© 2026 D.D. Joaquin. All rights reserved.
Hospitals had a way of making even the hardest men look temporary.
I hated that before I even stepped into Deacon’s ICU room. Hated it when the doors opened. Hated it when the smell hit. Hated it when the machines started their steady little chorus like a body could be argued into staying by enough wires and enough noise. Priest was beside me, broad and silent in that way he got when whatever he felt had gone too deep to waste on talking, and I already knew from the set of his shoulders that he was carrying guilt around like a loaded weapon. He wasn’t the only one.
The room was too clean for what had happened to him.
That was my first thought when I saw Deacon in that bed again. Not because the bruises were gone. They weren’t. His face still looked like hell. Skin washed out. Mouth too still. Bandages where there should not have been bandages. Tubes feeding into him. Machines breathing certainty into a room that didn’t have any. It was the kind of sight that made something primitive in me want to start breaking things just so the world matched the feeling in my chest.
Deacon had always taken up space like he didn’t need permission for it. Even standing quiet, he was solid. Grounded. The kind of man who made chaos think twice before getting too close. Seeing him laid out flat, held together by stitches and stubbornness and whatever bargain his body was making with the universe, unsettled me in ways I didn’t have language for and didn’t especially want any.
Then I realized Priest and I weren’t alone.
She stood at the foot of the bed with a chart in her hand, back straight, expression locked down a little too tight to pass for casual. Scrubs. Hair pulled back. Eyes sharp enough to cut. I recognized her a second before Priest did, not because I knew her name yet, but because I knew that look. It was the look of somebody trying to be professional while standing too close to personal ruin.
She looked up when the door slid shut. “Oh. I was just checking on him before my shift.”
Her voice was steady. Her fingers on the clipboard weren’t.
“How is he?” Priest asked.
“Vitals are steady,” she said, and she gave the kind of answer medical people give when they know the truth matters but so does not sending people into a panic spiral they can’t do anything with. “He made it through the night. That was the big hurdle. Now it’s day by day.”
She glanced toward the clock like she wanted escape to become an option through sheer will. “I should…”
“Wait.”
Priest’s voice wasn’t hard, but it carried enough weight to stop her. She looked back at him, and I watched the moment he saw what I’d already clocked. The distance between her and the bed wasn’t distance. It was attachment pretending it had boundaries.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
There was a beat too long before she answered. “Lila.”
That landed somewhere in the room and changed the shape of it.
I looked at Priest. He looked at Deacon. Something clicked in his face slow and ugly, like a lock turning after years of rust.
“Lila,” he said again. “Deacon knew a Lila once. Talks about her all the time. The memory of her got him through some rough days.”
The nurse mask slipped right off her then.
Not all the way. She didn’t lose it. Women like her never fully did. But heat flashed through her eyes fast enough to light the whole damn room. “Yeah?” she snapped. “Maybe she shouldn’t have been just a memory.”
I kept still.
Priest lifted his hands a little, the closest he ever came to an apology before he knew if one would be accepted. “I didn’t mean…”
The door opened behind us before he could finish.
“Well,” a male voice said, bright as sin in a room that had no use for bright, “Blue told me I’d find you here before shift.”
We all turned.
He stepped into the room like it belonged to him, which should’ve irritated me more than it did. Scrubs. Messy blond hair like he’d run his hands through it too many times and decided that counted as effort. Blue eyes too open for a place like this. A grin balanced somewhere between charming and inappropriate, like he knew exactly how much trouble he was and had made peace with it years ago.
Then he saw me and Priest.
“Oh,” he said, and that grin kicked a little wider. “Hey. You again.”
Lila closed her eyes like she was already regretting whatever came next. “Evan…”
“President biker guy is back,” he went on cheerfully, looking straight at Priest before his gaze slid to me with absolutely no hesitation and no proper sense of self-preservation, “and he brought hunky biker guy with him.”
I went still.
Not outwardly. I’d had too much practice for that. But something inside me locked up hard enough to hurt.
Priest shifted beside me. I felt it more than saw it. Not surprise exactly. Interest. The bastard noticed everything when it amused him.
Evan leaned in just a fraction, eyes flicking between us with the kind of curiosity most people had enough sense to hide. “Okay, real quick. Are you guys here to say goodbye, or threaten him back to consciousness?”
That got me.
Not much. Just enough of a choke on a breath that I had to clear my throat and pretend it was nothing. The room was too damn heavy, and he’d walked in and sliced a hole in it without ever quite crossing the line into disrespect. That should not have been possible. It was anyway.
Lila caught his sleeve and tugged. “Behave,” she murmured. “You’re in front of bikers and a coma patient.”
Something in me gave before I could stop it, and a snort slipped out.
Small. Barely there.
Still there.
I schooled my face immediately, but not before Lila’s eyes cut to me with sharp surprise. Evan caught it too. Of course he did. That grin of his warmed at the edges like he’d just found a private victory and intended to keep it.
Jesus Christ.
Lila tugged him toward the door. “We’re going to be late.”
He let her pull him, but he looked over his shoulder before he left. Smiled. Lifted a hand in a little wave like we were all standing around a barbecue instead of a hospital bed. “Bye.”
Then he was gone.
The room sealed up behind him, quiet folding back into place like it resented being interrupted.
I stared at the door a second longer than I should’ve.
Not because I had anything to say. Because I didn’t, and that unsettled me more than if I had. Men like that usually sorted themselves out fast in my head. Too loud. Too flirtatious. Too easy. I had categories for people. Uses. Threat levels. Soft spots. Angles. This one walked in laughing and somehow didn’t fit anywhere I wanted him to.
Priest looked at me.
I shrugged because there wasn’t another move available that didn’t make me look like I’d just been caught doing something embarrassing. “What?”
He didn’t answer.
I turned back to Deacon and let the humor drain right out of me.
Man, he looked bad.
That was the truth of it, stripped clean. No dramatic language. No pretty framing. Deacon looked like a man who had come too close to not making it, and my chest had been tight since the second I saw him. Tighter now, after a laugh I hadn’t wanted loosened something that had probably been better left locked down.
“Man,” I said quietly, because the words came before I could dress them up. “He looks bad.”
“Yeah,” Priest said.
I stepped closer to the bed. Close enough to hear the machine breathing for him. Close enough to see bruising along his jaw I hadn’t noticed from the door. Deacon had always been one of those men it was easy to assume would survive anything. Not because he was reckless. Because he was too hard to imagine losing. Some people become fixed points in your head without permission. Deacon had done that to me years ago.
I folded my arms, then unfolded them, then gave up and rested two fingers against the bed rail because I needed some place to put my hands that wasn’t somebody’s throat. “I’ve never been this worried about a brother,” I admitted, and the roughness in my own voice irritated me on principle. “Not ever.”
Priest’s hand landed on my shoulder. Heavy. Steady. Nothing performative in it.
“I know.”
We stood there for a minute without saying anything else. The ICU had a way of making every thought feel louder than it should. Mine kept circling in ugly, unhelpful patterns. Deacon on the road. Deacon going down. Deacon in that bed. And under all of it, against my better judgment, some bright-mouthed nurse with no sense of caution and a smile that had no business lodging itself anywhere inside my head.
I exhaled hard through my nose.
Priest glanced at me again. “What.”
I shook my head once and looked at Deacon because that was easier than looking at him. “Did I ever tell you how I met this idiot?”
That pulled the corner of Priest’s mouth just enough to count. “No. But I’m guessing you’re about to.”
I shifted my weight and let my gaze drift to the ceiling for half a second, mostly because if I looked at Deacon too long while I said it, whatever was sitting in my throat was going to get worse instead of better.
“First deployment,” I said. “Different units, same forward operating base. I’m fresh out of intel school and still dumb enough to think rules are optional if you’ve got the skill to get around them. Deac here was already built like a damn problem and had that face he gets when the world’s annoyed him just by continuing to exist.”
Priest huffed a laugh.
“I’m outside the mess hall with a drive I wasn’t technically supposed to have, trying to crack encryption that absolutely did not want cracking. Got wires everywhere. Laptop balanced wrong. Running on caffeine and spite. Whole setup looked like I was either about to save the day or blow us all to hell.”
“Probably both,” Priest muttered.
I ignored him. “Then this asshole walks up, looks over my shoulder like I invited him, and says, dead serious, ‘You’re gonna blow something up if you keep tapping it like that.’”
Priest actually smiled at that. Small, but real.
“I told him if it blew up, at least it’d be interesting.” I shook my head, remembering the way Deacon had stared at me after that. Flat. Unimpressed. Like he’d already decided I was too much work and was annoyed by the fact he was going to deal with me anyway. “Five minutes later the generator in our section trips. Whole damn place goes dark. Alarms start screaming.”
Priest looked at me. “You break it?”
“Not because of me,” I said automatically. “This time.”
He snorted.
“I’m under the table rerouting power when I feel somebody grab the back of my vest and yank me out so hard my shoulder nearly comes out of socket. I’m cussing, trying to twist around, ready to start a fight on principle, and there he is. Deacon. Dragging me across the floor while I’m yelling about unsecured cables and how I was this close to fixing it.”
My mouth twitched despite myself.
“He shoves me behind cover, hands me his rifle, and tells me if anything comes through that door that isn’t friendly, pull the trigger.”
Priest’s brows went up. “He gave you his rifle?”
“Yep.”
That part still got me, even now. “Didn’t know my name. Didn’t know if I could shoot straight. Didn’t know anything except I was there and that apparently made me his problem.”
The machine beside the bed kept up its rhythm.
I looked at Deacon’s face and felt my chest tighten again, but gentler this time. Not panic. Something older. More rooted.
“When everything settled, generator came back, alarms shut up, whole place stopped trying to have a stroke, he looked at my setup and said, ‘You broke it, you fix it. I’ll stand here.’”
Priest went quiet.
“So I fixed it.” I rubbed at the back of my neck. “Took me three hours. He stayed the whole time. Didn’t say much. Didn’t ask what I did or who I was or why I’d gotten myself half-buried in cables like some kind of feral goblin. Just stood there. Every time somebody walked by, he looked at them like they might be trouble.”
A faint smile tugged at Priest’s mouth. “Sounds right.”
“Yeah.” My voice came quieter than I intended. “That was kind of his thing. He never asked to be your brother. Just decided he already was and acted accordingly.”
I reached out and touched two fingers to the bed rail again.
“When he wakes up,” I said, because I refused every other version of that sentence on sight, “I’m telling him he still owes me an apology for that vest. Thing never fit right again.”
Priest nodded once. “He’ll like that.”
Maybe.
I hoped so.
The room settled around us again after that, but it felt a little less like it was trying to crush my ribs. Not better. Not safe. Just bearable enough to stand in. I kept my hand near the rail another second, then let it drop and stepped back.
And because apparently the universe had decided Deacon nearly dying wasn’t enough trouble for one chapter of my life, my mind slid back to the door opening. To the blond nurse in scrubs. To that grin. To the way he’d looked at me without the usual hesitation people had around men like us.
Hunky biker guy.
Christ.
I shoved the thought down so fast it almost made me dizzy.
Not because it mattered.
Because it didn’t.
Or at least that was what I told myself while I stood beside Deacon’s hospital bed, listening to the machines keep time, with the echo of a reckless stranger’s laugh still caught somewhere under my skin.