11. Delia
CHAPTER ELEVEN
DELIA
Isabel’s house is quiet after violence. That’s how I know she’s angry.
The staff move softly through the halls, eyes lowered, shoes making almost no sound against polished marble.
Doors close without latches clicking fully, and fresh flowers replace older ones before the petals have a chance to brown.
The house resets itself around the sins of the other night, smooth and perfect, as if blood is simply another inconvenience to be handled by competent hands.
I have lived in this silence for fifteen years. Tonight, it feels different.
Reva is alive somewhere beyond these walls, and Cal Boudreaux is in a hospital bed because I didn’t move fast enough.
Because I hesitated.
Because I spent half my life learning how and when to obey, and I still chose the wrong second to stop.
Little sister.
By a few minutes, but still. Reva will always be my little sister. I used to lord it over her when we were small, smug as a queen because I shot out of the birth canal first. I was older. I was the elder. The chosen one.
That joke curdles when I think of it now.
Chosen.
What a pretty word for being placed on the right side of the knife.
I adjust the bracelet over the bruises on my wrist and leave my room when the clock in the hall strikes eight.
Dinner is never skipped. Grief can wait. Fear can wait. Broken things can wait.
Isabel does not wait.
Once upon a time, I called her Nana.
Reva did too, though I doubt she remembers. That memory is gone somewhere, sunk beneath bayou and blood and whatever mercy the mind gives a child who has seen too much.
I was ten when Isabel told me to stop.
I remember it clearly. The morning light in the breakfast room. The smell of chicory coffee. The sugar crusted on my fingers from a pastry I had no appetite for. I called her Nana, soft and automatic, and her mouth tightened as if the word had left a stain on the tablecloth.
“I am not a nana,” she said, with a peevish wave of one jeweled hand. “Nanas rock babies and knit blankets. I am la jefa.”
The boss.
I called her Isabel after that. Or ma’am.
The corridor outside her office is dimmer than the rest of the house, lit by sconces shaped like lilies, their gold arms climbing the walls. Her door is open a few inches.
I slow before I can stop myself, listening. Her voice slips through the crack.
“I understand Boudreaux remains alive.”
A man answers, too quiet for me to recognize. “For now.”
“That family has a tiresome talent for surviving.”
My hand tightens around the edge of my bracelet.
Reva’s face flashes behind my eyes. Wet hair from the pool. Fury. Hurt. The slap I earned. The way she looked at me on the terrace when she realized I was trying to get her away from the chapel.
Reva, breathing.
Reva, standing in the wrong place again.
Isabel continues, calm and inexorable as Sunday Mass. “Send someone else to the hospital. Someone who understands subtlety and can blend in.”
“We lost the last one.”
“We lost a girl with ambition and poor instincts.” Paper rustles. “Do better this time.”
My stomach turns.
“Yes, Mother. And the parameters?”
“Boudreaux dies, but only after he tells us where they took the girl.”
The girl.
That’s all Reva is to her. No name. No blood. No proof of the child who once sat at Isabel’s table with sticky fingers and dark hair tied in two crooked bows.
Just…the girl.
“And if he doesn’t know?”
“Then figure out who does.” Her voice remains smooth. “Blackwood, Rousseau, Lafitte. They will take her somewhere they consider controlled. Men like that always mistake walls for power.”
“And Cross?”
The house seems to hold its breath with me. Isabel’s answer is very soft.
“Bring me Deacon Cross.”
My pulse hits once, hard.
“He may resist.”
“He betrayed me.” Her voice stays gentle. “Resistance would at least show he remembers he was trained properly. And do something about Noir. The others need to learn their lesson, as well.”
The floor creaks beneath my heel. The office goes silent.
I step forward at once, chin level, breath even, moving as if I have been walking the whole time. The door opens before I pass, Isabel standing inside the frame.
She’s wearing pale blue silk with her customary, traitorous string of pearls at her throat, her hair swept into a low twist. She looks rested. Beautiful. Untouched.
There’s never any blood on Isabel. That’s what her soldiers are for.
Her eyes move over me slowly.
“Delia.”
“Isabel.”
Her mouth curves. She likes hearing her own name from me. She likes knowing she trained Nana out of my mouth.
“You are early.”
“For dinner.”
“Hungry?”
“No.”
“Then punctuality must be your apology.”
I hold her gaze, tip my head just a bit, as if in confusion. “I didn’t realize I owed one.”
Her smile is small and almost kind. That almost is where she keeps the knives.
“You said your sister needed air,” she says.
“That is what she said, yes.”
“And after that?”
“I was going to bring her to the chapel, as you requested.”
“Were you?”
“Of course.”
“Before or after you walked her off the terrace?”
My skin prickles, but I keep my face still. Fifteen years in this house has taught me many useful things. How to lie without hurrying. How to breathe when watched. How to keep fear from showing its throat.
“She was upset,” I say. “Dragging her straight to the chapel would have made a scene.”
“You have never objected to scenes when they served you.”
“I object to sloppy ones.”
For a moment, her expression does not change.
Then she laughs softly.
“My darling girl.” She steps closer and brushes damp hair from my cheek. “You have always been cleverer than was good for you.”
I stand still beneath the touch.
Flinching has never saved me from anything.
“When you were twelve,” she says, “you understood obedience more clearly.”
When I was twelve, I still thought being chosen meant being loved.
I say nothing.
Her thumb settles under my chin, tilting my face toward the light. “You have been indulging old grief.”
“Reva is alive.”
“Yes.” Her eyes search mine. “This is a sentimental development for you.”
“She is my sister.”
“She was your sister. Then she became a lesson. Now she is a complication.”
The words land exactly where she aims them.
I think of Reva’s face through the pool water. Reva’s voice saying our parents would be disappointed in me. Reva on the terrace with Cal’s blood nearby and fear turning her young again.
“She was never a lesson,” I say. Dumb, but I can’t stand here and lie just to save myself. I’ve been doing it for fifteen years, and it’s exhausting. I’m exhausted. Every bone of me weeps with it.
The hallway goes colder. Isabel’s hand drops from my face.
For three seconds, she only looks at me. Then she smiles.
“Everything is a lesson—if you survive it.”
She turns toward the dining room. I follow because I’m still trained enough to know when a room has teeth and when they’re about to snap.
Dinner waits at the long table beneath a chandelier of blown glass roses. Two places are set. White china. Silver flatware. Crystal water glasses. A low arrangement of red roses cut short enough that nothing blocks Isabel’s view of me.
The staff serve soup first, tomato bisque with basil cream. I used to love this soup when I was little.
Isabel lifts her spoon. “Eat.”
The first taste is warm and smooth and nearly makes me gag. She watches, satisfied.
“Your sister has always had a talent for inspiring disorder,” she says.
I keep my spoon steady. “She was seven.”
“She is twenty-two now.”
“Same as me—I am aware. And still you want her dead.”
Isabel’s spoon pauses above the bowl. The staff vanish from the room without being dismissed. I hear the door close behind them.
“Careful, Delia,” she says.
I lower my spoon, tired of being careful, too. “You told them to kill Cal.”
“I told them to learn where Reva has been taken.”
“And then?”
“Then Calvin Boudreaux will cease being useful.”
The room blurs at the edges.
Cal. The man who took Reva. The man who kept her safe. The man I hated for years because he had given Reva the life I had been forced to imagine from this lonely hell.
He is real now. He is breakable.
Isabel sees that thought move through me. She sees everything she can use.
“You are fond of him?” she asks.
“I don’t really know him.”
“Fond of the idea of him, then.”
I reach for the water glass and take a careful sip. It gives my hand something respectable to do. Isabel sets her spoon down.
“You disappoint me when you forget where love leads.”
My throat tightens.
“To bargaining,” she says. “To softness. To daughters who believe blood exempts them from consequence.”
I know better than to ask which daughter she means. Maybe Reva. Maybe all of us.
Maybe me.
“I haven’t forgotten,” I say.
“Good.” She picks up her spoon again. “Then remember this too. Reva lives because too many people chose sentiment at the wrong moment. That will not happen twice.”
My chest goes still.
“And Deacon?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Her eyes lift. The mistake sits between us, small and fatal.
Isabel smiles with her mouth closed. “Ah.”
I hate that sound.
“You have questions about Deacon.”
“Nevermind.”
“Don’t get scared now, dear. Be bold.”
Heat crawls up my neck.
She leans back in her chair. “Deacon made himself useful for many years because he understood the difference between attachment and loyalty. Then your sister returned, and he mistook an old trespass for devotion.”
My hand tightens around the spoon.
Isabel’s gaze softens. I despise and fear her most when she looks gentle.
“You have survived because I allowed sentiment in controlled doses,” she says. “Do not confuse that mercy with permission.”
The warning slides under my skin.
She may kill Reva.
She may kill Cal.
She may kill Deacon.
She may kill me if I become too expensive to keep.
I have known that in pieces for years. Tonight, the pieces lock together.
The family she claims to protect has always been a room full of people waiting to learn which one will be sacrificed next.
I pick up my spoon. My hand does not shake. That is the only victory I am allowed at this table.
Isabel watches me take another bite.
“Good girl,” she says.
The soup turns to ash in my mouth, and I lower my eyes because that is what she expects. Under the table, hidden by linen and shadow, I press my bruised wrist hard against the edge of my chair until pain flashes bright and clean.
Reva is alive. Cal is alive. Deacon is loose.
Isabel wants them all brought to heel.
For the first time in fifteen years, I let myself think a thought that does not belong to her.
Over my dead body.