Page 143 of Priest

I met her eyes.

She didn’t have to explain.

Don’t take his wife from him in pieces in front of half the club.

I nodded once. “I won’t.”

Then I bent, pressed a kiss to her forehead, another to the soft fuzz of our son’s head, and stepped out of the room.

The family waiting room had the wrong kind of brightness. Too much fluorescent light for the grief sitting in it.

My officers were spread through the space in a way that looked casual until you knew them better. Rook leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and his jaw set. Ink sat forward in one of the stiff chairs, watching everything without seeming to. Ghost was still beside Ledger, close enough to be a presence without crowding him. Deacon sat in his wheelchair like he owned the room, cut hanging open over his hospital gown, one socked foot cocked out in front of him in defiance of every nurse who had tried to stop him from being there.

Ledger was the one I was looking for.

He sat with his forearms braced on his thighs, hands clasped so tightly the knuckles had gone pale. He wasn’t crying. Wasn’t raging. In some ways that made it worse. Grief sat on him like a weight he hadn’t figured out how to carry yet, hollowing him out while he stayed upright on sheer force of habit.

When I stepped into the waiting room, his head came up.

He knew.

Maybe not the details. Maybe not the shape of it. But he knew I had something, and whatever hope he had left thinned in his face the second he looked at me.

Ghost saw it too. He rose without a word, giving us room without going far.

I crossed the room and stopped in front of Ledger. “Come with me a minute,” I said quietly. “We should step away.”

His eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Ledg.”

“Say what you know here,” he snapped, voice rough enough to turn every head in the room. “In front of our brothers.”

The waiting room went still.

I held his gaze, weighing whether to push it, but there was no moving him tonight. Not with Lena dead and half the world he thought he knew cracking under his feet.

So I stayed where I was.

“Blue told me what happened upstairs,” I said, keeping my voice level because if I didn’t, this would become about my anger instead of his pain. “Lena came into the office through the back hall. Joker dragged her in. She was scared. She knew it was bad.”

Ledger didn’t move.

“Before he shot her,” I continued, “she told Blue to tell you she was sorry.”

His face didn’t change, but I saw the hit land. It moved through him like something blunt and internal.

“There’s more,” I said.

His voice came out flat. “Say it.”

“She told Blue she left the truth in a journal. Said it’s locked in the safe in the corner of your closet.” I held his stare. “She said you know the code.”

Something sharp flickered across his face, the first real crack in the numbness.

“A journal,” he repeated.

I nodded once. “That’s what Blue said.”