30. Reva #2
My spine stiffens at his qualification. I almost tell him not to use me as a reason to drag open old wounds.
Then Marisol meets my eyes, and the words die.
I need to know. Maybe not kindly. Maybe not safely.
But I need the truth, and apparently the truth always comes with blood on it in this family.
Marisol draws a slow breath.
When she speaks, her voice is soft, the edges of a Spanish accent more present than they were in the hospital. Stress, maybe. Exhaustion. Or the old self showing through the version of her that learned to smooth every sound for Isabel’s rooms.
“La Rosa isn’t like most crime syndicates,” she says. “It’s matriarchal. Old. Ritualistic. Built around mothers and daughters, even when the men are the ones holding guns.”
Delia’s face is carefully still beside her.
“When you and your sister were born, your grandmother was thrilled.” Marisol’s gaze moves between us, but it lands on me and stays there. “She had not one granddaughter to carry the line, but two. To her, it was a gift from God and a correction for my disobedience.”
“Disobedience,” I repeat.
“I disappointed her by getting pregnant by a white man.”
My father. Frank Hart.
The name moves through me with a dull ache. I have had so many years to grieve him that sometimes the grief feels worn smooth. Then someone says something like that, and suddenly he’s alive in a sentence again. A white man. An outsider. A person Isabel thought beneath her bloodline.
“My father wasn’t good enough for her.”
“No man would’ve been, honestly.” Marisol’s voice softens. “But your father was worse because he wasn’t someone she had picked, and I loved him anyway.”
The room goes very quiet. I don’t know what to do with that sentence.
Marisol’s fingers twist together once, then stop. “For a couple of years, we managed. You were small. Delia was bossy.”
Delia looks away.
I stare at her. “You were bossy as a toddler?”
“Well, I was older.”
“You have to let that go. They were mere minutes.”
“Very important minutes.”
The exchange happens almost automatically, and for one impossible second, the room thins around us. I can almost hear another version of her saying it with sticky hands and smug eyes.
Older by minutes.
Chosen by minutes.
Loved by minutes.
Then it’s gone.
Marisol watches us like the glimpse costs her.
“You were kept separate from most cartel activities,” she continues. “As much as I could make you. Your father had to work for Mother, though. That created conflict.”
“What did he do?”
“Numbers. Properties. Shell companies at first. He was good with patterns, with money, with people who thought being charming made them intelligent.”
Shiloh makes a soft sound. I glance at him.
He raises both hands. “Felt personal.”
I can’t help snickering.
Marisol’s mouth softens for a second before the memory takes it back. “Frank wasn’t a criminal. Not in his heart. He thought he could work close enough to keep us safe and far enough not to become the thing he hated.”
Nash’s expression stays unreadable. “That never works.”
“No.” Marisol looks at him. “It doesn’t.”
Then her eyes come back to me. “We talked about leaving constantly. Your father, Cal, and I. Cal was your father’s friend before he became anything else to this family.”
“Cal knew my dad?”
“He loved him like a brother.”
My chest hurts.
Cal knew my father. Cal knew my mother. Cal raised me inside a house full of ghosts with names he rarely said, and I thought that was because speaking of the dead hurt too much.
Maybe it did. Maybe everything did.
Marisol keeps her hands folded. “The day came when talking was no longer enough. You and Delia were almost four. Mother began speaking about training.”
Delia’s mouth tightens.
“Training one of you,” Marisol continues. “Preparing one daughter to inherit. Teaching her the family, the prayers, the rooms, the discipline, the cost of command.”
My gaze flicks to Delia. There’s no question which daughter Isabel meant.
Delia sits still, hands folded, face locked.
“And the other?” I ask.
Marisol’s eyes shine. “An alliance.”
I don’t understand for half a second. Then I do. The air leaves my lungs.
“Marriage,” Delia supplies, because apparently one of us has to be able to say ugly things without choking.
Marisol nods. “To an associate family. Another cartel with routes Isabel wanted secured. You were children, but contracts can be made early. Mother called it protection. She called it legacy.”
My stomach turns.
Me.
The spare girl. The one not trained. The one used to bind a man somewhere else, a family somewhere else, a future I wouldn’t have chosen and maybe wouldn’t have survived.
A cold sweat breaks over the back of my neck. Ever’s hand remains at my shoulder. His thumb presses once, grounding me before the room can slide too far.
“You were going to be sold,” Delia says.
Not cruelly. Factually. The truth lands anyway.
Marisol holds my gaze, firm now, resolute beneath the grief. “Your father and I agreed on one thing immediately. So did Cal. It wasn’t going to happen.”
Something inside me cracks open around the simple force of that.
They chose me.
They chose us.
Before the sheets, before the closet, before bullets and blood and fifteen years of lies, my parents looked at Isabel’s future for their daughters and said no.
Marisol looks down at her hands again. “So we got everything in order. Frank had Cal purchase a house through channels Isabel didn’t know.
It wasn’t far enough away. We wanted another state, another country, another life entirely, but moving money and property without alerting her took time we no longer had.
There were legal complications, papers that couldn’t be rushed, accounts she might have noticed if we touched them wrong. ”
Nash tracks every piece, expression still.
“We used different names,” Marisol continues. “Your father’s family name. Hart. Ordinary enough to disappear inside. We cut my history out of every document we could reach. We paid cash when possible. We told no one who didn’t have to know.”
“And then?”
Her mouth trembles.
“One day, we drove away. No heirlooms. No photographs she could trace. No jewelry. No favorite toys, though Delia screamed for a stuffed rabbit until she fell asleep.”
Delia’s eyes close.
“I remember the rabbit.”
“I do too,” Marisol whispers.
My eyes burn. I don’t remember the rabbit.
I remember a closet.
The thought is so bitter I almost miss Marisol’s next words.
“We lived in that house for three years.”
Three years.
The number hits strangely. I was four when we left, and then I was five, then six, then seven.
A whole life in child years. A life with bad whistling in the kitchen and scary movies watched with a blanket half over my face.
A life where Delia had a green or yellow bike and my father maybe sang off-key and my mother pressed her hand to her chest when she worried.
“And then she found us.”
Marisol’s voice lowers. “I still don’t know how. Frank was careful. Cal was careful. Deacon hadn’t yet—”
She stops. Deacon’s face doesn’t move. The room seems to hold its breath around the missing end of that sentence.
Marisol swallows. “I still don’t know how we were found.”
Delia turns her head. The motion is slow enough that I see the decision before the words come.
“I know how.”
Marisol goes still. Delia’s eyes find mine. All the softness from the front of the bar is gone. All the tentative threads we have been trying to tie between us pull tight at once.
“Reva called Isabel,” she says. “That’s how.”