34. Reva
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
REVA
Isabel’s house looks smaller without her in it, which is weird because she was not a big woman.
The ceilings are still too high, the rooms too polished, the floors too cold beneath all the expensive rugs.
The garden still sprawls behind the terrace in perfect green lines, trimmed into obedience by people who probably learned long ago which flowers Isabel preferred and which ones displeased her.
The whole place still smells faintly of roses, beeswax, old wood, and money that learned how to keep secrets.
But she’s gone.
Dead women take up a disturbing amount of space.
Delia sits at the head of the terrace table. No one told her to, but that is where the head of La Rosa sits, apparently. Not because of a crown or a title or some official declaration stamped on thick paper, but because every person who approaches her looks there first.
That is what power does. It teaches eyes where to land.
My sister despises the chair. I can tell by the way she sits in it.
Spine straight. Shoulders level. One hand resting near her water glass, the other in her lap, hidden beneath the edge of the table.
Her face is composed, hair twisted at her neck, black dress simple enough to be respectful and sharp enough to warn.
The rosary marks on her wrists are visible today, red and dark against her skin.
She didn’t cover them, and I understand why, but looking at them still scrapes against something raw in me.
Marisol sits to Delia’s right with a folder of documents in front of her, though she hasn’t opened it since lunch was brought out.
She looks tired in the morning light. Younger than she did in the hospital chapel and older than she did in my childhood photographs, which is a sentence that makes no sense and fits anyway.
Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders today, silver visible at her temples.
She has stopped trying to hide the tremor in her hands when she reaches for coffee.
I sit to Delia’s left because someone needs to balance the table, and also because if anyone decides my sister looks like an easy target, I want him to have to look past me first.
Sonny sits beside me.
She has said almost nothing since she arrived, which is extremely alarming from Sonny and therefore probably proof of the apocalypse. She came in after receiving the edited version of events, which included Cal is alive, I am not in immediate danger, and please do not panic.
She panicked on a professional level. Then she came.
Now she wears sunglasses, a sundress, and the expression of a woman who has walked into a criminal matriarchy before noon and decided that everything was fiiiine but the food better be good.
Homer prowls beneath the table on his little black leash, regarding the restraint as a personal insult against both his freedom and his ancestors.
He has already flopped onto his side twice, refused to move for three minutes, attacked a chair leg, and attempted to climb the hem of Delia’s dress.
The white cross in his orange fur catches the sun every time he rolls over to prove gravity has wronged him.
Sonny watches him drag himself dramatically across the tile.
“I’ve decided your cat is a performance artist.”
“He’s processing trauma.”
“He’s orange; he doesn’t know what trauma is.”
“He’s orange; he is the definition of trauma.”
Delia looks down as Homer stretches one paw onto her bare foot and digs in one needle claw. She doesn’t move him. Her mouth curves faintly.
“He really does look like her.”
“Our cat?” I ask. “Looks like who?”
Delia nods. “Mr. T.”
I frown. “Mr. T was a boy.”
Marisol’s fork stills over her plate.
Then she looks toward the open terrace doors, where Deacon stands just inside the house with Nash and Ever, pretending not to listen and failing because no man in my life respects conversational privacy.
“Oh,” Marisol says softly. “Deacon didn’t tell you?”
I turn.
Deacon’s face goes blank in a way I immediately distrust.
“Tell me what?”
Homer bites his leash and growls. Deacon says nothing.
Marisol sets her fork down. “The cat was female.”
I stare at her. “Mr. T?”
“Your father named her before anyone knew better. Orange females are less common, so he assumed. By the time we found out, he refused to correct it because you both already answered to the name.”
Delia’s eyebrows pull together. “She was a girl?”
“Yes.”
I look down at Homer, whose entire personality suggests gender matters far less than crimes. I pick him up and start inspecting, wondering if Homer’s actually a boy cat, after all. “Okay. That is upsetting on several levels, but why would Deacon know that?”
Deacon’s jaw grinds. “Mari—”
Marisol answers before he can say anything else. “Because he rescued her.”
Everything in me stills.
The terrace, the food, the sunlight, the bruised old house, Delia at the head of the table trying not to become the chair she sits in—all of it narrows to Deacon standing in the doorway with his hands at his sides.
“What?”
His eyes meet mine.
After all this time, all the knives and letters and blood, there’s something almost boyish in the discomfort that crosses his face.
“She was in the house.”
My throat tightens. “The night of the…?”
“Yes.”
Delia’s hand goes to her mouth.
Marisol’s eyes shine, but she keeps her voice steady. “Deacon found her after. She was frightened and hiding. He took her with him.”
I can’t speak.
Deacon steps onto the terrace. “She wasn’t hurt.”
“That’s not the point,” I manage.
“No.”
The word is quiet.
He stops near the edge of the table but doesn’t come closer, as if the space between us is something I need to choose. He knows too well when not to touch me, and some days that knowledge feels like another wound.
“What happened to her?” Delia asks.
Deacon looks at her. “She lived a long time. With me.”
The past tense goes through both of us. Delia’s eyes fill all at once.
Mine take a second longer because apparently my grief is confused about whether cats count when the entire family has been bleeding for days.
And then tears spill down my cheeks. Cats count.
God, they count.
“She wasn’t spayed,” Marisol says, wiping carefully beneath one eye. “And because Deacon isn’t nearly as immune to softness as he pretends, she ended up having a litter.”
Shiloh appears in the terrace doorway behind Deacon as if summoned by the word softness. “I knew it.”
Deacon looks back at him. “No, you didn’t.”
“You kept the kittens?”
“One.”
Shiloh’s grin spreads. “Assassin kitten rescue. This is devastating for your brand.”
“Shiloh,” Nash warns from inside.
“What? I’m respecting the emotional moment.”
“You are being a dick.”
Shiloh presses his lips together, but his eyes are warm when they move to me.
I look at Homer. The cat has given up on murder and is now batting at a fallen olive with both paws.
“One of her kittens?” I ask.
Deacon’s gaze returns to mine. “Was a female. I kept her too.”
My chest hurts. “Deacon.”
“I didn’t spay her.”
Sonny lowers her sunglasses slowly. “This is the weirdest family planning conversation I’ve ever witnessed.”
No one laughs. Not really.
Deacon’s attention stays on me. “I wanted you to have one.”
The words are so simple they do more damage than poetry would have.
Fifteen years. He kept a cat. Then her kitten.
Then another generation, maybe more, all because somewhere inside the blood and letters and impossible choices, he’d decided a girl who lost everything should someday have something living from before.
Something warm. Something hers.
Homer bats the olive under Delia’s chair, then headbutts her ankle.
Delia makes a sound that isn’t quite a sob. I reach for her without thinking. She reaches back.
Our hands meet on the tabletop, fingers locking hard enough to hurt. She stares at Homer like grief has finally found the stupidest, softest door and kicked it open.
“He’s family,” she whispers.
That breaks me.
My laugh comes out wet and awful. “He’s also an idiot.”
“He gets that from your side,” Delia says, and then she starts crying harder.
I do too.
Sonny takes one look at both of us, reaches across me, and snatches up a napkin. “I leave you alone for five minutes, and you acquire a dead sister, secret mother, a cartel, and a legacy cat.”
“It was a little longer than five minutes.”
“I’ve learned my lesson.”
Marisol reaches for Delia’s other hand.
The three of us sit there in the morning sun, crying at a terrace table in Isabel’s former house over a cat descended from a cat with the wrong name. Sonny dabs at her own eyes while claiming allergies. Homer finally notices the emotional weight of his lineage, sneezes, and tries to eat the olive.
Ever crosses the terrace and removes it from his reach.
“No.”
Homer meows at him.
Ever looks at me. “He argued with me.”
“He’s a Hart.”
Delia wipes her face with the heel of her hand. “Unfortunately accurate.”
Lunch cools on the plates. The documents wait in Marisol’s folder.
Inside the house, men with rosary tattoos and lowered eyes are learning how it feels to take orders from a woman who has no interest in kneeling for them.
Outside, on the terrace, three women who were made strangers by the same monster sit together and practice staying.
Delia releases my hand first. The moment ends gently.
Her face smooths again, though some softness remains near the edges. “We have to talk about the house.”
“The ugly one or the criminal empire one?” Sonny asks.
Delia glances at her. “Both.”
“I was afraid of that.”
Marisol opens the folder.
Just like that, the table shifts from almost-family into something sharper.
“The main accounts are already frozen from the inside,” Marisol says. “Teresa and Ana Luisa moved faster than I expected. Celeste has control of the charitable arm, at least temporarily. The punishment rooms are closed.”
“Burn them.”
Everyone looks at me.
I lift my chin. “You said closed. I said burn them.”
Delia studies me, then nods once. “Agreed.”
Marisol writes something down. “The girls housed at St. Agnes?”