15. Deacon
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
DEACON
The catering van smells like coffee, grease, and old sugar.
Sainte Aurelia’s staff uses it for foundation events when wealthy women want charity to arrive with petit fours and polished silver.
Tonight, the back holds two rolling racks of covered trays, three white jackets, a box of folded linens, and enough empty space for Nash Blackwood to stand in silence while deciding whether he trusts me enough to keep breathing at his back.
He hasn’t asked that question out loud. He won’t.
He sits on the bench opposite me with one hand braced near his knee and a pistol under his jacket. Another rests in the small of his back. A knife is tucked in his boot. The man dresses like a banker but prepares like a siege.
Rain taps lightly against the roof as the van turns off Magazine and slows near the service lane behind the old convent.
Sainte Aurelia rises beyond the windshield in pale stone and dark iron, its arched windows lit from within, its courtyard trimmed and waiting for donors who prefer their benevolence served under chandeliers.
The building used to house nuns and orphaned girls.
Now it hosts foundation luncheons, private auctions, and social committees that raise money while never asking too closely where money comes from in the first place.
Isabel likes that.
Old walls. Public virtue. Women trained to lower their eyes.
I hate this place.
The driver, one of Blackwood’s men, parks near the service entrance without asking for instruction. He already has his apron on, head down, shoulders rounded into harmlessness. Good man. Better actor than most.
Nash checks his comm. “Ever.”
“Clean on exterior for now,” Ever says in my ear. “I have eyes on service lane, main courtyard, and south garden. Interior is spotty. That old stone is chewing the signal in the chapel wing.”
“That was anticipated,” I say.
Ever’s silence tells me he dislikes expected problems as much as surprises.
“Reva?” Nash asks.
“Watching the feeds with me. Pissy. Present. Still in the cabin.”
That last part carries more relief than Ever would ever allow into clearer words.
Nash’s gaze flicks to mine. We both hear what he does not say. Reva stayed.
I told her I would get Delia.
Promises made to Reva Hart don’t feel like words after they leave the mouth. They feel like brands.
The side door opens before Nash reaches for the handle.
Sabine Martel stands outside in a black security coat, hair pinned tightly at her nape, radio at her shoulder, face set into the blank competence La Rosa rewards. Her eyes move once over Nash, then me, then the catering racks behind us.
“You are late,” she says.
“We are early,” Nash answers.
“For the event.” Her gaze cuts to me. “Late for her.”
That does something unpleasant under my ribs.
I step down from the van. “Where is she?”
“In a private chapel off the east corridor. Isabel took her there two hours ago.”
Nash gets out behind me and closes the door without sound. “Is Isabel still with her?”
Sabine’s throat works. “She left through the north corridor five minutes ago. The donors arrive in forty. She will be in the reception hall by then, smiling beside the flowers.”
She says flowers as if she would like to crush every rose in the building under her heel.
I look at her more closely. She is pale beneath her makeup. The hand at her radio is steady by discipline rather than ease. Sabine has served La Rosa long enough to know what Isabel is. Seeing is one thing. Disapproving is another. The second is more dangerous.
“What correction?” I ask.
Her mouth tightens. “The old one.”
Nash looks at me, eyebrow raised in question. I shake my head. Some things are best understood through disgust.
Sabine gestures toward the service entrance. “There are two men outside the chapel. One in the sacristy hall. A fourth near the north passage, but he follows Isabel’s movement and will be gone if she stays on schedule.”
“If?” Nash asks.
“If Delia refuses what Isabel wants quickly enough, Isabel may return.”
“What does she want?” I ask.
Sabine’s eyes come back to mine. “A recorded message…video. Delia telling Reva to come alone. To bring you if she can. To prove she still loves her sister.”
The words land with such cold, perfect familiarity that for one second I am sixteen again, standing in another hall, listening to Isabel teach a girl that love is most useful when held to the throat.
Nash says, “We move now.”
Sabine holds out a folded access card and two white catering jackets. “You will have eight minutes if you do this clean. Less if anyone panics.”
“Do you panic?” Nash asks.
“No.”
He takes the jacket from her. “Then we have eight minutes.”
Sabine looks at me while Nash shrugs into the coat. “Deacon.”
I pause.
Her voice drops. “If she asks whether Reva sent you, say yes.”
“She did.”
She nods, the gesture clipped. Then she steps back, keys the service door open, and lets us in.
The convent’s back corridors have kept their bones.
Narrow passages. Stone floors. Walls too thick for modern wiring to hide properly.
The catering route runs between the kitchen and reception hall, busy enough to give us movement, quiet enough to expose a wrong footfall.
Sabine walks ahead with a clipboard, a woman with authority and no patience.
People move for those women more often than they realize.
Nash carries a covered tray.
I carry another.
It would be funny in another life.
In this one, the weight of the tray reminds me to keep my hands calm.
We pass the kitchen, where two women in black dresses argue over table linens, and then slip into a side corridor marked for staff only.
Sabine does not look back. She turns left at a statue of Sainte Aurelia holding a book and a thorned rose, then right past a locked storage room where the scent changes from butter and coffee to wax, dust, and old incense.
The first guard appears near the sacristy hall.
He recognizes me.
His hand twitches toward his jacket, mouth beginning to form my name.
I set the tray down on the narrow ledge beside me and close the distance before sound catches up with intention.
One hand clamps the back of his neck. The other drives his head into the stone wall hard enough to empty his knees of tension.
Nash catches the man before he drops, smooth and silent, and drags him into the storage alcove.
No words.
Better.
Nash binds his wrists with a zip tie from his pocket and takes the man’s radio. His eyes lift to mine, a brief, assessing look.
He expected me to kill him. I expected it of myself, perhaps.
We keep moving.
The second and third guards stand outside the chapel door, speaking low. One is young and nervous. The other is older, bored, shoulders loose in the way men get when they trust the house more than their own eyes.
Sabine reaches them first. “Kitchen needs one of you in the reception hall. Guest list issue.”
The older guard frowns. “I was told—”
“You were told to stand outside a closed door while Mrs. del Rosario prepares to receive seventy donors.” Sabine tilts the clipboard toward him. “If the wrong name walks past her in front of the board chair, you can explain that your priorities were decorative.”
His annoyance turns toward the easy target. Her.
I step behind him.
Nash moves on the younger one at the same time.
The struggle lasts four seconds.
The younger guard gets a hand half under his jacket before Nash pins his wrist and drives an elbow into his throat, then folds him neatly against the wall.
My guard has more training. He turns into me, blade already out.
I catch his wrist, take the cut along my palm instead of my ribs, and put him down with two strikes that leave him breathing through blood and fear.
Sabine’s face tightens at the sound.
“You said clean,” Nash murmurs.
I wipe my hand on the guard’s jacket. “He chose ambitious.”
We pull both men into a side room used for choir storage. Robes hang along one wall, white and cream and gold, waiting for voices that will sing over whatever Isabel has done in the room ahead.
Nash takes position beside the chapel door, and I reach for the handle. He catches my wrist.
There it is. The clash we have been carrying since the cabin.
His grip is hard. His eyes are harder. “You don’t go in blind.”
The need to tear through the door nearly shoves sense from my skull. Delia is inside. Delia, who was made to stand straight, or else, under Isabel’s hand. Delia, who looked at me once when she was twelve with blood in her mouth and asked whether obedience ever stopped hurting.
“Let go,” I say. “I’m fine.”
Nash does not let go. “Look first.”
Sabine steps around us and touches a panel hidden in the carved frame. “Observation slit. Old convent feature. For the sisters.”
Nash releases me, and I lean in.
The chapel is small, private, and viciously beautiful.
The old stone floor boasts a narrow altar with candles burning in red glass cups.
A statue of the Virgin stands in the corner with chipped fingers and a face serene enough to be obscene.
The room has been dressed for punishment with the care of a woman arranging flowers.
Delia kneels at the center of the floor.
Her arms are extended straight out from her sides, her palms up in a posture from another century.
In each hand rests a small prayer book, their black covers worn soft.
A rosary is looped around each wrist, the red beads tight enough to leave impressions in her skin.
Around her knees…beneath them…lies a scatter of broken rosary beads and tiny white stones, the kind used in garden paths and old religious courtyards.
The damage will be small if she holds still.
That is the genius of it. Enough pain to teach.
Enough dignity left to make pride a torment.
She does not look broken. She looks furious.