12. Nash
CHAPTER TWELVE
NASH
NASH
From the street, Isabel del Rosario’s house looks peaceful. That’s the first lie.
The second is that it looks like a home.
Gas lamps burn behind black iron. Pale columns rise from a deep porch wrapped in shadow, and the oak trees along the walk hang heavy with moss, their branches cutting the moon into small, broken pieces.
Every window glows with muted shades of gold, soft enough to suggest dinner parties, old money, women in silk moving from room to room with nothing more dangerous than gossip in their mouths.
I know better.
A house like this is a weapon with shutters.
The front gate is theater. The flower beds are sight lines.
The magnolias near the east wall have been trimmed high to clear a shooter’s view from the second floor.
A camera sits hidden inside the filigree above the pedestrian gate, another in the porch lantern, a third tucked near the carriage house where no casual guest would look twice.
Beside me, Deacon watches the property without moving. He’s been still for seven minutes. I’ve been timing it.
The bastard can make himself look less like a Friday night date and more like a bad decision someone’s daughter left waiting under a tree than anyone I know.
Black clothes, black gloves, gray eyes turned toward the house where Delia Hart is being held by a woman who shares her blood and would spill it without blinking.
“South balcony,” Ever says in my ear. His voice comes through clean and low, stripped to the most essential function. “Two men. One smoking. One on phone. Same patrol cycle as before.”
I lift the small lens to my eye and track the upper line of the house. “I see them.”
“Camera at the east gate rotates every forty seconds. Blind pocket lasts six.”
“Not long enough.”
“No.”
Deacon says nothing. He’s busy watching the second-floor windows, gaze trained for movement.
Delia is behind one of them, or she was thirty minutes ago when Ever caught a figure crossing behind a half-drawn curtain in the west wing. The feed was too distant to confirm, but Deacon knew the room. It’s Delia’s room when Isabel wants her close. A pretty phrase for a locked door.
We shouldn’t be here.
That was the first thing I said when we sat down in the cabin war room and started planning.
It was the only answer I could afford before Reva’s face from the hospital moved through my mind and ruined every clean calculation.
The war room is hidden behind a panel near the cabin’s back hall, another one of my expensive little sins disguised as preparation.
Concrete walls. Six screens. A metal table bolted to the floor.
Maps of the marsh and city. Communications gear, signal jammers, weapons locked in recessed cabinets.
Reva saw it when we opened the door and went silent in that pointed way of hers, the one that means she is collecting evidence for a later fight.
Shiloh would have made a joke about my commitment to hospitality, but he was at the hospital, sitting outside Cal’s ICU room because Reva needed proof that I was keeping my promise.
Ever stood at the main console, splitting feeds from the hospital, the cabin perimeter, and the city cameras he had managed to touch without leaving too obvious a print. Deacon stood opposite me with both hands on the table and a map of Isabel’s property between us.
“Okay, so the goal is to get Delia out,” he said.
“The goal is to keep Reva alive,” I said.
His eyes lifted. “They’re not necessarily competing goals.”
“They become competing goals the second you make a move Isabel can trace back to the cabin.”
He leaned in slightly. Anyone else might have missed it. I didn’t. “Delia tried to move Reva out of the chapel path. Isabel will know that by now.”
“And if Isabel wanted her dead immediately, she would be.”
“She may decide slowly is more useful.”
Ever’s fingers stopped over the keyboard for half a beat. He said nothing, but the air changed around him.
That was the thing none of us wanted to say plainly in any room where Reva might hear it through the walls. Delia alive did not mean Delia safe. Isabel’s affection had always looked like a hand around the throat, and Delia had just proved she could still turn that throat away from a blade.
Deacon wanted to go through the house. I saw it in him.
He did not say the words because he’s not stupid, but the instinct sat behind his eyes, patient and lethal. Walk in, cut through anyone between him and the girl, tear her out before Isabel could use another hour to make obedience hurt.
A younger version of me might have admired the simplicity. The man I am now has Reva to protect.
“I do not trust your judgment where Delia is concerned,” I told him.
His mouth barely moved. “You have made that clear.”
“I also do not trust your judgment where Reva is concerned.”
That one stung a little, judging by the way his gaze flicked up at me. Ever glanced between us and wisely kept his hands near the console.
Deacon’s voice went very quiet. “Careful, Blackwood.”
“No. We are past careful. You saved Reva once and buried the truth so deeply she had to dig it up with both hands. You protected Delia by staying close enough to Isabel to become useful. You have a long history of doing the right thing in ways that leave women bleeding afterward.”
His face emptied. For a second, I could see it on his face—exactly how dangerous he truly was. Recognition shuddered beneath my skin, and I straightened, preparing. For what, I wasn’t sure. I just knew I needed to be ready.
But all he said was, “And you have a long history of mistaking control for morality.”
Fair. I took a breath.
Ever returned his attention to the screen. “Both of you, shut up.”
That got our attention because Ever rarely wasted words on command when a glare would do.
He put Isabel’s house on the center screen.
“You are both right enough to be irritating. We need current intel. We cannot breach blind. We also cannot wait until Isabel decides Delia’s loyalty needs correction.
Deacon has a contact inside. We use that before we make a plan that gets Reva killed trying to rescue a sister we may be able to move clean. ”
I looked at Deacon. He looked at the map.
“Name,” I said.
“Sabine Martel.”
Ever typed it before Deacon finished speaking.
A personnel file appeared within seconds, pulled from one of the dirtier corners of La Rosa’s network.
Early thirties. Security detail. Formerly assigned to Deacon’s unit, currently attached to house rotation under Isabel’s domestic guard.
Dark hair, sharp face, clean record except for three small gaps that looked like administrative error.
“You trust her?” I asked.
Deacon’s eyes stayed on the screen. “Enough to meet away from the house.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
“Was she your lover?”
Ever’s fingers paused again.
Deacon looked at me then. “Once.”
Great. I said, “Does she know where your loyalty sits now?”
“She knows enough.”
We left an hour later with Reva under Ever’s watch, hospital updates routed through Shiloh, and enough weapons on us to start a small, ugly war if things went wrong.
Reva did not like the plan. She liked it even less when I refused to let her hear every detail.
I told her what mattered: Deacon and I were going to confirm Delia’s location and meet a source.
Ever would remain with her. Shiloh had Cal. Nobody moved on Delia tonight.
She stared at me as if she could set fire to my bones through eye contact alone.
Then she said, “Be careful.”
So here I am, in the dark outside Isabel’s house, trying to be careful. Trying to make sure we don’t spill any blood we cannot afford to spill.
Deacon shifts beside me.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Third floor. East corner.”
I move the lens. A curtain stirs behind one of the dark windows, not in the way fabric moves from air-conditioning. A hand touched it. Someone looking down without wanting to be seen.
“Delia?”
“No. Taller.”
The curtain falls still.
Ever says, “I caught movement, but no face. Heat signature on the third floor. One body. Two in the hall outside.”
“Isabel’s office?” I ask.
“Likely,” Deacon says. “She uses the upper study when she wants the house listening without admitting it.”
We watch another ten minutes.
Every patrol pattern gets marked. Every camera sweep gets timed.
Every guard’s cigarette, limp, loose habit and lazy turn gets fed to Ever, who builds a living map from the cabin while Reva is twenty yards away from him and probably furious that she is not the one doing something reckless in the dark.
The urge to call and check on her sits under my ribs, but I don’t indulge it. She doesn’t need another man breathing fear into her ear because he can’t hold his own.
“Car leaving rear gate,” Ever says.
I angle the lens toward the service drive. A black SUV rolls through, headlights off until it reaches the street. Two men inside. No plates I can see.
“Follow?” I ask.
“Tracker drone is already on it,” Ever says.
There is a reason I pay for his equipment and tolerate his moods.
Deacon lowers his binoculars. “We have enough from here. Sabine will not wait long.”
I give the house one last look.
Behind those walls, Delia is either a prisoner, a daughter, a soldier, or some cursed arrangement of all three.
Reva wants her out because love does not respect tactical sequencing.
Deacon wants her out because guilt ages badly inside men like him.
I want her out because every hour Isabel keeps one sister, she tightens the leash around the other.
I also know extraction will bring Isabel’s eyes straight to Reva if we do it poorly.
That is the razor we rest on.