5. Deacon
CHAPTER FIVE
DEACON
Nash does not invite me into his private room.
He points.
That is the whole invitation.
I follow because I deserve whatever he feels the need to dish out. And I’ll take it—to an extent—because I deserve whatever hell’s about to rain down from Reva. Not Nash Blackwood.
The club has gone back to pretending nothing happened. Music moves through the walls. Glasses clink. Men laugh too loud because men often think volume is a kind of armor. Women in pretty dresses watch from corners with eyes that miss very little.
Noir Night survives on secrets.
Tonight, one of them walked across the floor in a black dress and called Reva by name.
I should have known Delia wouldn’t stay hidden forever. Nothing hidden stays buried in New Orleans. The ground is too wet for that. Dead things rise here. Rot floats. Bones work themselves loose and wait for someone unlucky enough to step on them.
Still. I wasn’t ready for Reva’s face. I’ve seen men die with less devastation in their eyes.
Nash shuts the door of his office behind us. The man has a space here, one upstairs—very bare bones, that one—and one at his home.
Once upon a time this was our office. It’s the same as it always was.
Dark wood. Locked liquor cabinet. Desk positioned so the man behind it sees the door, the window, and anyone stupid enough to think shadows make him safe.
Years ago, this room belonged to all of us in the way young men claim spaces they have not yet paid for.
We came through it loud and cocky, drunk on power we hadn’t fully earned and position we thought made us untouchable.
Now Nash stands between me and the door like I am the thing that needs containing.
Fair enough.
He does not sit.
Neither do I.
For a long moment, we just look at each other.
He hasn’t changed as much as he should have.
Older, yes. Harder in the jaw. More contained.
Less boy under the expensive suit. But the bones of the man are the same.
The same calm that used to make weaker men mistake him for merciful.
The same eyes that could weigh a body and decide whether it belonged in the room.
“You trying to kill her?” he asks.
No build-up. No throat clearing. No wasted breath.
I stare at him.
Of all the questions he could have opened with, that one is so far from what I was expecting it takes me half a second to understand he means it.
“What?”
His expression does not shift. “You heard me. Are you trying to kill her?”
The room goes very still.
I feel something old and ugly move beneath my ribs. It skims anger, skirting closer to disbelief at first. Then the anger slides in, cold enough to clarify everything around it.
“You think I’m trying to kill Reva?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
“No.” I take one step toward him. “You’re not asking. You’ve already built a story in your head and left just enough room for me to hang myself in it.”
His mouth tightens.
I laugh once. There is no humor in it. “Jesus Christ, Nash.”
“Answer.”
“No.”
“Say it clean.”
I look him dead in the face. “I am not trying to kill her.”
He watches me for another few seconds.
I let him. If he needs to measure my breathing, my pulse, the angle of my hands, he can waste his time doing it. I have lied to better men than Nash Blackwood about shit, but not about this. Never this.
“Everything I have done,” I say, closing my eyes against the tiny crack in my voice, “fucking everything, has been to keep that girl breathing. And you know that.”
“She isn’t a girl anymore. And I don’t know shit.”
The words hit wrong.
They shouldn’t. It is a fact. A very plain, ordinary one. Still, hearing him say it puts heat behind my eyes and violence in my hands.
“No,” I say. “She is not, in fact, a girl anymore.”
Nash’s gaze sharpens. Nothing gets past him when he’s looking for a reason to draw blood.
“I’m going to speak with her tomorrow,” I say.
“No.”
The answer is immediate. I almost smile.
“You misunderstand me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“No, you misunderstand me, because I am going to speak with Reva tomorrow.”
Nash moves then, slow and controlled, coming off the door to take one step toward me. “I reckon I’ll leave that up to Reva.”
“Reva doesn’t know enough to decide what she needs.”
The second the words leave my mouth, I regret them. Not because they are entirely untrue, but because they sound exactly like every bastard who ever decided something for her. Where she was going. What she was allowed to know. What she was allowed to survive.
Nash hears it too. His face goes colder.
“Careful.”
“I know what that sounded like.”
“Then don’t say it again.”
My jaw flexes. “She needs answers. Deserves them.”
“She needs a night without you forcing more blood down her throat.”
“She gets that tonight. And tomorrow?”
“If she wants to see you, she will.”
I step into his space.
There was a time when that would have been enough to start a fight. Maybe it still is. The old language remains in the body even after the friendship rots around it. He doesn’t move back. I don’t expect him to. Nash has always known how to turn stillness into a dare.
“If you stand between us,” I murmur, “there will be a problem, old friend.”
His brows lift slightly. “Is that right?”
“You don’t need to protect Reva from me, and you know it.”
“I watched her fall apart in the middle of my club because of you.”
“Because of Delia.”
“Because of secrets you kept.”
My teeth click together and I give him a breath of space. He isn’t wrong. That’s the inconvenient thing about Nash. He can be an arrogant, possessive bastard with an overdeveloped fondness for control, and still be standing on a fact sharp enough to cut.
“I have been protecting her her entire life,” I say.
Nash snorts. The sound is small. Dismissive. Designed to irritate.
It works.
“What exactly is this sudden interest in her, given all that protection?” he asks. “Aren’t you a little old for her?”
There it is.
I narrow my gaze and step in again, until only a few inches sit between us. “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”
Something flickers across his face. Recognition, maybe. He looks down for half a second, then back up with a slight shake of his head. His voice, when he replies, is quieter. Rougher at the edges.
“I took one fucking look at her and it was like a goddamn truck slammed into me.”
I hold his gaze for a long moment, then I step back, because I understand that. God help me, I understand it so well I nearly hate him less for saying it.
“Yeah,” I say. “Well.”
I walk around the desk and run a finger along its edge, my back to him.
“I used to send her letters when she was a kid. Absolutely nothing there, mind you, except making sure she was okay after all that shit went down. I just…” I stop, and my head drops back on my shoulders.
I stare at the ceiling for a long minute, the only sound in the room the hum of the fluorescents while I wrangle my thoughts.
I’ve agonized over this I don’t know how many days. How many nights, trying to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. It just…is. It just happened. It wasn’t, and then it was. It had nothing to do with age or anything other than who she was as an individual.
But it still made me feel like I should feel…wrong. And I don’t. And I don’t know how to feel about that.
“I never even clapped eyes on her from the time she was a seven-year-old child until she was an adult. In all those years, I never even saw her, not once. I wrote her letters, made sure Cal was taking care of her properly, made sure she was happy. That’s it.
It wasn’t until I decided to look in on her—visually check on her—when she was an adult—that everything…
fucking changed. And then someone may as well have jerked the damn rug from under my feet. ”
There’s a long beat of silence, during which I turn around. Nash studies me.
He wants to doubt it. I can see that. Wants the world cleaner. Wants me to be a villain he can put down and feel righteous about afterward.
I don’t blame him. I have wanted worse things.
“How old?” he asks.
“When?”
“When the rug got pulled.”
“Nineteen.”
His jaw tightens.
I smile thinly. “Don’t posture at me. I did not touch her. I did not speak to her. I did not insert myself into her life. I watched from a distance because distance was the only thing I trusted myself with.”
“That supposed to make me feel better?”
“No. It is supposed to make you informed.”
His nostrils flare. The old Nash would have swung by now. This one breathes through it. He has learned restraint. Or Reva has taught it to him. Either way, it looks uncomfortable on him.
“I guess I can understand that,” he says finally.
The concession costs him. I appreciate that more than I should. He turns toward the door, then stops with his hand on the knob.
“When she asks you what happened that night, you better think real hard before you decide what kind of lie sounds kindest.”
I say nothing. He opens the door.
“And if you hurt her because you’re too much of a coward to tell the truth,” he adds, looking back at me, “I’ll make whatever Mother Superior did to you look tender.”
Then he leaves, the door closing behind him with a quiet click. For a few seconds, I stand in the middle of his room and listen to the club breathe around me.
Mother Superior.
The name still has power in this city. They use it in whispers. In warnings. In prayers they don’t call prayers because criminals like to think they are too big for religion.
They are not.
They worship all the time. Money. Blood. Power. Fear. Themselves.
Mother Superior understood that better than anyone. She knew faith was just loyalty dressed in ritual. She knew pain could be made holy if you dressed it in candles and rules.
My back aches.
It has no reason to. The scars are old. The flesh healed years ago. Still, some wounds hear her name and remember the heat.
I cross to the liquor cabinet, key in the code to open it, and pour two fingers of Nash’s best bourbon into a glass.
I don’t ask permission. Fuck his permission.
The first swallow burns clean.
Nineteen.
The first time I allowed myself to lay eyes on Reva after that night, she was sitting at her cheap kitchen table in her Chicago apartment, her hair piled on top of her head and a pen caught between her teeth.
I had told myself it was a check-in.
That was all.
One of Cal’s usual security sweeps had bothered me.
A camera near the building entrance had gone down for thirty-three minutes.
Brief enough to be nothing. Long enough to be everything.
Cal handled it before I could even send word, but the itch stayed under my skin.
So I did what I had not allowed myself to do a single time over the years.
I looked.
The apartment feed, installed by Cal when she moved in, was somehow crystal clear and illegal, which described half my life at that point.
I expected an empty room. Maybe a glimpse of Cal’s latest rotation through the hallway.
Maybe Reva passing through with groceries, still a shape I filed away under childish duty and moved on from before the thought could become anything else.
Instead, she sat in front of a laptop wearing an oversized sweatshirt with the sleeves shoved to her elbows, her dark hair in a messy bun that looked one pencil away from collapse.
Papers spread across the table. Flash cards.
A textbook open beside a mug of coffee gone cold.
She chewed the end of a pen and glared at the screen as if the information had personally offended her.
I remember the stupid details.
The chipped blue polish on one thumbnail.
The fuzzy socks with little ghosts on them.
The way she mouthed words to herself while reading, then caught herself doing it and scowled like she had lost an argument with her own face.
The course was for EMT training. I knew that because the page title sat in the corner of the screen and because Cal had mentioned it in one of his clipped messages. She wanted to help people. He had sounded equal parts proud and terrified.
I should have closed the feed after confirming she was safe.
Instead, I watched.
She studied for seven minutes.
I counted because I am the kind of man who monitors the collapse of his own empire.
Seven minutes of focus before she tore a piece of notebook paper from the corner of a page, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it toward the trash can across the room.
It missed by a foot. She stared at it. Then at the trash can.
Then she whispered something I could not hear, though the shape of her mouth looked a lot like, “Pathetic.”
She made another ball. Missed again.
“Girllll,” she said to herself, louder this time, “that one’s dead, but sure, let’s see how many we can kill.”
I smiled. That was my first mistake. The second was staying for the show.
Reva tried four more shots. Missed three. Landed one by pure accident and threw both arms in the air like she had won a championship, acted like it was on life support, and proceeded to give it mouth to mouth.
Then she went back to studying.
For approximately five minutes.
After that, she picked up her phone.
TikTok, because apparently all roads to hell are paved with short-form video.
She scrolled with the grim commitment of a woman doing research and not at all avoiding responsibility.
A video made her laugh. Not a delicate laugh.
Not pretty. A full, loud, ridiculous burst that turned into a snort and then into something dangerously close to a hyena.
Someone upstairs pounded on the floor. Reva looked at the ceiling. Then she barked.
Actually barked. Sharp. Loud. Completely unrepentant.
I stared at the screen. Then I laughed too.
That was the moment the line moved.
No ceremony. No grand temptation. No wicked voice in my head telling me to cross it. Just a young woman in ghost socks, barking at her upstairs neighbor, and me realizing I had stopped seeing the child who survived.
She was alive.
Not an assignment. Not a secret tucked away between Cal’s reports and my old sins. Not a ward, though I had used that word in my head for years because it sounded clean enough to stand near.
Reva Leigh Hart was a woman.
Messy. Sharp. Funny in a way that made no sense. Studying to save lives with one hand while throwing paper balls like an enemy combatant with the other.
I shut the feed off.
Fast. Too fast, as if speed could somehow change my epiphany.
For weeks afterward, I did not look again unless I had a reason I could defend under torture. Building alarms. A stranger near her door. Cal asking me to check a license plate. I kept distance because distance was the only form of morality left to me. I told myself concern had limits.
It did. I simply did not like where mine had ended.
Because concern was no longer the thing I had to fear.