Page 133 of Priest

“I’m okay,” I lied, one hand bracing against the wall.

His eyes dropped briefly to my stomach, and whatever he saw there made his jaw tense. “You don’t have to be okay. You just have to keep moving.”

From below, through the gunfire and shouting, a voice thundered up the stairwell.

“Blue!”

Priest.

The sound of him, raw and furious and terrified, hit me harder than the gunshot had.

“I’m here!” I tried to shout, but it broke halfway out of me. “Priest!”

The answer that came back was pure violence wrapped around my name.

Ace tightened his arm around my back and got me moving again. Smoke and dust hung in the stairwell, catching in the emergency lights. Men moved through the haze below, shapes with guns and cuts and purpose. Somewhere down there, Priest was tearing the world apart to find me.

My legs wanted to fold under me with every step, but Ace didn’t let me fall.

“I’ve got you both,” he said quietly. “But we’ve got to keep moving.”

Both.

The word hit something deep, something already frightened and aching and stretched too thin.

Then movement flashed below, and Ace stopped so abruptly I nearly stumbled. His body went rigid beside mine.

I followed his gaze down into the smoke, heart climbing into my throat as a figure came into view at the base of the stairs.

Priest.

For one suspended breath, the whole building seemed to hold still.

And I knew, before his eyes fully lifted to us, before he saw the man holding me upright, that the nightmare wasn’t finished tearing things open.

42

Priest

The warehouse sat low and ugly against the gray afternoon like something the world had meant to forget. Rust ran down the corrugated siding in long reddish streaks. Half the windows were boarded, the rest too filthy to show much beyond shadow. If Archangel hadn’t said he was sure, I might have driven right past it a hundred times and thought nothing more than abandoned. That was the kind of place men like Joker preferred. Buildings that looked dead from the road, places where sound didn’t carry far and no one asked questions if trucks came and went at odd hours.

I crouched behind the broken concrete lip of an adjacent loading dock with Archangel at my side, my gloved hand tight around my weapon, my eyes fixed on the structure across the yard as if I could force the walls to go transparent by sheer will. The air had that damp industrial chill that settled into clothes and skin alike. Somewhere nearby, metal creaked softly in the wind. Beyond that, everything felt too still.

It was wrong.

There should have been more visible security if Joker meant to hold what Archangel said he was holding inside. More movement. More men smoking outside, more boots crossing the lot, more signs of a place actively in use. Instead there were only occasional shifts behind dirty glass, a silhouette passing through one of the lower windows, and a man in a dark jacket stepping out once to spit into the gravel before disappearing again.

“Bottom floor movement every few minutes,” one of Archangel’s men said over the comms, his voice low and controlled. “Upper level too. Can’t get an exact count from this angle, but there’s definitely activity up there.”

Archangel didn’t take his eyes off the building. “They’re keeping the exterior clean on purpose.”

He said it like fact, not theory.

Across the lot and tucked into their own shadows, Saints and Fallen Angels held position in a rough perimeter, each man waiting for the signal to move. They weren’t posturing. No one was pacing or burning off nervous energy. They were too disciplined for that. Even so, tension moved through the line in quieter ways: the check of a safety, the roll of a shoulder, the faint tilt of a head toward the comms.

Then I saw movement farther down the service road. Not from our men.

Two dark SUVs sat angled near the tree line beyond the fence, plain enough not to draw attention if you didn’t know what to look for. Men in dark tactical gear moved around them with clean efficiency. No cuts. No visible allegiance. Not club. Not local police either.