Page 139 of Priest

He smirked like she was part of a routine they’d run too many times to quit now. “Easy there, Agent Miranda. I was clearing things up with my brother after saving his woman.”

Her eyes dropped to his bloody sleeve, and whatever anger had been leading her sharpened into something colder.

“You’re bleeding.”

“Graze.”

“You were ordered to stay back at the Fallen Angels clubhouse.”

“Yes, warden,” he said, entirely too pleased with himself. “And I said that wouldn’t work for me.”

She stepped right into his space, toe to toe, her expression flattening. “You don’t get to decide which federal instructions are decorative.”

He leaned closer, still smiling. “Sure I do. I just suffer consequences beautifully.”

I cleared my throat before she decided to add another wound to his collection. “Priest,” I said. “I’m…” I cut myself off and glanced sideways at him. “Castor’s brother.”

She turned immediately and offered her hand with brisk efficiency. “Agent Nora Kincaid. I’m his handler.”

I shook it once, then looked from her to him and back again. “Kincaid? Thought he called you Miranda.”

He snorted.

“It’s our thing.”

Her glare could’ve peeled paint. “It is not our thing. He thinks he’s funny.”

That got a real laugh out of him, low and familiar in a way that knocked against something old in my chest.

“Nah,” he said, looking at me now. “It’s our thing. Get it? She’s an agent. Always wanting me to use my Miranda rights.”

The laugh ripped out of me before I could stop it, sudden and rough and probably more needed than I wanted to admit. He laughed too, and for one impossible second the years between us thinned enough that I could almost see who we had been before Joker, before Sadie, before too many choices that couldn’t be unmade.

Nora did not look charmed.

I patted her lightly on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

She looked like she had already considered that and found luck inadequate.

Then I turned back to him, and the moment shifted again. Softer wasn’t the word. It wasn’t soft. But it wasn’t entirely hostile anymore either.

“I’ve got to get back to Blue,” I said. “I appreciate you saving her. You’ve given me a lot to wrap my head around, and now isn’t the time to do it.”

His expression eased just enough to look honest.

“I always had your back, little brother,” he said. “It was a shit way to do it. Might’ve been the only way I knew how back then.”

I held his gaze for a beat, then nodded once.

There wasn’t time to give an answer to that the way it deserved.

Not yet.

So I turned and headed back to my woman.

Labor was not graceful. It wasn’t cinematic. It was sweat and effort and pain, the kind of fear that lived close enough to love to share its breath.

Blue did it anyway.