Page 5 of Deacon

I cut my eyes toward her. There was no point pretending I didn’t know what she meant.

“How do you know Deacon?” She stressed the name, then glanced toward the table. “Jackson. Whatever we’re calling him.”

For a moment, I said nothing. The truth sat against the back of my teeth, heavy and hot and seventeen years too old. Then I looked at her and gave her the one piece I couldn’t imagine delivering gently.

“He’s Jade’s father.”

Her head turned so fast I felt the movement beside me. The shock on her face might have been funny on another day, mostly because Blue rarely let anything catch her off guard and I had managed it while a surgeon worked on my past ten feet away. Her hand went instinctively to her stomach. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” She looked at Jackson, then back at me, but whatever question had formed died when I angled my head. “Okay. Your turn.”

Her mouth twisted as her palm moved over her belly. “Baby daddy’s VP.”

I stared at her. Despite the room, the smell of cautery and blood, and the fact that nothing about the night was remotely amusing, an incredulous breath escaped me. “Of course he is.”

The smallest smile crossed her face, quick and grim, before disappearing. I looked toward the table again. “If he lives, I’m killing him. You know that, right?”

She huffed something close to a laugh. “Fair.”

“And then I’m going to pretend I never saw him.”

Blue slid an arm around my shoulders, careful of the equipment and sterile fields. “Sisters before misters, girlfriend.”

I leaned against her for half a second. “Always.”

Then she let me go because that was who Blue was. She never smothered. She gave exactly what was needed and trusted you to stand when she stepped away.

The surgery dragged in the way all surgeries did when the person on the table mattered too much. Time inside a hospital could become slippery even on an ordinary shift. Waiting in an OR for a man from my past to keep breathing turned it into a bad kind of prayer, one repeated with every glance toward the monitor.

When the surgeon finally stepped back and stripped off his gloves, the entire room seemed to shift with him. “He made it through.”

My knees nearly gave beneath me.

He wasn’t safe. Of course he wasn’t. The rest followed in careful pieces. Critical condition. Medically induced coma. Intensive care. The next twenty-four hours. The doctor delivered each phrase in the tone people used when they knew better than to promise anything they couldn’t drag into existence with their own hands.

I heard all of it, but the only words that lodged were, he made it through.

The waiting room was full when we came out. I stopped inside the doorway and took it in with one sweep. Leather and denim filled the chairs, hard men sitting too still while the women around them watched every movement with tension braced through their shoulders. The man who had spoken to Blue sat at the center with his elbows on his knees, but the moment he saw her, he surged to his feet so quickly the chair scraped behind him.

Another woman sat beside him, pretty in the polished, deliberate way some women were. I knew nothing about any of them, yet the way the room breathed told me she shouldn’t have been rubbing circles into his arm as though she had a right to soothe him.

It had nothing to do with me. Less than nothing. Still, I saw the moment he told her to sit back down, and the way Blue’s expression remained perfectly calm. I knew enough women to recognize how much was happening beneath it.

Blue gave the update, and everyone in the room seemed to breathe at once when she told them Jackson had made it through surgery. He wasn’t safe yet, but he was alive, and sometimes that was all a room needed to keep from splintering.

I stayed near the back because I didn’t trust my face. I also had no desire to be examined by a room full of club people while Jackson lay upstairs in a coma and Blue stood five feet away holding her own private war behind her teeth.

The man caught her arm before she could leave and said something too low for me to hear. She stiffened, but he guided her toward the hallway anyway. I watched them go for half a second before looking away.

It wasn’t my business.

Everything about the night seemed determined to drag old lives into the same room and lock the doors behind them. I didn’t have the energy to follow anyone else’s history.

Mine was upstairs unconscious.

Mine had almost died without knowing.

The thought had circled me since trauma, but it landed harder now that the room had gone quieter. This time, it carried Jade’s face with it. Jade at thirteen, asking casually and not casually at all whether I had ever truly been in love. Jade at fifteen, rolling her eyes as she declared every boy in school an idiot. Jade now, taller than me and sometimes studying old photographs with a look far too thoughtful for comfort.