32. Reva
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
REVA
The plan uses a funeral.
Appropriate, I guess.
Viktor Volkov died two nights ago, which matters to me more than it probably has any right to. He was an old Bratva patriarch, a man with routes, money, soldiers, and enough history with Isabel that Marisol called his death useful before horror at her own pragmatism moved across her face.
Useful.
One dead man becomes a door.
One funeral becomes a stage.
One grieving crime family becomes the closest thing we have to an army waiting beneath painted saints and candle smoke.
I don’t like any of it.
The alternative is worse.
We arrive separately because apparently walking into a Russian Orthodox church as one grim little murder parade would be tacky.
Nash goes first with Ever. Shiloh circles the block twice before bringing Delia and Marisol through a side entrance.
Deacon brings me last, one hand at the small of my back, his face set in the blank expression that means he’s counted every exit and disliked half of them.
The church rises from a quiet street beneath a gray morning sky, gold domes dull under the clouds, the cross at the top catching a brief slice of light when the sun breaks through.
Men in dark suits stand outside in clusters, pretending to be mourners and failing.
They don’t draw attention to their weapons because they don’t need to.
Weapons live in the way they stand, the cut of their jackets, the quick sweep of their eyes over each car that passes too slowly.
Inside, the scents of incense and melted wax drift to greet me as we enter.
Icons watch from the walls, solemn and gold-haloed, saints with long faces and painted sorrow. Candles tremble in red glass holders near the front. Voices chant low enough to get under my skin. The coffin sits beneath flowers so white they look like a stain against the dark wood.
Viktor Volkov must have been important. Or dangerous. I guess it’s the same thing around here.
Deacon guides me to the back pew. I sit between him and Shiloh, with Ever at the end closest to the aisle.
Nash sits one row ahead, angled just enough to see the door without turning his head.
Marisol sits with Delia on his other side, a black veil pinned over her hair, gloved hands folded tightly in her lap.
My mother looks like she belongs to grief. The thought lands wrong and stays there.
Delia sits beside her, spine straight, face empty.
She wears black, sleek and simple, her hair twisted low at her neck.
No bandages are visible today, long sleeves covering her wrists.
Her mouth is painted a deep, careful red that makes her look older than twenty-two and harder than anyone should have to be before breakfast.
She doesn’t look at the coffin. She looks at the men.
The Volkovs line the front pews and side aisles, broad-shouldered, icy-eyed, silent in a way that makes the whole church feel colder.
Their grief is organized. Their anger is too.
At the center of them stands a man I noticed the second we entered, though notice is too soft a word for the way the room arranges itself around him.
Konstantin Volkov.
Marisol gave us the name before dawn.
Viktor’s son and the new head of the family.
Late-thirties or thereabouts, tall, dark-haired, hard in the face, dressed in a black suit that looks expensive and punishing.
He doesn’t fidget. Doesn’t look around to make sure people are watching him.
He stands near the coffin with one hand resting on the back of his mother’s pew and accepts condolences with the bleak courtesy of a man who understands death as both personal and political.
At one point, his gaze moves over the congregation.
It touches Nash. Deacon. Me.
Then Delia.
There’s nothing obvious in his expression. No smile. No widening eyes. There’s no visible spark from the man at his father’s funeral. Still, his gaze stays on her a fraction too long.
Delia notices. Her chin lifts by a degree.
Konstantin’s mouth doesn’t move, but something in his eyes changes. Interest, maybe. Recognition. The look warriors give when another blade catches light across the room.
Then he looks away.
Delia’s fingers tighten once against her knee.
The service moves around us in a language I don’t know.
Voices rise and fall. People cross themselves.
A priest swings incense until smoke curls through the light.
I sit still with my hands in my lap and try not to think about God watching all this pageantry from the walls around us while criminals calculate bloodlines over a dead man’s body.
Maybe saints are used to worse.
Maybe everyone is.
Isabel sits near the front on the opposite side of the church.
Not in the first pew. That would be too intimate. Not far enough back to look lesser. She has placed herself exactly where power tells grief it may pass. Black dress. Black gloves. Black veil. Pearl rosary wrapped around one wrist, every bead pale against the fabric.
She has three men with her.
Well. She had three men.
Two left midway through the service after one quiet word from a Volkov soldier near the side door. The third remains at the end of her pew, though he has spent the last twenty minutes looking increasingly aware that every man near him answers to someone other than Isabel.
Good. Let him sweat through his suit.
Marisol’s hand shifts beside Delia. Delia covers it with her own for one second, so quick I might’ve imagined it.
When the final prayers end, the congregation begins to file out slowly.
People move toward the front first, touching the coffin, murmuring to the family, stepping around each other with the practiced gravity of funeral etiquette.
The Volkov men direct traffic without seeming to.
A door opens to the side hall. Another closes near the rear.
We stay seated.
All of us.
My pulse beats in my throat.
Shiloh’s hand slides over mine on the pew between us.
He squeezes once, then lets go before anyone watching can turn comfort into weakness.
Ever’s shoulder brushes mine on the other side when he shifts, a silent check.
Deacon remains still, but his presence at my back feels like an unsheathed knife.
Nash doesn’t turn around.
He doesn’t have to.
I know what his face looks like right now.
Cal should be here, some fractured part of me thinks.
Then I turn that thought over and feel sick for wanting a man in ICU to stand in a church full of criminals and make me braver.
The church empties in slow waves.
Women in black. Men with red-rimmed eyes and flat mouths.
A few old men with canes. A girl younger than me clutching a handkerchief and staring at the floor.
The priest disappears through a side door.
The last of the ordinary mourners leaves, though ordinary is doing generous work in a room like this.
At last, only the useful remain.
Volkovs. La Rosa.
And us.
Isabel rises.
For one tiny second, her steps stutter when she turns toward the aisle and sees us still seated at the back.
It is so quick most people would miss it.
I don’t. Neither does Delia.
Her mouth curves by a hair.
Isabel recovers beautifully. I’ll give her that. She straightens, adjusts one glove, and begins walking down the aisle with the slow, wicked smile of a woman who thinks the game is still arranged in her favor. Her remaining guard falls in behind her, though he looks less certain with every step.
She pauses beside Konstantin Volkov near the front.
“Konstantin.” Her voice is soft enough to make the church lean in. “Your father was a formidable man. His absence will be felt.”
Konstantin inclines his head. “By some.”
The answer is bland. Isabel’s smile tightens.
She rests a gloved hand lightly on the end of a pew. “I hope your family’s good sense did not go into the grave with him.”
“My family has an abundance of taste.”
“Then you understand there is business to settle.”
His gaze moves briefly toward us from beneath a lowered brow, then returns to her. “Yes.”
“Good.” Isabel’s voice warms. “Take care of it for me.”
The request sounds like silk. We all hear the chain beneath it. Konstantin studies her for a long, quiet moment, a barely there smile playing on full lips.
Then he turns his head toward the back of the church. When he speaks, his voice is loud enough to carry. “I did offer to take care of her.”
Her.
Me? Maybe Delia. Maybe all the daughters Isabel has spent years turning into problems.
My body goes still. Shiloh’s hand finds mine again. This time, he keeps it.
Konstantin continues, “But I hear they would prefer to exact their own vengeance for their father’s death.”
He looks directly at me. Then at Delia. Something like pride shines in his eyes, cold and unexpected.
“I understand this.”
Delia stands first.
I feel it happen beside me…inside me…before I make myself move. My knees hold, a phenomenon worth noting. Shiloh releases my hand, and I step into the aisle with my sister.
Together.
The word moves through me, strange and fragile and sharp.
We walk toward Isabel while the church watches.
I feel every eye on us, those of every saint and every man with a gun beneath his jacket. Marisol remains in the pew. Nash too. Ever doesn’t move. Deacon does, but only enough to become shadow behind us, his presence close and lethal without taking the moment from our hands.
Isabel watches us approach. Her smile doesn’t slip again.
“Ah,” she murmurs when we stop in front of her. “My girls. How dramatic.”
Delia’s voice is calm. “You always did like ceremony.”
“And you always mistook imitation for command.”
Delia smiles, thin and sharp. I’ve seen that smile only a few times, and never directed at me. I’m grateful for that now.
Konstantin steps aside, leaving Isabel with a clear path to the door. That path is blocked by us.
Isabel’s gaze flicks to the Volkov men stationed near the exits. Then to her own guard. He looks away.
It is slight, and it is everything. Her nostrils flare.
“I will remember this,” she tells Konstantin.
He lifts one hand and turns it lazily in the air. “For the next five minutes, perhaps.”
A sound moves through the room. Not a laugh, but something close enough to bruise.
Isabel’s face goes white beneath her veil.
Konstantin walks away from her then, straight down the side aisle without another word. As he passes Delia, his gaze touches her face. She doesn’t look away. The air between them goes taut for half a second, quiet and dangerous, then he continues toward the doors with two of his men following.
Delia’s shoulders remain level. Mine do not.
My breathing has gone too fast. I slow it because Ever would coax me to slow it if he saw, then make that low approving sound when that worked, and I refuse to be a praise whore in the middle of a church coup.
Isabel looks around. Really looks this time.
The guard near her pew doesn’t reach for his weapon.
The men by the doors stay still. A woman near the candles lowers her eyes.
One of the old La Rosa soldiers who came with her steps backward into the shadow of a pillar, as if distance might save him from the choice he already made by doing nothing.
Her people are strangely disinclined to step in.
This is Marisol’s army, I realize. Not soldiers with rifles storming through doors.
Silence.
Women who stop giving warnings. Men who decide survival lives on the other side of Isabel’s fall. Allies who withdraw support in public, where everyone can see the gap open beneath her feet.
Leave that to me, Marisol said.
Isabel draws herself up slowly. For the first time since I saw her at the masquerade, she looks old.
But only for a moment. Then pride fills the cracks.
“Get out of my way.”
Her voice is quiet. It doesn’t shake. Some awful part of me respects that.
Delia stands beside me, so close our sleeves nearly touch. I feel her breath move, slow and steady, as if all those years under Isabel taught her how to become still while monsters bare teeth.
I am less still.
My hands are cold. My heart is furious. My father’s name sits inside me with Cal’s blood and my mother’s tears and every version of my sister that Isabel tried to carve into usefulness.
I think of the phone.
Nana saying hang up, Reva.
I think of a four-year-old girl who may have answered because she missed a voice that sounded like family.
I think of a woman who used that.
Fear turns into something with edges as Delia’s smile deepens by a fraction.
“You’re not going anywhere.”
Isabel’s eyes cut to her. Delia takes one step closer.
“It’s time for La Rosa to change hands.”