14
Deacon
Lila had been gone less than a minute, and the room still felt full of her.
Laughter broke loose after the door shut, low and rough and a little disbelieving, like none of us trusted what had just happened enough to touch it too hard.
Nomad remained in the chair by the window looking altogether too pleased with himself, while Ledger stood near the bed with one hand braced on the rail, shaking his head like I’d somehow become more entertaining by nearly dying.
“She was meaner when she left than when she came in,” Ledger said.
I shifted carefully against the pillow, my ribs protesting immediately. “That’s because Nomad doesn’t know how to mind his own damn business.”
Nomad leaned back farther, arms crossing over his chest. “No, that’s because she still cares enough to get mean.”
That earned him a look. “You always this smug?”
“Only when I’m right.”
Ledger laughed again, and I made the mistake of joining him.
The sound escaped before the pain did, a sharp pull through my side that had me wincing and reaching instinctively toward my ribs.
Nomad watched with all the sympathy of a man enjoying himself far too much.
“Better watch it,” he drawled. “You have too much fun, your little nurse is gonna come yell at you.”
I dragged in a careful breath. “I’ll survive. Might even be worth it.”
Nomad snorted. “Yeah, well, almost dyin’ bought you exactly one minute of sympathy. After that, you’re back to bein’ irritating.”
Ledger shook his head, his grin still hanging on him. “Man wakes up one day and already starts flirtin’ with nurses.”
I glanced at him. “Nurse.”
Nomad’s brows lifted. “That right?”
I settled carefully against the pillow again, fighting both the pull in my ribs and the grin trying to win anyway. “Always was.”
That earned a softer laugh from Ledger. The room stayed easy after that, filled with the loose, half-disbelieving relief that only showed up when men had spent too long waiting for the worst and somehow hadn’t gotten it.
Nomad looked far too pleased with himself from the chair by the window, Ledger clearly had no intention of letting me forget a second of Lila’s visit, and I let myself sit inside it for a minute.
The laughter hurt, but it was a good hurt. Real. Better than the dark had been.
Footsteps sounded in the hall, and the door opened.
Priest stepped inside.
For a second, I watched him from the bed while the last of the laughter hung in the room.
He paused as though the sound had caught him off guard, his gaze moving from Nomad slouched near the window to Ledger at the rail before finally landing on me.
Whatever he had expected when he walked in, it hadn’t been this.
Good. I liked giving him that.
“Careful,” Nomad said, glancing up when he caught sight of him. “You laugh too hard, doc’s gonna come yell at you.”
I snorted and immediately winced, my hand shifting toward my ribs. “Worth it,” I muttered. “Been quiet too long.”
Ledger straightened when he saw Priest, his grin easing into something steadier. “Look who finally showed.”
“Had somewhere I needed to be,” Priest said, his voice rougher than usual.
I clocked the fatigue first, then the stitches. Priest looked steadier than he probably had any right to, but I didn’t ask about it yet. Me and Priest had bled beside each other long enough to know when to leave something alone until the man carrying it was ready to put it down.
Nomad pushed up from the chair. “We’ll give you two some time.”
Ledger nodded and gave my shoulder a careful squeeze. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
My mouth twitched. “In a hospital bed? No promises.”
That earned one more laugh before the two of them headed out.
The door shut behind them, taking the rough-edged ease of the room with it, and the silence that followed felt different.
Less heavy than before, but more honest. Priest dragged a chair closer and sat with his elbows braced on his knees while I studied the man across from me.
I saw too much because I knew him too well.
The tension tucked behind his shoulders, the exhaustion, the relief he was trying not to show too plainly.
Guilt lived beneath all of it, old and fresh at the same time, because Priest had always carried other people’s blood like some portion of it belonged to him even when it didn’t.
“So,” I said finally, because I had never been patient and nearly dying hadn’t improved me, “you gonna tell me what the fuck happened, or am I piecin’ this together from gossip and painkillers?”
Priest exhaled through his nose once. “We were ambushed. Bullets were flyin’. You and me both went down hard. They rushed us here. Flashing lights, trauma team in the ER, the whole thing. You were out cold before we rolled in.”
His voice dipped lower before he added, “I thought we were gonna lose you.”
That landed harder than I liked. I turned toward the dark window, catching fragments instead of a complete memory.
The shots. Metal. That split second when everything went wrong too fast to stop.
Then nothing except darkness, Lila’s voice, pain, the lake, and enough regret to make waking feel like punishment.
“And you?” I asked.
“Stubborn as ever,” Priest said. “Couple stitches. Lotta blood. Nothin’ permanent. Bullets missed me. My bike took rounds and went down. Yours didn’t get that lucky. I crawled to you, dragged you behind the van. Danny and Jonesy covered me till I got there.”
I shut my eyes briefly.
Danny and Jonesy. Two prospects barely old enough to understand what they were signing on for and loyal enough to step into it anyway.
“We lost ’em,” Priest said quietly. “Both.”
The words sat between us, and I let them. There wasn’t room inside me yet to do much else with them. Grief needed breath, and breath was still in short supply. “I remember the shots,” I murmured. “Then nothin’.”
“There’s more,” Priest said.
I looked back at him. He scrubbed a hand over his jaw like he was putting the pieces in order before laying them down. “This town. This hospital. This is where she’s been.”
My gaze sharpened. “She?”
“Blue.” Priest said the name like it weighed something. “She’s a fuckin’ doctor, brother. ER. She was there when they brought you in.”
I went still. Of everything I had been piecing together from fog, voices, and the reactions around me since waking, that was one thing I hadn’t seen coming. “Blue,” I said again, more to hear it than because Priest needed the prompt.
Priest nodded once. “And Lila, your Lila, was on shift too. ER nurse.”
The room shrank around me, my hand tightening on the sheet before I could stop it. “Lila?”
“She helped save your life,” Priest said. “Both of ’em did.”
For a long moment, I couldn’t say a damn thing.
Lila had been there when they brought me in.
She had seen me broken and bleeding after seventeen years and still put her hands on me to help save my life.
Then, when I didn’t wake up, she hadn’t walked away.
She had come back night after night and sat beside my bed through all that dark like some part of her still answered when it came to me.
“Figures,” I murmured finally, my voice rougher than I intended. “Always her.”
Priest’s mouth twitched without any humor behind it. “That ain’t all.”
He reached into his cut and pulled out folded sonogram pictures, smoothing them flat before handing them over. I took them carefully, slower than I wanted because my body still moved like it belonged to somebody else. At first, all I saw was blur and shadow.
Then it clicked.
I looked up. “Holy shit.” My eyes dropped back to the images. “She’s pregnant?”
“Eight months,” Priest said, and there was no missing the pride in his voice now. “My kid.”
For a second, I only stared. Then something warm and genuine cracked through the pain and everything tangled around it, pulling the first real smile from me since I woke.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said softly. I looked at the picture again, something almost reverent moving through me.
“That’s a little miracle, brother. Congrats. ”
Priest took the words like a man who still didn’t know what to do with good things when somebody handed them to him clean.
I huffed out a careful breath. “Guess that makes me Uncle Deacon again. Another little one in the ranks.”
“It ain’t that clean,” Priest said.
Of course it wasn’t. Nothing ever was with us.
I handed the sonogram back, watching his fingers close around it with the kind of care he usually reserved for a blade or a brother. “What’d you do?”
Priest looked at me flat. “I fucked it up.”
I waited, and after a beat, he looked down at the pictures in his hands.
“All those rules I had for her,” Priest said, his voice turning rougher on himself than it ever did on anybody else.
“Distance. Boundaries. Bullshit I told myself was protection. That’s the reason she left.
” He looked down at the pictures in his hands.
“She thought I didn’t want a baby. Hell, at first I didn’t.
Then I saw her. Swollen and carrying my kid, and man...
” He shook his head once like he still couldn’t quite believe his own honesty.
“I wanted it all. Her as my Old Lady. The baby. No rules.”
Something old and ugly shifted beneath his words.
It wasn’t Priest’s exact story that got under my skin.
It was the shape beneath it. Wanting too much too late, realizing what mattered only after damage had already been done, then standing there with both hands full of love and no clean way to offer it.
“She flipped ’em,” Priest said. “Now she’s got rules for me.”
My brow lifted. “Yeah?”
“If I want in the kid’s life. If I want in hers. I follow them. Show up. Prove I can do it without tryin’ to control every damn thing.”
I shifted carefully in the bed, the movement drawing a protest from my shoulder. When it passed, I looked at Priest more steadily. “You want her?”