Page 176 of Deacon

Priest’s hand landed on my shoulder. “She passed out. Shock. Pain. Maybe a concussion. She’s breathing.”

I checked anyway, locking onto the faint movement of her chest until my own lungs remembered what they were supposed to do. Yeah. Breathing.

I kept one arm around her while I pulled out my phone and called Matty. He answered on the first ring. “Yeah?”

“We’ve got her.” I looked down at Lila as the silence on the line stretched just long enough to tighten my chest.

Matty’s voice came back lower, stripped down to the one thing he needed from me. “Alive?”

That one word nearly dropped me. I looked down at Lila’s bruised face. “Yeah. She’s alive.”

Matty breathed out, rough enough that I heard what he had been holding back. “We’re almost at the cabin,” he said. “We’ll have Jade soon.”

“Take her to Evan’s apartment,” I said. “Let her stay there tonight while I get Lila settled.”

The line went quiet again. Matty knew me well enough to hear everything I hadn’t said. “Is she okay?”

I looked over Lila properly. Split lip. Blood at her hairline. Swelling along her face. Her shoulder was wrong, and dark marks were already beginning to show at her throat.

“She’s hurt,” I said. “But she’s alive.”

Another pause settled between us before Matty asked, “Who was it? Who had her?”

My eyes traveled across the room. Mason. Jude. Too much blood for a house this clean. Too many answers neither Matty nor Lila had yet.

“We were too slow getting together to figure things out with Jude,” I said. “He had her. And some doctor she worked with. Doctor was dead when we got here. Don’t know all of how he fits yet.” I tightened my arm around Lila. “Can’t tell you more right now, Matty. Not if you want to keep your job.”

His teeth ground audibly through the phone. “She has to be told everything, Jackson.”

I looked down at the woman I had spent seventeen years trying to protect with silence, only to find her bleeding in my arms after lies from every direction had finally caught up with us.

“I know,” I said. My voice came out quieter than I expected, stripped of everything except exhaustion. “I didn’t want to destroy her world, man. I love her, and goddamn it, I couldn’t be the one to do that.”

Matty didn’t answer immediately. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost the anger. “He’s the one who did that. Not you.” His voice roughened. “And he’s the one who gets to live with the consequences.”

The sentence hung between us until he cursed. A car door slammed on his end.

“Gotta go. We’re here.”

“Keep my little girl safe,” I said. “And don’t tell her about her mom yet.”

His grunt was enough. The call ended, and I shoved the phone away.

I stood with Lila in my arms, taking her weight slowly enough to keep her bad shoulder as still as I could. “Get a prospect to come pick up my bike. I’m putting her in her cage and taking her home.” I adjusted her carefully against my chest. “Tell Blue to meet us there.”

Priest nodded once. “Already done.”

At the doorway I looked back at the room. Two bodies. Castor standing near the kitchen, still as ever. Blood darkening polished hardwood where somebody had probably once worried about scuff marks and spilled drinks. I tipped my chin toward the room. “This mess?”

Priest’s face flattened. “Handled.” That was all I needed.

I carried Lila outside. Cold night air hit the blood on my hands while the men around us shifted quietly back into motion, clearing space, making calls, doing whatever had to be done without asking me for anything. Somewhere across town, Matty was almost to Jade.

Both of them were alive. Relief didn’t feel clean. It came jagged, tangled with rage and fear and the image of Lila under Jude’s gun that I knew would be waiting for me every time I closed my eyes. But she was breathing against my chest, and my daughter was coming home. For tonight, I could build everything else from there.

47

Lila