Page 136 of Priest

The warehouse around us kept moving—men shouting, radios crackling, doors crashing open below—but the center of my world narrowed to the woman in my arms and the fluid darkening concrete at our feet.

“Medic!” I roared, the sound ripping out of me so hard it scraped my throat raw. “We need an ambulance now!”

Blue doubled over again, clutching at my shirt, but before I could say anything else, she caught my wrist with surprising force. Her face was pale with pain, eyes wide and wet and fixed on mine.

“Lena,” she choked out. “She’s upstairs. In the office.”

Something cold slid through me.

Blue swallowed hard, breath breaking around the words. “Joker shot her.”

For half a second I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think past the collision of it—Blue in labor, Ace alive, Lena dead on the floor above us, Ledger downstairs somewhere still fighting through the building without knowing his wife had already fallen.

I turned my head sharply. “Archangel!”

He was already there, already reading enough in my face to know this wasn’t tactical.

“There’s a body upstairs,” I said, forcing the words out through the pressure in my chest. “Lena. Get someone to her now. And get Ledger the hell away from that floor until she’s covered.”

Archangel’s expression changed, only slightly, but enough. He nodded once and signaled to two of his men without wasting a second.

Blue folded against me again with another pain, and I tightened my hold on her, dragging my focus back where it needed to be.

Everything had changed in the span of one breath. I had come into that building ready to tear through whatever stood between me and Blue.

Now I was holding my woman while our baby forced its way into the world in the middle of a rescue. My dead brother stood alive at the top of a bloodstained staircase. Lena was upstairs, waiting for someone to bring her home, while the sound of war still raged beneath us.

43

Priest

The ambulance doors slammed shut with Blue inside, and the adrenaline that had carried me out of the warehouse started turning into something meaner.

Rescue had been one kind of terror. This was another. There was nothing to hit now, no door to breach, no target in front of me wearing my father’s face. There was only Blue in labor, pale with pain and still trying to hold herself together while I sat at her side and watched the medic glance between her face and the monitor like the numbers might decide our future before we reached the hospital.

She turned her head toward me when the contraction eased enough for breath.

“I’m not having this baby at Bay of Saints,” she said, voice thin but certain.

The medic looked up. “Ma’am, from the west edge of Blackstone Falls, Bay of Saints is the closest hospital.”

“No.” Blue swallowed hard and gripped the rail. “Wicker Falls. My hospital.”

“Blue,” I started, because the drive was longer and she had already been through too much.

Her eyes cut to mine. Tired. Pained. Unmoving. “That’s where I’m having our baby.”

I held her stare for half a beat and saw what I needed to see. This wasn’t stubbornness. It was control. Familiarity. A piece of safety she could still choose after everything else had been ripped away from her.

I nodded once. “Wicker Falls Memorial.”

The medic swore under his breath, then relayed the change.

Blue’s fingers found mine. “Lila and Evan can come in,” she said after another breath. “And you.”

Something in my chest gave way at that. Relief, maybe. Gratitude, definitely. I’d gone into that warehouse without knowing if I would get her back at all, and now she was still letting me stand beside her while our baby entered the world.

“Yeah,” I said, squeezing her hand carefully. “Try and keep me out.”