Page 36 of Priest

“I’d make you sound like an asshole.”

That earns me another ghost of a smile.

The shooting thins. A final burst cracks from the tree line before an engine roars away, then another. Nomad calls movement. Graves answers. Vise swears, sharp and furious. Switch stays near us, gun still raised, shoulders tight enough to shake.

By the time the first cruiser screams around the bend, the road looks like a war somebody tried to erase too late. Smoke curls from the truck. Spent casings glint in the dirt. Danny and Jonesy sit trapped in the cab’s wreckage, beyond anything I can fix. My bike lies on its side twenty yards back. Deacon’s blood is on my hands, my cut, under my nails.

Blue would know what to do.

The thought hits so hard I almost sway. I see her hands in my head, steady and sure, stitching skin at the clubhouse like blood never scared her because she had already made peace with what bodies could do. I hear her voice, calm in a way mine can’t be. Apply pressure. Keep him talking. Watch his breathing.

I grip Deacon tighter and force air into my lungs. “Stay with me. Help’s here.”

Paramedics hit the ground running, boots skidding over loose gravel and spent casings as they drop beside Deacon with bags snapping open between them. Hands come in fast, practiced, reaching for pressure and pulse while voices overlap in short, controlled commands that barely sound human through the blood roaring in my ears. One of them reaches for Deacon’s cut, and instinct moves through me before thought can catch it. My hand clamps down over the leather.

“Don’t,” I growl.

The medic’s eyes flick to mine, sharp and impatient. “Then get it off him.”

Graves says my name from somewhere behind me, low enough that only I hear the warning in it. Switch shifts closer, pale under the road grime, ready to grab me if I make the wrong move. I force my fingers to work, hands slick from Deacon’s blood, easing the leather off him while the medic keeps pressure where I had mine. Deacon makes a sound under his breath, a rough scrape of pain that guts me clean, but the cut comes free.

I clutch it against my chest for half a second before Graves takes it from me. He folds it once, careful with the patches, and holds on like he understands exactly what it weighs.

“Let them work,” he says.

I move because Deacon needs them more than he needs me. That is the only reason.

I stand a few feet away with blood drying on my hands while the paramedics work over him, packing pressure where they can, getting him strapped, keeping him alive long enough for the hospital to do what the road can’t. His clothes stay on him for now, soaked and ruined and clinging to him in ways that make my stomach turn, but his cut is safe. That matters because Deacon would make it matter.

Nomad stands near the truck, face carved from stone as he looks at Danny and Jonesy. Vise paces once, then stops himself like movement might turn into murder. Switch bends over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, then straightens before anyone can see too much.

We walked into something built for us.

The thought settles cold and precise beneath the smoke and sirens. Someone knew the stretch. The timing. The truck. Someone knew where to put the knife.

The paramedics load Deacon, and I climb in after him without asking. A woman in uniform starts to object, then sees my face and thinks better of it. The doors slam. The ambulance lurches forward. Deacon lies strapped beside me, too pale, too still, machines talking around him in beeps and numbers I don’t understand.

I reach for his hand because I can’t reach for anything else. His fingers twitch once against mine.

“I’m here,” I say, though I don’t know if he can hear me. “I’ve got you.”

The siren screams above us, tearing through the morning toward a hospital I don’t know, toward doctors I have no reason to trust, toward whatever comes next. My body starts to register the damage then, the split skin and the road rash under my clothes, but none of it reaches very far. Every part of me that matters is watching Deacon breathe.

By the time the ambulance doors open and the hospital swallows us in a rush of light and voices, I still don’t know who fired first. I don’t know how many men ran when our brothers shot back hard enough to send them scrambling.

All I know is Deacon is bleeding, Danny and Jonesy are dead, and the road that was supposed to clear my head has just dragged the whole club into war.

11

Blue

The ambulance bay doors slam open before the radio finishes its sentence.

“GSW incoming, male, mid-thirties, multiple wounds, unstable.”

Lila and I move together because this is what muscle memory looks like when it has been earned in blood and bad nights. She takes the left side of the gurney, I take the right, and our hands close around cold metal as the EMTs roll him in on a wave of noise. The bay flashes white and red around us. Shoes skid on polished concrete. Someone calls pressure. Someone else shouts vitals that already sound wrong.

Then I see his face.