Dead Man Walking (The Fallen Men #6) - Giana Darling Page 0,178

get to the hospital.”

I sighed dramatically, but he ignored me as he walked through the long, swaying grass to cut straight to the parking lot.

It had been months since I’d been on the back of his bike. I missed it, but I loved the fact that Priest drove us in my pink 1982 Fiat 124 Spider. He didn’t give a crap what anyone thought of it, so he was completely unfazed by the idea of folding his long body behind the wheel and transporting us around in the pink car. Boner had made a joke about it once but met with Priest’s stone-cold stare, he hadn’t uttered one again.

Only when I was tucked in the passenger seat with my belt buckled and Priest behind the wheel did he finally look at me again like I was human. I didn’t take it personally. This was the makeup of his brain, to tackle problems systematically.

“If this is it, in a handful of hours you’ll have given me the greatest gift I’ve ever known and always feared,” he murmured as he squeezed my thigh before placing it on my headrest to check behind him as he reversed the car. “Thank you, mo cuishle.”

I patted his hard thigh, then gave it a reciprocal squeeze as I stared out the window to hide my happy tears.

* * *

* * *

Thirty-seven hours.

Of course, no child of Priest would be easy.

The little devil took his time, and nothing we did would rush him.

“He likes it in there, safe with you,” Priest guessed at one point as he mopped my sweaty brow and fed me ice chips with his fingers. “Don’t blame him. The world’s not an easy place.”

“You’ll protect them,” I said because I knew he would do anything and everything to make sure our baby had the best life possible, a different kind of life than Priest had suffered through.

He grunted, but there was a softening to his mouth as he unpeeled a strand of hair from my slick cheek.

The entire club was outside in the waiting room of St. Katherine’s, this time, waiting for a birth instead of a possible death. Loulou filtered in to hold my hand and make me laugh to take my mind off the pain and Phillipa too, though she was nervous around Priest even though she tried not to be. We were working on our relationship—my mum, sister, and I—being open and honestly communicative for the first time in our lives. It wasn’t easy, but it was worth it in the end to try to earn each other’s love and loyalty instead of just assuming it by proxy.

At thirty-six hours, Dr. Rosen declared we needed to do an emergency C-section because my cervix couldn’t seem to dilate enough, and the baby was in distress.

Priest almost knocked over the table of medical instruments in his haste to get me out of the private room and into surgery.

“I’m scared,” I confessed as they set me up in the operating room, a sheet veiling my belly from sight. Priest’s hand was gripped in mine so tightly, I might have been causing him physical pain, but of course, he didn’t say a thing.

He leaned close to my face in his blue scrubs, beard obscured by a mask, a cap over his long, thick mane of copper hair so his eyes were all I could see. Those pale green eyes ringed in a thick black circle I’d learned was called a limbal ring.

“You are not weak,” he reminded me, voice full of vigor as if he could pass the strength of his conviction to me through tone alone. “You never were and now, after everythin’, you’re even stronger. You’re gonna do this, my Bea. You’re gonna bring our baby into this world.”

I clung to his hand, to his gaze, the entire time they operated.

And then, twenty minutes later, the doctor declared we had a baby.

A baby boy.

I was crying before I even saw him because of the look on Priest’s face. He could see beyond the veil where I couldn’t, his gaze fixed on a single point that must have been our baby in the doctor’s arms.

“Oh,” he said, a single, small exhale of sound.

But that one syllable was so profound, a tiny halleluiah.

The entire expanse of Priest’s hard featured, perpetually scowling face was alit with love, palpable love and awe, utter worship.

“He’s…” he tried to explain to me as they cleaned and checked baby McKenna’s vitals. He shook his head, unable to find the