16. Reva #2
I gather towels, dry sweats, clean socks, and a long-sleeved shirt from the stack Shiloh packed when he raided my life from Blackwood House.
In the kitchen, the coffee pot is still half-full from the hours I spent waiting, so I pour a mug.
I add a liberal dollop of cream, and then another, because I don’t know how Delia takes it, and black feels too harsh.
The guessing feels intimate enough to make my chest ache.
I set the towel near her chair. “For your hair. Or your hands. Whatever.”
She looks at it for a long moment before picking it up, careful not to touch my fingers.
“You still talk like you think I’m going to bite you,” she says.
Her voice is weak enough to make the insult feel like an offering.
“I know you are but what am I.”
The corner of her mouth twitches, then disappears into control.
I put the coffee near her. “I don’t know how you drink it.”
“I don’t.”
“Coffee?”
“Peace offerings.”
That one lands deep enough to make me quiet.
She looks at the mug anyway. Doesn’t touch it, but doesn’t shove it away. With Delia, I am starting to understand, those may be the same thing as progress.
Nash steps in before the silence grows teeth.
“This is what happens now. Deacon gets bandaged. Delia gets cleaned up and decides what, if anything, she is ready to tell us. Shiloh stays at the hospital with Cal until we rotate him out. Ever keeps the perimeter sealed and watches for a response from Isabel. Reva does not interrogate her sister while she’s bleeding. ”
Delia lifts her chin. “Tis but a flesh wound.”
The joke startles a snicker out of Ever, and I almost laugh. It comes out as a breath and nothing more. Pressing his lips together, Ever finishes wrapping her palm. “Knees next.”
Delia’s shoulders lock.
Everyone sees it. The room holds still around her response.
Ever sits back. “Or Reva, or you can do them yourself. Your choice.”
Her gaze moves from him to me, and the look in it is so sharp I feel it under my ribs.
She is waiting for me to push. Waiting for me to claim sister as a right to her skin, her story, her pain.
I want to grab Delia and hold on until the years between us stop screaming, but that would only prove every ugly lesson Isabel ever taught her was true.
“The bathroom at the end of the hall has no exterior window,” I say. “There’s hot water. I’ll leave clothes and bandages outside. If you need help, ask. If you don’t, don’t.”
Her expression does not soften, but something tired passes through her eyes.
“Fine.”
Ever rises and steps back, leaving her the path. Delia stands slowly. Her face tightens, but again, she makes no sound. I hate every person who taught her silence was useful.
As she passes Deacon, her gaze drops to the bandage at his side.
“You should have moved faster,” she says.
He looks up at her. “You should have ducked sooner.”
For a second, the old familiarity between them flashes too clear. Then she walks away.
Jealousy is an ugly, embarrassing thing to feel when my sister has just been dragged out of Isabel’s correction room. I know he doesn’t think of her that way.
I feel it anyway. It curls low in my stomach and makes me press the tape over Deacon’s bandage harder than necessary.
He catches my wrist.
“Little Ghost.”
“Don’t.”
He releases me at once. That helps. It also makes me feel worse.
I finish taping the wound with careful, professional hands. “You said you’d get her.”
“I did.”
“Thank you.”
His eyes lift.
I cannot hold the look for long. Gratitude toward Deacon is complicated. So is anger. So is every room he enters. I leave him with the unused gauze and take Delia’s clothes down the hall, stacking them outside the bathroom door with antiseptic, tape, and scissors. Water is already running inside.
I stand there longer than I should.
The door between us is just wood, but it feels like fifteen years, like a closet, like a chapel, like every adult who made choices around us and called the damage necessary.
“The clothes are out here,” I say.
The water keeps running. I turn to go.
“Reva.”
My name through the door stops me.
I close my eyes. “Yeah?”
A pause stretches between us. “Coffee with cream?”
“I guessed.”
“You guessed wrong.”
Something in my chest loosens painfully. “Good to know.”
The water shifts, and her voice comes again, quieter this time. “I’ll drink it anyway.”
I stand in the hallway until my eyes stop burning. Then I go back to the kitchen before I make her regret giving me that much.
Nash is on the phone with Shiloh, giving a clipped update. Ever watches the screens from the island because the war room is too far from the people who may need him. Deacon has leaned back in his chair, face pale beneath the discipline, but when I look at the bandage, the bleeding has not spread.
Nash ends the call. “Cal is still stable. No change. Shiloh is staying through the next nursing shift.”
“Okay,” I say, though okay is a ridiculous word for a world where Cal is sedated, Delia is in my bathroom, and Deacon’s blood is drying on my hands.
A few minutes later, Delia returns with wet hair combed away from her face, my clothes hanging loose on her frame, and bandages wrapped around both palms. Her feet are in the socks I left.
She has cleaned her knees and covered them herself under the sweatpants.
I know because she moves more carefully now, but the blood is gone from where I can see it.
She stops just inside the kitchen, eyes moving over each man, each exit, each visible weapon.
Nash does not tell her to sit this time.
No one does.
The coffee I made her sits untouched on the table, cooling beside the chair she left. Delia looks at it, then at me. I brace for another cutting remark because that is easier than hope.
She walks to the table and picks up the mug.
Her fingers are wrapped in white gauze. Mine are stained faintly pink from rinsed blood. She takes a careful sip and grimaces.
“Too much cream,” she says.
“I’ll survive the shame.”
Her gaze meets mine over the rim. “Will you?”
I do not know what question she is really asking. Maybe neither does she. I nod anyway.
I pull out the chair across from her because beside her feels like too much and farther away feels like surrender. Delia lowers herself slowly, and I grip my own mug to keep from offering help she has not asked for.
For a while, we sit with the table between us, wrapped in the hum of the locked cabin and the quiet movement of dangerous men pretending not to watch us too closely. There are a hundred things I want to ask her and twice as many I am afraid to hear.
I slide the sugar bowl toward her. She looks at it for several seconds, then takes a single cube.
Just like before, our fingers don’t touch.
It still feels like the first honest thing either of us has managed.