Page 151 of Priest

His brow lowered immediately. “Blue.”

“I said don’t build it for me.” I held his gaze. “Build it because the town needs it. Build it because it will help people. If we do this, it has to be real. Not just a grand gesture.”

He went still.

Then he nodded once. “Alright.”

Lila sat back slowly, as if she didn’t trust the floor beneath her anymore. “You’re all insane.”

“Probably,” Evan said. “But maybe productively insane.”

Ink tipped his head. “That sounds like a campaign slogan.”

That sent laughter moving through the room again, softer this time, less like escape and more like air finally finding its way back in.

For one brief, ridiculous stretch of time, the apartment felt less like a place we were hiding in and more like the beginning of something new.

Priest found my hand under the blanket and laced his fingers through mine.

No one said yes that morning. Not out loud. No one agreed to move, run an ER, or rebuild a life on the strength of one impossible conversation in my living room.

But the shape of it was there.

A way back to Bay of Saints that didn’t ask me to leave my whole life behind.

A place for Lila and Evan if Wicker Falls pushed them out.

A reason for Saints and Fallen Angels to keep meeting on ground that wasn’t only soaked in blood.

And for the first time since the warehouse, the future didn’t feel like something waiting to take from us.

It felt like something we might get to build.

46

Priest

Church felt different now, though the room itself hadn’t changed.

The same scarred table sat at the center. The same walls held the weight of old decisions and the kind of promises men made when blood had already been spilled. But I came into it carrying more than club business. Blue was home with our son. Joker was still out there with Sadie. An empty house on the compound, one I’d never bothered to live in, had started turning itself into something else in my head.

Home.

The word still sat strange on my tongue, but it was there.

So was the freestanding ER I’d opened my mouth about before thinking through permits, funding, and all the legal teeth attached to building something that could save lives. That was my problem now too. Not because I regretted it. Because for the first time in a long damn while, I wasn’t only planning for war.

I was planning for what came after.

When I took my seat at the head of the table and looked out at the men filling the room, I wasn’t just thinking like a president. I was thinking like a man with a family to bring home.

Ledger sat three chairs down on my right, shoulders rigid and face closed off in a way that made the whole room feel colder around him. He still hadn’t gone for the journal. Hadn’t tried to read whatever Lena had left behind. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he wouldn’t. Since the funeral, grief had settled into him differently. Less wild. Less raw on the surface. No less dangerous for being quiet.

Ghost sat close enough to watch him without making it obvious. Across from them, Rook leaned back in his chair, silent as ever, his expression unreadable unless a man knew him well enough to catch the small shifts. Nomad was beside him, boot hooked on the chair rung, eyes moving between faces like he was already mapping the roads none of us had taken yet. Ink stood instead of sitting, one shoulder to the wall, arms crossed, taking everything in.

Deacon was there too, finally out of the hospital and back in his chair at the table, though he wasn’t moving like a man fully healed. He sat carefully, one arm draped across the back of his chair, color better than it had been but still not right. The fact that he was in Church at all meant every nurse who had worked on him would probably want to drag him back by his ear, but none of us had expected him to stay put once they turned him loose.

Archangel sat farther down the table, calm as ever, with Castor beside him looking only slightly more cooperative than he had the last time I saw him. Agent Kincaid wasn’t with them, which meant either she trusted him not to bolt or she was somewhere preparing new ways to threaten him with federal consequences.