Page 37 of Priest

The world does not stop. It tightens until every sound has an edge.

Blood streaks his temple and runs dark into the collar of his torn shirt. His jaw is clenched like he is holding himself together through pure stubbornness, lashes fluttering, breath shallow in a way that turns my stomach cold. I know that face. I know the hard set of that mouth. I know the look of a man trying to stay conscious because surrender feels too much like losing.

“Deacon,” I say, the name leaving me before I can stop it.

At the exact same moment, Lila’s voice tears through the bay. “Jackson!”

We do not stop the gurney. We do not even slow it. Still, our eyes snap to each other across his body, shock cutting clean through the training. “Jackson?” I ask, disbelief threading the word because that name means something to her, something I have no room to understand.

“Deacon?” she fires back, just as stunned, her face pale under the harsh lights.

The questions collide between us, unanswered and impossible, before the moment is swallowed by the blood pouring through my hands. His chest barely rises. A faint bubbling sound catches at the corner of his mouth, pink and wrong, and whatever confusion just cracked open between Lila and me gets shoved into a box I cannot afford to touch.

“Trauma bay two,” I order. “Move.”

A hand catches my arm before I can clear the doors.

Strong. Familiar. Possessive in a way the hospital does not recognize and will not tolerate.

“Blue, what the fuck?”

I turn, and the breath punches out of me in one hard rush.

Priest stands in the ambulance bay wearing blood-spattered leather and road grime, his face scraped raw near one cheekbone, his eyes wild enough to make him look less like a president and more like a man dragged out of a wreck by his own rage. For one beat, everything I buried under work and distance tries to rise. His voice. His hands. The shape of him in my doorway, in my bed, in all the empty places I told myself I had sealed shut.

Then Deacon jerks on the gurney, and the monitor shrieks.

The past can bleed later.

Priest’s grip tightens. “Where have you been? You disappear, and now you’re here? What the fuck is going on?”

There are a hundred answers stacked behind my teeth, each one sharper than the last. None of them belong in this hallway. I wrench my arm free hard enough to make his fingers slip.

“Your brother is bleeding out on my gurney,” I say, and my voice cuts through him cleaner than any scream would have. “If you want him alive, you will get out of my way.”

His jaw locks. For a second, he looks like instinct might win over sense, like he might reach again because Priest has never understood what to do with something he cannot hold. I step closer instead of back, letting him see every inch of the doctor standing between him and the man dying behind me.

“Not here,” I say, low enough that only he gets the blade of it. “Not now. Whatever you think you’re owed, it waits.”

Something in him stills. His gaze snaps past me to the gurney, to the blood, to Deacon’s slack hand hanging over the side. The demand drains from his face and leaves terror behind.

I turn away before it can touch me. “Move,” I order again, and this time the room obeys.

The trauma bay swallows us in hard light and stainless steel. Lila is already back in sync with me, hands steady even though her eyes keep dragging to Deacon’s face like every second costs her. Evan slides in on my other side, gloved and sharp, reading the room faster than most people breathe.

“Well,” he says under his breath, gaze flicking from me to Lila and then toward the glass where Priest has followed as far as security will allow, “this feels wildly personal.”

“Later,” I snap.

“Favorite word of emotionally damaged medical professionals everywhere,” he mutters, but his hands are already working.

“Cut the shirt,” I say. “Leave anything leather until I see where the wounds track. Two large-bore IVs, type and cross, massive transfusion protocol. Get blood moving now.”

The room snaps around my voice. Scissors bite through fabric. Gauze blooms red before it even settles. Deacon’s skin is too pale under the grime, his pulse too weak beneath my fingers. Lila leans across him, pressing hard where I tell her, her mouth flattened into a line that says she is one breath away from breaking something and has chosen not to.

I can feel Priest through the glass without looking. He is a weight in the room, all violence held back by walls and men who would be stupid to test him. Every instinct in him is probably screaming for answers, for control, for someone to blame. I have nothing to give him. Not now. Not while his brother’s blood is soaking through my gloves.

“Chest is ugly,” Evan says quietly.