6. Deacon
CHAPTER SIX
DEACON
I finish the bourbon and set the glass down on Nash’s desk before the memory can drag me any further.
Too late.
The door opens behind me. I don’t bother turning. Only one person in this building would enter this room without knocking while Nash is gone and expect to remain alive.
“You fucking…liar,” Delia says.
Her voice is steady. Her breathing is not.
I turn then.
She stands inside the doorway with one hand still on the knob, her face pale beneath the club makeup, tear tracks cutting through the powder on her cheeks. She has fixed the rest of herself. Hair smooth. Dress straight. Mouth composed.
The eyes ruin it. They are too much like Reva’s tonight. That is cruel of God, if he is still taking credit for anything.
“Nash told me you were here,” she says.
“Did he?”
Her mouth tightens. “He told me to stay away.”
“Yet here you are.”
“Apparently I learned from the best.”
The words cut, though not as clean as she wants them to.
There was a time Delia used to look at me like I had answers. Like I had dragged her out of hell instead of just delivering her to a different room inside it. That time did not last long. She grew up. Smart girls do.
“What do you need?” I ask.
Her chin lifts. “Why is Reva here?”
“I don’t know every step that brought her to New Orleans.”
“Don’t do that.”
The echo of Reva almost makes me smile.
Almost.
Delia sees it and goes colder. “Why now?”
“She came looking for me.”
Her face flinches before she can stop it.
“Why?”
“I think because she remembered my name.”
Delia turns away, one hand going to her mouth. She does not cry. She has already cried somewhere else and punished herself for it. Now she presses her knuckles to her lips and drags in one careful breath through her nose.
“She was dead,” she says. The words come out flat.
“No.”
“She was dead as far as I knew.”
That is different and also true.
I say nothing.
Delia looks back at me. “Did you know?”
I hold her gaze.
Her laugh is small and awful. “Of course you did.”
“I knew she lived.”
Her eyes flash. “For how long?”
“Since that night.”
For a second, all the blood leaves her face.
Then she crosses the room and slaps me.
It is a good slap. Clean. Hard enough to turn my head.
I let it.
She looks more shocked by that than by the sound of her palm cracking across my face.
“You knew,” she says. “You knew she was alive this whole time.”
“Yes.”
“And you never told me.”
“No.”
Her hand shakes at her side. She curls it into a fist and uncurls it again. “Why?”
Because you were watched.
Because the walls around you had ears and teeth.
Because grief made you useful to them, and hope would have made you dangerous.
Because I was a coward.
None of those answers are clean enough to hand her.
“She was safer dead,” I say. “You both were.”
Delia recoils as if I slapped her back.
“And she…she thought I was dead. Do you even hear yourself?”
“Every day.”
“No. You don’t.” Her voice cracks, then flattens around the fracture. “You do not get to decide that. You do not get to stand here and tell me that my sister was safer dead when I spent fifteen years thinking she was in the ground.”
“She was never in the ground.”
“Well, to me, she was! We both were!”
I nod once, suddenly exhausted. That’s the worst thing I can do, apparently. Delia’s face twists.
“Don’t…just fucking…agree with me! That doesn’t make it right!”
“I have never claimed that it was the right thing to do, Delia. Just…necessary.”
She moves farther into the room, though she keeps distance between us.
Delia has learned lessons Reva has yet to learn.
I’ll have to make sure she learns them, and fast, now that she’s here.
Never stand too close to a man you’re not prepared to kill.
Never put your back to the only door. Never let tears make your throat soft.
“Does she know?” Delia asks.
“Know what?”
“That you knew. That Cal knew. That everyone she trusted built a grave around her and called it protection.”
“Not all of it. But she’s going to soon.”
Delia closes her eyes.
The tear that slips out seems to offend her. She wipes it away hard enough to redden the skin beneath her eye.
“She looked at me like I was supposed to run into her arms.”
There’s bitterness there.
Guilt too, buried under it but breathing.
“She thought you were dead, Dee.”
“So did I. Her, I mean. I just…don’t understand why.” Delia looks at me with a mixture of defiance and brokenness.
I run a hand across the back of my neck. The truth has been rationed to all of us in different portions. It should not surprise me that she was starved too. I didn’t have much contact with Delia beyond seeing her around Mother Superior’s compound.
“What did they tell you about her?” I ask.
Her jaw tightens.
“Delia. I can’t tell you the truth if I don’t know what lies you’ve been told.”
She looks toward the closed door. “I was told that bad guys had killed my sister…Daddy…they shot Mommy. That Reva had died. I asked about my best friend and my cat and they were confused, so I stopped asking. I think they thought I was confused…making things up. They said you searched and everyone was accounted for. That there was nothing to recover. That…that grief was a privilege we could not afford.”
Mother Superior’s phrasing, if not her exact words. My stomach churns with a familiar, useless fury.
“It made sense.”
“I was seven.”
The room goes quiet.
I look at her then. Really look.
Not at the weapon she became. Not at the woman who knows how to walk through Noir Night with a straight back and a cold mouth. At the child she was when we carried her out. At the girl who had blood on her dress and asked for her sister until her voice broke.
Seven. Reva’s twin—fraternal, but still so similar.
Old enough to understand the shape of death.
Young enough to believe adults when they tell you where to put it.
“I didn’t know what they had told you,” I say.
Her laugh is empty. “Well. Add it to the list of things you didn’t know while knowing everything.”
Fair.
I move to the desk and pour another bourbon. I do not drink it. I hold the glass because my hands want something to do and there are too many breakable things in this room that belong to Nash.
Delia watches the motion. “You need to get rid of her.”
“No.”
The answer is too fast for diplomacy.
Delia’s face hardens. “Send her away.”
“No.”
“She can’t be here.”
“She’s here already.”
“Then make her leave.”
“She’s not a package I can redirect.”
“Don’t get clever with me.” She steps closer, anger finally breaking through the trained smoothness. “You think I don’t know what happens now? You think I don’t know what her showing up means?”
I set the glass down.
“What do you think it means?”
“It means people will start asking questions.”
“They already are. She knows she’s here already, Dee.”
“It means old files get opened.”
“They should have been opened years ago.”
“It means she’ll dig until she finds something she can’t survive.”
“She has survived more than you know.”
Delia’s eyes flash. “No. She hasn’t. She hasn’t survived nearly enough.”
There it is.
I roll my lips inward, tasting bourbon. I wouldn’t call it hate, or rage, or anything kin to that. Not exactly.
It’s a wound with teeth.
I let the silence sit because she needs to hear what she just said. Her mouth trembles. She looks away.
“She had Cal,” she says, quieter.
“She did.”
“She had school.”
“Yes.”
“She had a life.”
I say nothing.
The room does not forgive the sentence. It repeats it back at us in the hum of the air conditioner, the muffled bass through the wall, the little clink of ice settling in the glass I have not touched.
“She had a life,” Delia says again, and this time the anger in it cracks wide enough for grief to show. “And I’m glad. God help me, I’m glad. But I hate her for it, too, and I hate myself for that, so if you want to judge me, get in line.”
“I’m not judging you.”
“Why not? You judge everyone.”
“I assess risk. There’s a difference.”
She sideyes me, lip curling. “You have to send her away.”
“I told you no.”
“You owe me.” The words come out before she can stop them.
I look at her. She looks back, breathing hard now, cheeks flushed, eyes bright.
“You owe me,” she repeats, and this time she means to say it. “For every year. For every lie. For every moment you let me believe she was dead. For every time I stopped asking because it hurt too much to hear the answer. You owe me this.”
Something old and tired presses behind my ribs.
“Yes,” I say.
She blinks.
“I owe you,” I say. “I owe Reva. I owe your mother. I owe the dead. I owe debts that will not fit inside the rest of my life.”
“Then pay one.”
“I can’t.”
“Won’t.”
“Can’t.” My voice hardens. “It’s too late to just send her away.”
Fear moves across her face before anger covers it. “What does that mean?”
“It means she came into Noir. She’s been hunting for me. She found you. Nash has claimed interest. Shiloh and Ever won’t step aside. Cal will hear about tonight by morning if he hasn’t already. Too many people have seen her face.”
Delia swallows. “And?”
“And when the wrong person puts the right pieces together, there’s no sending her anywhere far enough.”
Her gaze holds mine. She understands more than I want her to. Less than she needs to.
“What pieces?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I am not telling you anything you can’t safely carry.”
“I have carried worse.”
“You don’t know half of what I’ve carried.”
“I know enough to wish I had carried more of it for you.”
That stops her. The anger does not leave her face, but it loses its footing for a second.
“Please stop,” she says.
“All right.”
“No, I mean don’t do that. Don’t be kind now. I don’t know what to do with that from you.”
I nod.
She wipes at her face again, angry at the tears, angry at me for seeing them, angry at herself for having them.
Good.
Anger will keep her upright for a little longer.
“Does she know about…Mother Superior?” Delia asks.
“Some.”
“Does she know…?”
“No.”
Delia’s breath catches and she casts her gaze to the ceiling. “You cannot let her find out.”
“I am aware.”