucking nice thing to say about the Christmas chaos. It was barely December, and she’d spewed holiday spirit all over her house.
I hadn’t been this close to an ornament in my entire life. I didn’t believe in Christ, organized holidays, or sentimental crap, so none of it resonated with me.
None of it, save the image of Bea in some kinda frothy lace nightgown going up on her toes to place the ornaments on the tree as high as she could reach from her slight height. One of the brothers must’ve helped her put the star on top and didn’t that make rage sear across my skin like a branding iron.
She was mine.
If she wanted Christmas crap all over the house, I should’ve been the man to reach the high places, to secure the heavy tree in its planter, to fucking deck the halls if she wanted me to because just existing in the same place at the same time as this slip of a blond girl made my fucking blood sing.
I was scowling into the empty fireplace, thinking foolishly that I should light the damn thing because my Little Shadow liked the warmth when there was a creak deep down the hall. My head snapped to the dark mouth of it, spine straight, muscles taut as wires ready to spring.
Bea’d almost fucking died that day.
I hadn’t been there.
And why?
Because I was too much of a fucking pussy to go inside a building just because it was designated as a church.
I hadn’t set foot in any kind of holy place since I was seventeen. It wasn’t that I had some irrational fear God would strike me down, or I’d burn up to ash for my sins the second I crossed the threshold.
I didn’t talk about my past. I didn’t even think about it. Sometimes, there aren’t words big enough to describe emotions, to describe the way events carve themselves into your flesh, sinew, and bone. Why would I speak of my horrors only to diminish them?
The unspeakable had been done to me in holy places, in a church claimed for God. I saw that setting when I closed my fucking eyes every night to sleep. I felt prayer burned into my palate when I woke from restless slumber plagued by memories masquerading as nightmares.
Avoiding churches entirely was almost unnecessary when the echo of one haunted my every living moment.