He stared down the engineers until they dispersed like a cloud of tiny little flies—when he’d hoped they’d be wasted enough to mouth off to him so he could indulge in the great joy of shoving his boot up an ass or two—and then he followed her inside and just like that, he was home.

There were a lot fewer Deacons in the dim interior than there had been ten years ago. None, in fact. No Priest behind the bar, scowling ferociously around a Marlboro Red and refusing to serve the dumbass tourists who staggered in, drunk off their asses and too stupid to notice that they weren’t in a safe place. Something that was also true of the Big Easy herself, the faithless bitch, but that didn’t seem to stop folks from swarming down to the city anyway, like they wanted to make themselves another crime statistic or sad story the ghost tour operators would embellish for tips.

Ajax could almost see the ghost of the old man down there at the far reach of the bar, could almost smell his cigarette smoke as the ceiling fans moved it around and made it a part of the humid Louisiana air. Fuck you, Priest, he thought ferociously. You weren’t supposed to die alone.

“I did it,” the girl with the perfect tits announced grandly to the mostly empty bar, because it was still early in the week and in the day, and only October besides. “I said I would do it and I did.”

She still had that sculpted back turned to him, a lush, supple thing with intricate angel wings tattooed on each of her shoulder blades. Girly ink, sure, but with a body like that, who was Ajax to question whether or not she was one of New Orleans’s resident saints? He could think of several ways he’d like to pray with a gritty little street angel like this one, and that was just his cock talking. His head had always been far more creative, even after zero sleep and a long, hot ride, to say nothing of the significantly less fun drive in from outside Baton Rouge. There wasn’t much left on this earth that Ajax feared, but only a dumbass rolled up into a city after a ten-year absence without his brothers at his back.

Ajax was a lot of things, including a little too hot for a stripper in a Vegas-style headdress at the moment, but he was no dumbass. Dumbasses tended to die ugly deaths in the places he’d been, this one included.

He moved to the bar, instinctively situating himself at the shortest part of its L, where he could keep his back to the mirrored wall and his eyes on the rest of the Priory, with those rolling doors pulled wide open to bring the hectic mess of Bourbon Street inside.

“I don’t get why you had to do it,” the current bartender said.

She looked cute and perky, like she’d gotten lost on her way to a sorority house at Tulane, which left Ajax completely cold. He missed the foul-mouthed, big-titted biker bitches and hot little sweet butts who’d worked here back in the day, all dressed in leather and attitude problems and visible ink. It caused him physical pain to think of the Priory—his Priory—as nothing more than a French Quarter tourist trap like that joke Pat O’Brien’s around the way, dispensing watered-down Hurricanes and bullshit to every imported frat boy in a fifty-mile radius.

“But,” Tulane continued with a blinding cheerleader’s smile that was completely out of place here to Ajax’s way of thinking, “I support your right to go topless in the middle of the Quarter if you feel like you have to, Sophie. You know that.”

Ajax went still. Very still. The way he’d learned to do in far-off jungles where the faintest twitch of a single muscle meant a blown-off head, at best.

No fucking way, he thought. And then again.

But he’d seen too much to believe in coincidences. What were the chances that another girl with the same name as Priest’s sweet little daughter—an actual Catholic schoolgirl ten years ago and in Ajax’s memory a fucking baby barely old enough to merit a training bra—would wander into the Priory and also happen to have a close relationship with the bartender? He stared at the golden hot pants and the angel wings. That ass. He ignored the roaring thing in him that urged him to clear the bar and put his hands on this girl he’d followed halfway across the city without ever seeing more of her face than a hint of jaw, a flutter of fake eyelashes—

Keep your hands to yourself, asshole, he told himself harshly, though in his head he sounded a lot like the ghost he still half-saw looming there in the shadows at the other end of the bar.

She turned then, displaying those perfect fucking tits, which should have been illegal on the daughter of the man Ajax respected above all others, and he took his instant, unmanageable hard-on as a personal affront to every oath he’d ever made in this sacred space.

“My daddy told me I could dress up like a drag queen and wander the streets of the French Quarter over his dead body,” Sophie Lombard said as she tugged off the glittery mask—and there was no doubt about it, goddamn it, it was her. “So it was now or never, really.”

Ajax knew that face, though he took the stripper cosmetics and the hooker lashes as another insult, when the face he remembered had been scrubbed clean and sweet and pure. And when she peeled the acrobatic headdress from her head and sent it skidding a few feet down the dull sheen of the bar, her long, dark, wavy hair tumbled down past her shoulders, a thick and shining rope of it he wanted to wrap around his hands while he took her—

Jesus Christ.

He stared at her, willing this to be some kind of homecoming-inspired hallucination, but no. He was sober at the moment, he hadn’t touched the funky stuff in years, and this was Sophie Lombard all grown up. She was a lush little package, all taut curves and a belly ring, just like a couple of his preferred wet dreams. She had the most perfect set of plump, round tits he’d ever seen, even with the stupid tassels jutting from them, and they definitely should not have been on display for the entire fucking city like that. Or ever. What the hell was the matter with her? More to the point, he absolutely could not fuck her in the Priory toilets, no matter what bad decisions his cock was agitating for even now.

A man did not fuck the daughter of his beloved father figure when said father figure’s body was barely cold. Even if the daughter in question was dressed for a long night on the pole and had basically just advertised that she was for sale to the better part of New Orleans.

Not in the toilets, anyway.

When she only slipped onto a barstool, making no attempt to cover herself or change what passed for her clothes, Ajax decided he’d had enough. It was high time he took control of this shit.

Before he lost what was left of his.

“Hey, Sophie,” he said. He didn’t have to raise his voice to command the attention of the entire bar. He saw her stiffen like she recognized his voice and he couldn’t deny that he liked that. He was never meant to go unnoticed, not here. Not in the only place he’d ever belonged. “Is that what you’re wearing to the funeral?”

She turned toward him slowly. So slowly he had a lifetime or two to remember her as a little girl. Sophie of the big, wide eyes and sparkly little laugh. Sophie in thick dark braids and skinned knees. Sophie, who Priest would have died to protect, which meant any of the brothers would have done the same. Sophie, who had never been meant for a sticky dive bar and a pair of pasties, no matter how hot she looked in both.

Sophie, who glared at him down the length of the bar with a notable lack of the respect Ajax was used to receiving, especially from soft, breakable females who usually purred and got silly when they took a good look at him.

“Oh, hey there, Sean,” she replied after a long moment, her green eyes cool and haughty, like she was a goddamned queen instead of a half-naked girl with a death wish, throwing around a name she knew better than to use. “Long time no see.”