Page 122 of Priest

“I’m fine,” she said again, and the lie tasted rotten.

Priest’s voice rose slightly over the others as he gave instructions. Units would move in coordinated lines. Communication would stay tight. Nobody acted alone.

Nobody acted alone.

The irony cut deeper than anything on that recording.

She couldn’t tell them.

If she spoke now, if she said she knew that building, that she had met Dead Man’s Hand there and smiled through small betrayals until they became habit, she would unravel everything in the middle of a crisis. Marcus would hear it. Cage would hear it. The whole club would turn and see her clearly.

And Blue would still be out there.

Lena’s grip tightened on the chair.

I can fix this.

The thought came desperate and bright, a match struck in a room already full of gas.

She knew the layout. She knew the blind spot near the back entrance. She knew where guards tended to linger because she had seen them leaning against the loading dock doors, smoking and laughing while she pretended not to memorize anything.

Marcus would go in heavy. Priest would go in like a storm. The officers would move with guns drawn and fury riding them hard. Dead Man’s Hand would respond in kind, and Blue would be in the middle of it.

If Lena could reach her first, if she could get inside before the first shot cracked the air, maybe she could pull her clear. Maybe she could do one thing right before everything came due.

She eased her hand from the chair slowly, testing her balance. The room was focused on Priest and Archangel now. Cage had drifted a step away, pulled toward the other kids by one of the women gathering them closer.

Lena moved backward first, one careful step at a time, as if she were only clearing space. Then another. She kept her head down and her shoulders slightly rounded, letting the current of the room carry attention elsewhere.

Her heart pounded as she reached the hallway that led toward the back exit. The noise of planning grew fainter with every step. She didn’t look back.

Outside, the air hit colder than she expected. She drew in a sharp breath and crossed the yard toward her car, hands trembling as she dug for her keys.

This wasn’t how she had imagined it.

She had wanted a quieter life. A safer one. She had convinced herself that weakening the club was the same as protecting her family. She had imagined Marcus in pressed shirts, Cage in a private school, a house with a fence and neighbors who cared more about lawn care than patches.

She had never once imagined a pregnant woman paying the price for it.

If Blue died, if that baby died, the weight of it would never leave her.

She made it as far as her car before reality caught up with impulse. The main gates were sealed, steel shut and guarded. Fallen Angels waited beyond them. Saints stood inside them. Nobody was coming or going without orders.

For a moment, she stood there with the keys biting into her palm, heart hammering hard enough to make her vision blur.

Then she forced herself to think.

The back stretch of the property wasn’t watched the way the front was. It never had been. The fence along the tree line dipped where the ground fell away, warped from years of weather and neglect. She’d noticed it once during a summer cookout, half paying attention while Cage chased fireflies near the edge of the woods. It had struck her then as something that should probably be fixed.

Nobody had gotten around to it.

She left the car where it was and moved quickly without running, keeping to the shadow of the storage buildings. The noise from the clubhouse dulled as she moved farther from it. Voices. Engines. The low hum of controlled chaos. Damp grass soaked through the thin soles of her shoes, but she kept going.

At the tree line, she crouched and tested the fence with shaking fingers until she found the loose section she remembered. It resisted at first, then gave enough for her to wedge through sideways. The metal scraped against her jacket before she slipped free into the narrow band of woods beyond.

Daylight filtered through bare branches in pale strips, the ground soft beneath her feet. She didn’t stop until the buildings were hidden by brush and the compound had blurred into noise behind her.

Only then did she let herself breathe.