Page 82 of Deacon

“I know.” That was the part I couldn’t argue with. Administration could make loyalty sound like an embarrassing lapse in judgment, but once the lockdown hit, neither of us had considered returning downstairs. Blue mattered more than protocol in that moment, and I knew if news came, Deacon would hear it before we did. I didn’t regret staying with him, which somehow made the reprimand worse.

Evan leaned against the elevator wall and crossed his arms. “For the record, I do not care about stupid hospital policy.”

“I know you don’t.”

“No, I mean really don’t. Deeply. Spiritually. They can put that in my file.”

The corner of my mouth betrayed me, and his expression brightened. “Thank God. I saw that. There she is. Tiny signs of life.”

Outside, the late afternoon air did little to clear my head. The hospital parking lot stretched beneath a gray sky, ordinary enough that the witness’s description came back with brutal clarity. Pregnant woman. Parking lot. Cloth over her mouth. My steps faltered before I could stop them.

Evan caught it immediately, his outrage softening. “Hey. She’s okay, and she’s home. We are going to go see her, tell her this hospital is run by cowards in sensible shoes, and then hold that baby until I feel healed.”

That got me moving.

His car smelled faintly of coffee and peppermint gum, familiar enough to loosen another knot as Wicker Falls passed outside the windows. Brick storefronts, church signs, lawns trimmed too neatly for the season. The town always managed to look respectable while finding quieter ways to be cruel.

“You thinking about quitting?” Evan asked.

I rubbed at my temple. “I’m thinking about homicide.”

“That’s fair, let’s plan together.” A few seconds passed before his voice lost its humor. “You know they were looking for reasons to make this our failure instead of theirs.”

I turned toward him, but his eyes stayed on the road. “A doctor gets abducted off hospital property, security locks down late, and somehow the problem they’re most comfortable addressing is us not being in the right place at the right time? Please. That’s not accountability. That’s cowardice in a blazer.”

He wasn’t wrong.

When Blue’s building came into view, some of the pressure in my chest eased. Apparently knowing she was safe and seeing it for myself were two different things.

Little Jax was asleep against Blue’s chest when we arrived, wrapped in a dark gray swaddle while she curled into the corner of the couch beneath a blanket. Her hair had surrendered hours ago, her exhaustion visible in every soft edge of her face, but she was home. Alive. The apartment smelled like coffee and baby soap, and Priest moved through her kitchen with the ease of a man who had barely left since bringing her back.

Ink was there too, quiet near the doorway with a duffel for Priest at his feet and a folder from Last Rites tucked beneath one arm. Blue took one look at us and straightened slightly. “What happened?”

I dropped my bag and sank into the nearest chair. “We got written up.”

“Written up?” Priest echoed from the kitchen.

Evan gave Blue a humorless smile. “That is the polite version. The less polite version is that apparently abandoning your post during a hospital lockdown is frowned upon.”

Blue stared at him. “You got in trouble because you went to Deacon? Because you were trying to tell him I’d been taken?”

“Among other things,” I muttered.

Priest abandoned the coffee he was making and came into the living room. “Start from the top.”

Evan glanced at me, correctly judged that I was still angry enough to skip straight to telling administration where to shove its review, and took over. “When that panicked woman came into the ER saying she’d seen a pregnant doctor taken outside, I was at the charge desk. There was exactly one pregnant doctor I cared about, so I grabbed Lila and went upstairs.”

“To Deacon,” Blue said.

I nodded. “He already knew when we got there. Bender said Ink had called. Deacon was sending him to find us when we showed up.”

Priest’s jaw tightened, but he let Evan continue. “The hospital went code purple about two minutes later. Security locked everything down, the prospects planted themselves outside Deacon’s room like they owned the building, and security did not adore the aesthetic.”

“They nearly called the police,” I added. “Administration was even less thrilled that two ER staff members had left their assigned posts during lockdown.”

Blue shifted Jax more securely against her chest. “Did they fire you?”

Evan gave her a look. “Blue, darling, when administration asks whether you are still emotionally capable of practicing after a traumatic incident, that is rarely the prelude to a promotion.”