Page 72 of Deacon

I settled farther into the pillows, careful with my side, and kept my hand on the leather. “Appreciate it.”

“You’d have done the same.”

“Yeah.”

I would have.

Priest dragged the chair closer with his boot and turned it backward before sitting, his forearms resting across the back. He studied me in that quiet way that usually meant something important was coming. “You scared the hell out of everybody.”

I glanced at him. “Yeah? Or just you?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

A laugh escaped me before common sense could stop it, and pain lit through my ribs. Priest watched me wince with all the sympathy of an annoyed brick wall.

For a while we stayed with easier things. Club paperwork, Ghost disappearing into his screens, Ink growing quieter than usual. Priest kept the details broad enough that I knew he was doing it on purpose. He hadn’t come here to dump the club onto my hospital bed. He had brought my cut because it mattered, and because neither of us particularly wanted to spend the visit discussing how close he’d come to watching me die.

“You going to her?” I asked.

He knew exactly who I meant. “Yeah.”

“Good.”

His eyes narrowed. “You sure you’re good?”

I shifted, searching for one position that didn’t make my side feel like somebody had stitched it together with fishing line. “I’m alive. That’s good enough for now.”

Priest kept looking at me.

I held his gaze. “Go handle what matters.”

Something flickered across his face. Priest could lead men through gunfire without blinking, but loving Blue had turned out to be the thing that kept finding places his armor didn’t cover.

He stood. “Heal fast. I’m not babysitting your paperwork.”

“Liar.”

That pulled something closer to a real smile from him. Priest reached out and squeezed the good side of my shoulder, careful even while pretending he wasn’t, then glanced once more at the cut beside me.

At the door, he stopped and looked back. “Don’t do this shit again.”

“I’ll put it on the schedule.”

He shook his head and left.

The room felt different once he was gone, quieter in a way hospitals never actually managed. Wheels still rolled somewhere beyond the door, monitors chirped down the hall, and the vents hummed overhead, but I looked at the cut and let my hand settle over the patch again.

Brotherhood took strange shapes. Sometimes it looked like men returning fire from behind an overturned truck. Sometimes it was your president remembering, while you bled all over the road, that your colors belonged with you.

The next knock came a few minutes later, hesitant enough to tell me it wasn’t Priest coming back.

“Come in.”

Ghost stepped through first with Ink behind him. Ghost took one look at me and smirked. “Jesus. You look like shit.”

I snorted and immediately regretted it when my ribs protested. Ink dragged an armless chair toward the bed and sat backward across it while Ghost leaned against the wall by the window, apparently committed to his lifelong suspicion of furniture.

“Good to see you too,” I muttered.