Page 66 of Priest

“I’m fine.”

“You are not fine,” he says cheerfully, like arguing with him is a hobby he deeply enjoys. “You are running on caffeine and stubbornness. I came to retrieve you before you pass out in a supply closet and scare a resident.”

She hesitates, glancing down at Deacon.

“I’ll stay,” I hear myself say. “You should go.”

She studies me for a moment, weighing that offer against whatever she knows of me and whatever she thinks Deacon might need. Then she nods. “Thank you.”

Evan turns his attention to me, eyes sweeping over my cut, my size, my face. “Well,” he says, impressed, “you are… aggressively large. I approve.”

Ink snorts.

Evan’s gaze slides to him next and sticks.

“Oh,” Evan says, recognition sparking immediately as his grin widens. “Hey. It’s you.”

Ink stiffens beside me.

Evan nods once, like he’s checking something off an internal list. “Hunky biker guy. I knew you’d show up again.”

Lila sighs. “Evan.”

“We were never formally introduced,” Evan continues, completely unfazed as he turns his full attention to Ink. “And I feel like that’s important, spiritually.”

Ink looks at him for a long second, expression carefully blank. “Ink.”

There’s a beat.

The corner of Evan’s mouth drops open in something like awe. “Oh my God. Of course it is.”

Ink’s jaw tightens. His gaze flicks away, just briefly, like he’s recalibrating.

“That is,” Evan continues, hand pressed dramatically to his chest, “the sexiest possible outcome of that interaction. You cannot just walk around looking like that with a name like Ink. It’s reckless. Honestly.”

Ink huffs.

It’s quiet. Barely there. If I hadn’t been watching him, I’d have missed it entirely.

He clears his throat and schools his face back into stillness, but Lila shakes her head like she’s used to dragging Evan out of situations he created on purpose.

“Come on, Evan.”

Evan backs toward the door, still grinning, eyes bright with victory. “We are absolutely circling back to this later.”

The door closes behind them.

Ink sits back down, shoulders tight, one hand rubbing briefly at his jaw like he’s irritated with himself more than anything else. He doesn’t look at me, so I give him the mercy of pretending I didn’t see a damn thing.

I look at Deacon instead, at the steady rise and fall of his chest and the quiet insistence of his heartbeat. The machines keep their rhythm, the room settles around him again, but something has shifted, and for once, it isn’t all bad.

Something tells me this is only the beginning.

22

Sadie

The room Priest gave her inside the clubhouse is small and bare, the kind of space meant to be temporary even when no one says it out loud. A bed sits against one wall with an end table. A dresser with scarred wood takes up the other. The walls hum faintly with the life of the club around her, men moving through halls, engines rumbling outside, everything carrying the weight of people who belong here in ways she never quite will.