Page 55 of Deacon

The words sat between us, and I let them. There wasn’t room inside me yet to do much else with them. Grief needed breath, and breath was still in short supply. “I remember the shots,” I murmured. “Then nothin’.”

“There’s more,” Priest said.

I looked back at him. He scrubbed a hand over his jaw like he was putting the pieces in order before laying them down. “This town. This hospital. This is where she’s been.”

My gaze sharpened. “She?”

“Blue.” Priest said the name like it weighed something. “She’s a fuckin’ doctor, brother. ER. She was there when they brought you in.”

I went still. Of everything I had been piecing together from fog, voices, and the reactions around me since waking, that was one thing I hadn’t seen coming. “Blue,” I said again, more to hear it than because Priest needed the prompt.

Priest nodded once. “And Lila, your Lila, was on shift too. ER nurse.”

The room shrank around me, my hand tightening on the sheet before I could stop it. “Lila?”

“She helped save your life,” Priest said. “Both of ’em did.”

For a long moment, I couldn’t say a damn thing. Lila had been there when they brought me in. She had seen me broken and bleeding after seventeen years and still put her hands on me to help save my life. Then, when I didn’t wake up, she hadn’t walked away. She had come back night after night and sat beside my bed through all that dark like some part of her still answered when it came to me.

“Figures,” I murmured finally, my voice rougher than I intended. “Always her.”

Priest’s mouth twitched without any humor behind it. “That ain’t all.”

He reached into his cut and pulled out folded sonogram pictures, smoothing them flat before handing them over. I took them carefully, slower than I wanted because my body still moved like it belonged to somebody else. At first, all I saw was blur and shadow.

Then it clicked.

I looked up. “Holy shit.” My eyes dropped back to the images. “She’s pregnant?”

“Eight months,” Priest said, and there was no missing the pride in his voice now. “My kid.”

For a second, I only stared. Then something warm and genuine cracked through the pain and everything tangled around it, pulling the first real smile from me since I woke. “Well, I’ll be damned,” I said softly. I looked at the picture again, something almost reverent moving through me. “That’s a little miracle, brother. Congrats.”

Priest took the words like a man who still didn’t know what to do with good things when somebody handed them to him clean.

I huffed out a careful breath. “Guess that makes me Uncle Deacon again. Another little one in the ranks.”

“It ain’t that clean,” Priest said.

Of course it wasn’t. Nothing ever was with us.

I handed the sonogram back, watching his fingers close around it with the kind of care he usually reserved for a blade or a brother. “What’d you do?”

Priest looked at me flat. “I fucked it up.”

I waited, and after a beat, he looked down at the pictures in his hands. “All those rules I had for her,” Priest said, his voice turning rougher on himself than it ever did on anybody else. “Distance. Boundaries. Bullshit I told myself was protection. That’s the reason she left.” He looked down at the pictures in his hands. “She thought I didn’t want a baby. Hell, at first I didn’t. Then I saw her. Swollen and carrying my kid, and man...” He shook his head once like he still couldn’t quite believe his own honesty. “I wanted it all. Her as my Old Lady. The baby. No rules.”

Something old and ugly shifted beneath his words. It wasn’t Priest’s exact story that got under my skin. It was the shape beneath it. Wanting too much too late, realizing what mattered only after damage had already been done, then standing there with both hands full of love and no clean way to offer it.

“She flipped ’em,” Priest said. “Now she’s got rules for me.”

My brow lifted. “Yeah?”

“If I want in the kid’s life. If I want in hers. I follow them. Show up. Prove I can do it without tryin’ to control every damn thing.”

I shifted carefully in the bed, the movement drawing a protest from my shoulder. When it passed, I looked at Priest more steadily. “You want her?”

He gave me a look like the question was damn near offensive. “I’ve never not wanted her, brother.”