2. Priest #3
“Maybe you can.” I looked at the shop. The blown-out windows, the destroyed cooler, the petals and glass and water covering the floor. A round had punched through the wall six inches from where her head had been. “But you’re not going to handle it from here. Not alone, not today.”
“I don’t need...”
“I’m not leaving you here.”
The words came out flat and final. A fact, the same way a wall is a fact. She could argue with it. She couldn’t move it.
She looked at me for a long time. The resistance fought the exhaustion which in turn showed the terror. The woman who’d been carrying whatever this is alone was battling the reality that alone had just stopped working.
“Where,” she said quietly.
“The Angels’ compound. Every man in that building is ex-military. Rangers, Delta, Special Ops, Army intel. We’ve got walls, we’ve got gates, and we’ve got eight men who’ve been trained for exactly this kind of situation. Nobody is getting to you there.”
She closed her eyes. Opened them. Nodded once, sharp, like giving herself permission.
I let her grab her bag, got her out the back, through the hallway and down the steps to the alley.
My bike was at the curb out front, so we walked around the building, staying close to the wall, and I scanned the street before I moved her to it.
Main Street was in chaos. People on the sidewalk, a man on his phone calling the sheriff, Rosie standing in the doorway of the diner with her hand over her mouth.
The blown-out windows of The Flower Boutique gaped like open wounds.
I swung onto the bike. Kicked the engine over.
“Get on. We’ll call the Sheriff later.”
She climbed on behind me. Her arms came around my waist and locked, her hands gripping the front of my shirt, and I felt her press her forehead between my shoulder blades.
The contact was total, her whole body against my back, holding on with the desperation of a woman who’d spent all that time holding on to nothing but herself.
I pulled out of Main Street and hit the highway.
The road opened up, the mountains rising on both sides, and her arms tightened around me with every mile.
Her fingers dug into the fabric above my ribs.
Her knees pressed against my thighs. Her breathing was fast at first, then slowing, evening out, her body finding rhythm with the bike, the surrender that happens when you stop fighting the motion and let it carry her.
The graze on my shoulder burned in the wind.
I didn’t care. The woman behind me had her arms around me for the first time after all those months of peonies and small talk and careful distance.
But the circumstances were wrong, the reason was wrong, and none of that changed the fact that every one of her fingers pressed through my shirt and I was aware of each one separately, like points on a map I’d been trying to read from too far away.
The compound gates stood open. Angel was on the porch, because Angel was always on the porch when it mattered.
He looked at Macy climbing off the bike still with some glass in her hair.
Looked at me, at the blood soaking through my shirt at the shoulder.
His eyes went hard, but when he spoke, his voice was steady.
Warm, even. The voice of a man who’d spent years making frightened people feel safe inside these walls.
“Come on in,” he said to her. “You’re safe here.” Then, to me, lower, “Church. Fifteen minutes.”
The lodge closed around us. Heavy timber, thick walls, the weight of a building that understood what protection meant. I brought her to the guest room at the end of the hall, the one with the lock on the inside and windows that faced the treeline.
She sat on the edge of the bed. Her hands pressed flat on her knees, holding herself in place through force. The cut on her arm had dried. Her eyes were clear, alert, the eyes of a woman who’d stopped shaking and started thinking.
“Your shoulder,” she said.
“Doc’ll patch it.”
“Priest.” She said my name and it landed differently than it had before. Heavier. Like she was trusting me with something just by saying it. “Thank you.”
I nodded. Stepped into the hallway. Closed the door.
Stood there.
The graze was throbbing now, the adrenaline burning off, the pain arriving in full.
I leaned my back against the wall and looked at the blood on my shirt and I thought about her arms around my waist on the ride here.
How she’d pressed her face against my back and held on like I was the only fixed point she had left.
The feeling in my chest had been building for months.
Small, steady, accumulating like snowmelt filling a river, so gradual you don’t notice the level rising until it’s over the banks.
I’d ignored it, managed it, told myself it was just the flowers, just the shop, just a woman with a warm voice and a careful smile.
Standing in this hallway with a bullet graze on my shoulder and her heartbeat still echoing through my ribs, I couldn’t ignore it. The thing I’d been carrying had a name and it wasn’t small and it wasn’t going away.
I pushed off the wall and went to find Angel.