Priest's Devotion (Forsaken Angels MC #8)

1. Mia

ONE

MIA

The peonies came in on Tuesday mornings.

Dave from the wholesale truck would pull up at seven-fifteen, back the refrigerated van to the side door, and carry in the flowers while I signed the manifest and pretended I wasn’t already sorting where the stems need to go in my head.

The peonies went in the front cooler because they sold fastest. The roses went left.

The greenery went on the bottom where nobody ever looked unless I told them to, and I always told them to, because a thirty-dollar arrangement with good greenery outsold a forty-dollar one without it.

Running The Flower Boutique had taught me that. Along with how to strip thorns without bleeding, how to wire a corsage that wouldn’t fall apart during a first dance, and how to smile at someone I’d never met before in a way that made them feel like a regular.

That last one I’d already known. I’d been doing it my whole life, just never for flowers.

Dave left at seven-thirty. I wiped down the counter, adjusted the window display, flipped the sign to OPEN, and stood behind the register with a cup of coffee that was slightly too hot to drink and a morning that stretched ahead of me like all my mornings.

Predictable. Ordered. Mine, in the specific way that borrowed things become yours if you hold them long enough.

The shop was small, but it was perfectly sized.

One main room with buckets along the walls, a glass-front cooler for the premium stems, a worktable in the back where I did arrangements, and a counter opposite the door where the register sat next to a dish of wrapped candies that Mrs. Alderman’s grandkids emptied every Saturday.

The floor was old hardwood that creaked when the temperature dropped.

The ceiling was pressed tin that someone had painted white decades ago.

A bell hung over the door, and every time it rang I looked up, smiled, and greeted whoever walked through it. I put them into one of two categories.

Known or unknown.

I didn’t think about why I did that. It was reflexive now.

Practice had worn the sharp edges off the habit until it felt less like surveillance and more like customer service.

The regulars got a wave, a hello, a question about their week.

The strangers got a different version of the same warmth, one that included a quick scan of how they looked at me or didn’t.

I was good at reading people. I’d had to be.

The first customer that morning was Helen Briggs, who wanted pink tulips for her mother’s birthday.

After her came a man I’d never seen, mid-forties, work boots, bought a single red rose and left without making eye contact.

A local contractor, maybe. Passing through.

He got into a truck with Idaho plates and pulled back onto Main Street.

The tension in my shoulders released an inch.

I checked my phone. No missed calls. No texts.

My handler’s last check-in had been eleven days ago. A three-minute conversation on my personal cell, the one the Marshals had set up under the name on my lease. “Everything okay, Macy?” “Everything’s fine.” “Anything to report?” “No.” “Good. I’ll call next week.”

He hadn’t called next week. Or the week after that.

I put the phone back under the counter and told myself it was fine. Inspectors had caseloads. Check-ins stretched sometimes. It didn’t mean anything.

I believed that the way I believed everything about the system that had kept me alive since my placement. With discipline, and without looking too closely at the cracks.

Priest came in at ten-thirty.

The bell rang and I knew it was him before I turned around, the same way I always knew. The sound of boots on old hardwood that carried a particular weight. The pause inside the door, just a beat, a big man conscious of the space he takes up.

I turned. He was standing by the cooler, looking at the arrangements with that familiar deliberation. Like he was making a decision he’d already made.

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning.”

He wore his cut like all of them did, the Forsaken Angels patch across the back, the leather soft from years of wear.

Under it, a dark t-shirt, jeans, the slightly dirty boots that left marks on my hardwood that I never minded.

His arms were covered in ink, full sleeves that disappeared under his shirt.

Short dark hair, with a strong jaw with a few days of stubble.

His hands were large and careful, and he touched the flowers like a man handling something that matters to him even if he’d never say so.

He’d been doing this every other Tuesday for almost as long as I’d been in Forsaken.

He’d come in, browse the cooler, ask me a question or two about what was fresh, and settle on an arrangement.

He carried it out and I knew, because Forsaken was a town where people talked, that he took the flowers to the cemetery. I didn’t know who they were for.

I’d never asked and he’d never offered.

It was the most honest relationship I had, which was a thought I tried not to examine too carefully.

“Peonies came in this morning,” I said. “The blush ones you liked last time.”

He looked up from the cooler. “You ever get those ranunculus in? The ones you said were your favorite.”

I stared at him. I’d mentioned that once.

Weeks ago, maybe longer, while I was trimming stems and talking to fill the silence, the way you do in a small shop.

A passing comment about the flowers I’d grow if I had a garden, the ones I loved for myself instead of for selling. I hadn’t expected him to hold onto it.

“Not yet,” I said. “They’re hard to source this time of year.”

“Let me know when they come in.”

He said it easily. Like remembering a woman’s favorite flower was a normal thing to carry around, unremarkable, no weight behind it at all. I wasn’t sure whether that made it better or worse.

“I’ve got some really lovely white peonies in at the moment. Want me to pull some?”

He nodded. I went to the back cooler and selected six stems, the ones with the buds that were just about to open.

I brought them to the counter and started the arrangement, adding greens, a few sprigs of eucalyptus for texture, the things I knew looked right together because I’d learned this trade from scratch and discovered I had hands for it.

He watched me work. He always watched, and it wasn’t proprietary or impatient, the way some men’s attention was. It was attentive. Like he was taking notes he didn’t plan to use, or just collecting details because that was how his brain worked.

“How’s business?” he asked.

“Good. Wedding season’s starting. I’ve got three consultations this week.”

“You like the wedding work?”

“I like making things that matter to people.” I trimmed a stem and nestled it into the arrangement. “Nobody walks into a flower shop on the worst day of their life. They come in for birthdays, anniversaries, dates. I only ever see people when they’re trying to do something kind.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment.

“Unless it’s flowers for funerals?” he replied.

“Well, yeah. I guess you’re right.” I laughed, suddenly caught off guard.

His eyes moved from the arrangement to my face and held there long enough that I felt the warmth of it in my chest.

I handed him the bouquet. Our fingers didn’t touch because I was careful about that, the same way I was careful about everything — the distance between professional warmth and actual closeness, the line between the woman I was in this shop and the woman I couldn’t afford to be.

But I realized it had been an effort whenever this man was in my shop.

“Twenty-two even,” I said.

He paid cash. He always paid cash. Left thirty on the counter, same as always, and I put up a token protest at the overpayment and he ignored it and we both pretended this wasn’t a ritual.

“See you around,” he said.

“Bye.”

The bell rang. The door closed. Through the window, he walked to his bike, the bouquet tucked under one arm with a gentleness that looked wrong on a man that size and was exactly right on him.

I caught myself watching him too closely.

I turned away, started cleaning up the stem cuttings from the counter and told myself that the tug in my ribs was nothing.

Appreciation. Familiarity. The comfort of a regular customer who came back, who tipped well, who remembered what my favorite flower was.

That was all.

The phone rang at two-fourteen in the afternoon.

I was in the back, elbow-deep in a bridal consultation mockup, when the shop phone lit up. I wiped my hands on my apron and picked it up on the third ring.

“The Flower Boutique,” I answered brightly.

Silence. Just long enough to be deliberate.

“Mia.”

The name landed in my stomach like ice water. I gripped the counter.

“Marco says hello.”

The line went dead.

I stood there holding the phone to my ear for five seconds, ten, listening to nothing. The shop hummed around me. The cooler fans, and the occasional traffic noise outside the window. The small, ordinary sounds of a life I’d built on a foundation that had just cracked down the middle.

I put the phone down, but then picked it up again. I dialed the number I’d memorized the day I arrived and never had to use because the system was supposed to work. I was supposed to be able to trust it and trusting it was all I had.

Voicemail.

I hung up. Dialed again.

Voicemail again.

I texted. Inspector, I need to speak with you. Urgent. Please call.

Nothing came back, not even a read receipt.

I pulled the emergency contact card from behind the register, the one I kept in an envelope taped to the underside of the cash drawer. A backup number for the regional office. A name I’d never had to say out loud.

I dialed. The line rang eight times and went to a recorded message for a department that apparently closed at four-thirty on weekdays.

It was two twenty-two on a Tuesday afternoon and every door I tried was locked.

I put the phone down. Walked to the front of the shop and turned the sign to CLOSED. Pulled the shade on the window.

I’d been preparing for this since the day I arrived.

Quietly, in the back of my mind, the way you prepare for a storm you’ve been told might come.

The cash in the safe upstairs was a little more than it needed to be.

The bag in my closet had clothes, toiletries, a prepaid phone always with charge.

My car was parked in the alley behind the building with a full tank because I filled it every Sunday, rain or shine, and I never let it dip below half.

I didn’t panic. Panic was a luxury for people who hadn’t practiced this in their heads a hundred times.

I inventoried. Cash, car, bag, route. Highway 12 east to the interstate, then south.

Change direction twice. Pay cash for everything.

Find a town nobody would look for you in and do what I’d done in Forsaken.

Build. Perform. Disappear into the ordinary until ordinary became real again.

I was upstairs packing the bag when the bell rang downstairs.

I’d locked the door. I was sure I’d locked the door, but couldn’t remember actually doing it.

I went down the stairs with my heart hammering and my phone in my hand, already calculating distance to the back exit. The shop was dim with the shade drawn. A shape in the doorway, broad, backlit by the afternoon sun.

“Macy?”

Priest. Standing inside my locked shop.

“I left my sunglasses on the counter.” He held them up. “Door wasn’t locked, I thought I’d try my luck even though the sign was flipped. I thought maybe you were still in here.”

In my panic, I hadn’t locked the door, and this was the type of stupid mistake that could get me killed.

“Macy, are you okay? You look…you don’t look yourself.”

“I’m fine,” I said. Too fast. Too sharp. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

His eyes moved over my face. The shade drawn in the middle of the afternoon. The CLOSED sign. My hands, which were gripping my phone so hard my knuckles ached.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“No. I’m just closing early. Headache.”

He didn’t move. He stood there in my dim shop with his sunglasses in one hand and his eyes on me, and he was weighing what I’d said against what he saw. He was a man who noticed details. I’d liked that about him since the first visit. I didn’t like it now.

“Priest.” My voice came out harder than I intended. “I’m fine. I just need to close up.”

He looked at me for three more seconds. Then he nodded. Slow, careful, the nod of a man who was accepting what he’d been told without believing a word of it.

“Okay,” he said. “But if you need anything. You’ve got the shop number for Iron Works from when we fixed your car?”

“I do, but really. I’m fine.”

Priest nodded slowly in a way that told me he didn’t believe me but he left anyway. The bell rang behind him and the door closed.

I locked it this time. Tested it and then tested it a second time.

Then I stood in the middle of my flower shop, the place I’d built from nothing, the life I’d assembled from instructions, discipline, and a talent I hadn’t known I possessed.

All of it, built by Macy. The peonies, the wedding consultations, knowing everyone’s name and letting nobody know mine.

Following every rule, trusting every protocol, believing that if I was careful enough and quiet enough and good enough, the system would hold.

The system wasn’t holding one little bit.

I picked up the phone one more time. Dialed my handler’s number. Listened to it ring into silence and then the click of voicemail and his recorded voice, professional, clipped, a man doing a job that apparently no longer included protecting me.

I hung up without leaving a message. There was nothing left to say.