Page 137 of Priest

Wicker Falls Memorial lit up the way hospitals always did when labor hit unexpectedly and half a motorcycle club arrived attached to the father.

They got her upstairs fast. Nurses moved around her with clipped efficiency, barely hiding their alarm when they recognized her and saw the state she was in. Questions came sharp and fast. Blue answered what she could, and I handled the rest until they pushed me back just enough to get her changed and settled.

Once Blue was in a labor room, breathing through another contraction with Lila at her side, the rest of my world followed us through the hospital doors.

My brothers showed up because of course they did. No one had to tell them, and no one had to ask.

Ledger came in looking like he’d been flayed from the inside out. He didn’t say much. Maybe there wasn’t anything to say yet. Lena’s death had carved something raw into his face, and the worst part was that none of us knew enough to make sense of what had happened. One minute she’d been at the clubhouse, pale and shaken like everyone else. The next, she was lying dead on the floor of Joker’s warehouse with no one understanding how she’d gotten there or why.

Ghost stayed close without hovering. He sat beside Ledger in the family waiting room, quiet and watchful, his loyalty never asking for credit. Ledger looked like a man standing at the edge of something steep and black. Ghost looked like he had already decided he was staying there until his brother stepped back.

Some poor nurse had apparently tried to stop Deacon from coming down from his floor after word reached him, but someone had found him a wheelchair. Once a stubborn biker had his cut back on over a hospital gown, there wasn’t much a nurse could do except be offended on principle.

When I stepped out into the family waiting area long enough to breathe and check what the room needed, Deacon was parked there like some half-dead king, arms folded over his chest, cut hanging open over pale blue cotton, irritation written all over his face.

“You look like hell,” he told me.

“You look worse.”

He gave me a tired smirk. “Fair.”

Once Blue was settled and Lila and Evan were with her, the edge in my chest eased just enough to let me have time to step into the hallway. Lila had taken her place near the bed with the same steady competence she brought to every crisis, talking Blue through the harder contractions without making it feel clinical. Evan hovered on her other side, one hand wrapped around hers when I couldn’t be in two places at once, tossing in just enough humor to keep fear from swallowing the room whole.

I waited until Blue looked at me and nodded, telling me without words that she was okay for a minute, before I finally stepped out to deal with the ghost that had just walked back into my life.

He was waiting at the far end of the hall, leaning against the wall like he hadn’t come back from the dead and split my whole goddamn world sideways.

For a second, all I could do was look at him.

The years sat on him differently than I expected. Leaner through the face. Harder around the eyes. His sleeve was torn near the upper arm, blood darkening the fabric where a bullet had grazed him, but he stood like the wound barely registered.

That made something in me tighten.

He’d taken that getting Blue out.

It didn’t erase the past. Nothing could. But it put itself on the scale whether I wanted it there or not.

He straightened when I started toward him, and by the time I stopped in front of him, the silence between us had gone thick with too much history to cut clean.

“She okay?” he asked first.

There was something almost cruelly normal about that being the opening line. Not hello. Not surprise. Just she okay?

“She’s having my baby,” I said.

He nodded once, slow, like he was taking that in. For a second, neither of us said anything else. The hospital moved around us in soft noises and hurried footsteps, but it all felt far away.

Then I folded my arms across my chest and gave him the only truth I had room for.

“You’ve got about two minutes before I go back in there,” I said. “So start talking.”

His mouth twitched faintly, but there was no humor in it. He scrubbed a hand down over his jaw and pushed off the wall.

“I knew Joker was rotten before I understood how deep it went,” he said. “Drugs and guns were the easy dirt. The stuff every club pretends makes them hard. But he was building toward worse. Flesh. Kids. Women he could sell because no one powerful cared enough to look for them.”

My jaw tightened, but I let him keep going.

“You still had enough good in you to hate it,” he said. “That scared him more than you knew. He wanted you brutal. Obedient. He wanted us both made in his image, but you kept fighting the shape.”