Page 141 of Priest

We sat there for a while, watching him breathe and flex and blink at the world like he was already annoyed to be in it.

Finally, Blue looked at me.

“What do we name him?”

I had thought about names before in abstract ways. Somewhere between fear and hope, between imagining a future and refusing to trust one. But now he was here, warm and loud and ours, and the answer felt simpler than I expected.

“Jackson,” I said first.

Her brows lifted slightly. “After Deacon.”

I nodded. “The man I trust most.”

She looked back down at the baby, then up at me again, understanding moving quietly through her face.

“And Ace,” she said softly. “He saved us.”

I let out a long breath.

Us.

Her and the baby. My woman and my son. The life I had almost lost before I even learned how to hold it right.

“Yeah,” I said. “Ace.”

Blue’s smile was tired and tender all at once. “Jackson Ace Adams.”

The name settled over the room and somehow fit.

I touched my son’s cheek with the back of my fingers and felt something in me go still at last. Not healed. There were too many bodies behind us, too much blood ahead, and too much of the past still clawing its way into the present.

But in that room, with Blue beside me and our son breathing softly between us, one thing in my life no longer felt uncertain.

He had come into the world in the middle of war.

He would be raised in spite of it.

44

Priest

Blue looked down at our son like she was still memorizing him, and I let myself watch her for longer than I meant to. The room was quiet, our boy warm and breathing between us, and for one dangerous moment it almost felt like the rest of the night had happened to somebody else. Then I saw the shift in her face, the way her fingers tightened slightly around the blanket, and I knew the quiet was over.

I stayed close enough that my leg touched the side of the bed, one hand resting near her knee, the other tracing the edge of the blanket wrapped around him. We hadn’t spoken much since Lila and Evan slipped out to give us space. We hadn’t needed to. There was too much in the room already. Shock. Relief. The ache of survival. The strange, fragile joy of a child arriving in the middle of all that ruin.

Blue adjusted our son against her chest and winced faintly. I saw the shift in her face before she said anything, the way her eyes went somewhere farther off than this room, farther off than the small warm weight in her arms.

I hated what I was about to do.

But Ledger was out there in that waiting room breaking apart one breath at a time, and none of us knew enough yet to give him anything except that his Old Lady was dead.

I leaned forward, resting my forearms on my thighs, and kept my voice as gentle as I could. “Blue.”

Her gaze lifted to mine.

“I know you’re tired. I know this is the worst damn time to ask you for anything else.” I looked down at our son, then back at her, guilt already sitting heavy in my chest. “But Ledger’s out there with nothing except the fact that his Old Lady is dead. Last any of us knew, Lena was at the clubhouse with Cage. We don’t know why she was in that warehouse, and you’re the only one who heard what happened before we got to you.”

Blue’s fingers tightened slightly around the blanket.