Page 73 of Deacon

“I’m serious.”

“Yeah, well. You don’t look great either.”

That landed. Ghost’s mouth pulled into a grimace, and I took a better look at both of them. Shadows sat deep beneath Ghost’s eyes, while Ink carried his exhaustion in the set of his jaw and the tension around his gaze. Whatever they had been working on had kept them running too long.

I shifted the cut from my lap and laid it carefully beside me. “What’s goin’ on?”

Ghost glanced at Ink before pushing away from the wall. “We thought you’d want an update.”

“Start talking.”

He shoved his hands into the pocket of his hoodie. “We ran the three-route bait exactly like planned. Coastal, southern, industrial. Kept them separate. Kept them clean. No crossover, no obvious tells.”

I knew enough of that from Priest, though most of the details had reached me through medication and fractured sleep.

“Most of it came back dead,” Ghost continued. “No chatter worth a damn. No movement we could pin to the routes specifically.”

“But.”

Ink’s mouth twitched. “There’s always a but.”

Ghost ignored him. “Industrial got a flicker.”

That pulled every bit of my attention into the room. “What kind?”

“One of ours spotted two Dead Man’s Hand patches parked off the north stretch near Iron Cut. They didn’t move in or follow. Just sat there.”

“Could be coincidence.”

“Could,” Ghost agreed, sounding like he believed in coincidence about as much as I did.

Ink leaned forward against the chair. “Industrial was also the only route with casual overlap near the women last week. Background conversation, nothing presented like club business.”

I looked between them. “So either Dead Man’s Hand got lucky, or somebody repeated exactly what you fed them.”

“Bar, pool tables, women,” Ink said. “Three versions, three audiences. Industrial’s the only one that gave us anything back.”

“Priest still steady?”

Ink gave me a dry look. “Since when is that man anything else in public?”

That answered the question.

Priest would look like ice while privately trying to chew through concrete. He hated uncertainty, especially when the threat might already be inside his perimeter.

I rubbed a hand across my jaw. “You two think it’s a leak?”

Ghost hesitated long enough for Ink to answer first. “I think somebody either has long ears or Dead Man’s Hand decided to get patient.”

“Difference?”

Ink’s gaze held mine. “Long ears might belong to someone we let close.”

The room tightened around the words.

Nobody needed to dramatize it. A leak inside Saints meant somebody we knew had decided our brothers were worth selling.

“We got anything else?”