Page 64 of Priest

I haven’t seen Sadie since the day I went to Blue’s. Since the moment the truth clicked into place and I realized how carefully that conversation had been staged. Sadie knew exactly where Blue would be. She knew what to say. She knew which words would cut deepest, and I’ve spent enough years around manipulation to know the difference between a woman stumbling into damage and a woman aiming for it.

She didn’t stumble.

She orchestrated it.

I told Blue she’d pay for that. I meant it, but the question isn’t whether Sadie answers for what she did. The question is how, because Sadie is Cain’s daughter, and that fact sits in my chest like unfinished business with old blood dried around the edges.

Cain kept me alive when I was a kid who didn’t know how to sleep without one eye open. He fed me when pride would’ve let me starve and taught me how to breathe through the rage before it could choke me out. In Joker’s world, fear was currency. Control was law. My father didn’t raise children. He sharpened weapons and called the ones who survived strong.

I spent my childhood learning what power looked like in the hands of a monster. A door slamming meant somebody was about to hurt. A man smiling could be worse than a man yelling. Love, if you were stupid enough to call it that, always came with a price.

Cain was the only man in that world who ever looked at me like I was still a boy underneath all the damage Joker kept trying to carve into me. He wasn’t soft. None of us were. But he never treated cruelty like a lesson I was supposed to be grateful for, and when I thought rage was the only thing keeping me alive, Cain put a hand on my shoulder and told me to hold on.

So when Cain died, whatever he left behind came with strings.

Including her.

I told myself bringing Sadie into Saints territory was about protection. About keeping her out of Joker’s reach. About honoring a debt I never asked for but still owed. I told myself a lot of things because that’s what men do when guilt starts wearing the same face as obligation.

But debts rot if you let them sit too long.

Sadie crossed a line she doesn’t get to pretend she didn’t see, and the longer I turn it over in my head, the more I hate the shape of it. Do I confront her now and risk tearing open something that’s already bleeding? Or do I wait long enough to see if that manipulation was instinct or intent?

Because if it was intent, there are consequences.

I built Saints because I didn’t want Joker’s blood to be prophecy. I didn’t want his club. Didn’t want his rules. Didn’t want to look in the mirror one day and see the monster he spent my childhood trying to create. Every decision I’ve made, every line I’ve drawn, every rule I’ve wrapped around myself came from that fear. Don’t own what you love. Don’t take what hasn’t been given. Don’t let power become appetite.

Then I broke into Blue’s apartment with dinner in my hands and good intentions dressed over the bones of something ugly.

That truth hasn’t left me alone either.

Cain might’ve saved me once, but Cain isn’t here anymore, and Blue paid the price for Sadie’s game. She also paid for mine.

I look down at Deacon, at the slow rise and fall of his chest and the steady insistence of machines doing what bodies sometimes can’t. Ink shifts against the wall, quiet as ever.

“You’re thinkin’ loud,” he murmurs.

“Yeah,” I say, eyes still on my brother. “I know.”

I stay where I am in my head because some reckonings need timing, and some debts don’t get forgiven just because the man who created them is dead.

Deacon lies exactly as he has since the night he was brought in, still except for the staccato rise and fall of his chest beneath the sheet, each breath forced into a rhythm his body hasn’t taken back for itself yet. His jaw is set like he might wake up angry about all of it. Stable, the doctors keep saying. Stable like that’s a destination instead of a holding pattern.

Lila comes in late, always after her shift, always quiet. At first, I thought it was coincidence. Now I know better.

She never announces herself. She slips in, nods once in our direction, and goes straight to the bed. She washes her hands with that careful, automatic precision medical people seem to carry in their bones, then sits and takes Deacon’s hand like she’s done it a hundred times before. She doesn’t perform grief. She simply sits with it, steady enough to make the room feel less empty.

Ink and I have grown used to it. We don’t comment. We don’t fill the space. We let the room belong to her.

Tonight feels no different at first. She comes in with her hair pulled back, exhaustion written into the lines around her eyes, her scrubs creased from too many hours on shift. After she washes her hands, she settles beside him and takes his hand, thumb resting just beneath his knuckles.

Minutes pass.

The machines hum. The IV drips. His chest rises and falls with mechanical patience.

I catch myself watching her more than him, the way she doesn’t lean forward or close her eyes or make a show of hurting. She just sits there, steady as a post driven into the ground, holding on to a man who left a wound in her life long before Dead Man’s Hand tried to finish the job.

Then she looks up.