Page 156 of Priest

Joker wanted fear.

He wanted us reactive. Defensive. Cornered.

Instead, he was going to get watched roads, full parking lots, community fundraisers, a freestanding ER, protected families, and a town that grew roots faster than he could cut them.

I had Blue. I had Little Jax. I had brothers at my back and something worth building in front of me.

Let Joker come hungry.

He could come for war.

We were done only surviving.

We were building what would outlast it.

Epilogue

Blue

The first thing I noticed about the house was how untouched it felt.

Not unloved. That would have suggested disappointment, and this place didn’t feel disappointed. It felt paused, as if it had been built by a man who knew how to provide for a future he had never quite believed would arrive.

The walls were painted. The floors were finished. Sunlight stretched across the hardwood in warm bands, spilling into rooms that had been waiting too long for noise. The kitchen had every practical thing a person needed and none of the small personal touches that made a place feel lived in. Even the bedrooms carried that same strange sense of readiness, like the whole house had been standing still until someone came along and made it matter.

Now it did.

Little Jax slept against my shoulder, heavy with that newborn weight that still startled me. His cheek rested against my collarbone, and every now and then his mouth moved in his sleep like he was searching for something even there. I stood in the middle of the living room with him tucked against me and looked around at the house Priest had owned for years without ever really living in it.

Something in me settled.

Not completely, and maybe not safely yet, but enough.

“Well?” Priest asked from behind me.

I turned.

He stood in the doorway from the kitchen with a box marked BABY STUFF in black marker, looking like he had been carrying pieces of our life from one place to another since sunrise and would gladly keep going until there was nothing left to move. He had changed into an old gray T-shirt somewhere in the last hour, and there was a smudge of dust near his jaw that he clearly didn’t know was there.

It made him look less like the president of a motorcycle club and more like what he was trying very hard to become in front of me.

A man bringing his family home.

“It’s weird,” I admitted.

His expression shifted just enough to tell me he had expected that answer. “Weird bad?”

“No.” I looked around again. “Weird like you had a whole house sitting here empty.”

His mouth twitched. “Wasn’t empty.”

I lifted an eyebrow.

“It had furniture.”

A laugh slipped out of me before I could stop it. Jax made a tiny protesting grunt against my shoulder, apparently offended by joy this early in life, and I rubbed a hand over his back until he settled again.

Priest crossed the room and set the box beside the couch. “You want me to take him?”