Chapter 32 Deacon
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
DEACON
She’s here.
Of all the places for Reva Leigh Hart to wash up, of all the bad decisions she could have made and all the blood-dark roads she could have chosen to walk, she has somehow found her way to the one place I have spent the last fifteen years keeping her from.
New Orleans.
More specifically, Noir Night.
My kingdom, if a man can call a graveyard and a whorehouse and a den of expensive appetites a kingdom.
Mine. And Nash’s…I’ll give him that.
Now she’s in it, standing under golden lowlight in a dress that makes men stare and fools dream, with Nash Blackwood’s scent all over her. My little ghost of a girl looking at me like the floor has opened beneath her feet.
God help me, she’s not a child.
That part I’d already learned.
In the bathroom of that bar in that first nothing town she stopped in, I learned it with a kind of violence I did not enjoy confessing to myself.
That little interlude had not been planned.
I had no intention of stepping out of the shadows for her then, no intention of touching the perimeter I have spent years drawing around her life.
And then I saw her. Saw her dancing with Shiloh. Saw Shiloh’s intent written all over him in that slick, smiling way the boy mistakes for subtlety.
Saw her ready—willing—to throw herself at him like she was trying to burn down the remains of her own restraint.
And something had come over me.
Territorial.
Immediate.
Primitive enough to shame a better man, if I had ever been one.
Oh no you fucking don’t. That was the thought. It was nothing strategic or noble or even coherent. All I could think was…mine.
Reva was mine.
Some part of me had known it for years, though I wouldn’t have said it that plainly, not even in the privacy of my own head where all the worst truths live. Maybe I had simply been waiting for her to grow up.
Is that sick? Maybe it’s a little twisted. But there you fucking go.
I never touched her as a child—never even really talked or wrote to her.
Never crossed a line. Never fed her little promises or poisoned her mind with fantasies meant to bind her to me.
I never groomed, never manipulated, never told her a word about my place in her past or the shadow I cast over her present.
I was simply there.
Watching. I simply wanted to watch over her and make sure she had a chance to grow up. To be safe.
Keeping her safe was all I needed.
Until I saw her with him.
Reva was mine.
It is a dangerous thing to love someone in secret.
More dangerous still when what you love is a woman who should hate you, and eventually will, because the shape of your devotion is all wrong.
It does not look like clean hands or righteous choices.
It looks like blood under the nails. It looks like compromise that she doesn’t want to make.
It looks like sacrificing every decent thing in your life to preserve one living piece of what was lost.
I did not arrive at her by accident. I did not obsess over her by accident. None of it was fate.
I have been writing her letters for years.
Not love letters. Nothing so obvious. Nothing that would have tipped my hand or led her by the nose toward me. Just fragments. I’ve been a figure in the margins of her life. A mentor where I could be one, a quiet hand on the scale when I could manage it without drawing notice.
Safer that way.
Safer for her.
I became something similar for Delia, too, though more directly.
More openly. Reva’s sister needed someone she could trust in this world, and God knows that world did not offer her much worth trusting.
So I became useful. Steady. A dark shape in the background who could make a door open, a problem disappear, a danger retreat one step.
Mentor, protector, liar. The closest thing to a friend she’d ever truly had.
Whatever name best suits a man who builds his own church out of sin and then kneels in it nightly.
I have been watching Reva for so long I no longer know where duty ended and hunger began.
Probably they were never separate things.
I watched her in foster placements. In schools.
In borrowed little apartments. In grief.
In fury. In the ugly, awkward years when her bones lengthened and her eyes sharpened and the child fell away piece by piece, leaving behind this fierce, starving creature who was always going to come clawing at my door eventually.
She got the cat because of me.
Christ, even that.
The orange cat from her family’s house the night everything burned down—Mr. T, Delia had called him with all the solemn confidence of a little girl who assumed the world could still be named into kindness.
I took him because I could not stand the thought of the animal being abandoned to whatever came next.
Fire. Hunger. A neighbor’s boot. A shelter that smelled like bleach and dying hope.
It seemed a small mercy.
The joke, of course, was on me. Mr. T was not a mister at all, but a lady cat of statistically unusual coloring, which I learned much later and against my will from a veterinarian who found the whole thing amusing.
One of her descendants got out recently and came back swollen with kittens.
I saw to it all of them were fixed, fed, and sent off to homes I deemed acceptable.
That, too, is apparently the sort of man I am.
Monster. Keeper. Reluctant curator of orange and jobless cats.
I have a ridiculous list of sins and salvations.
And always, threaded through all of it, Reva.
I destroyed everything remotely decent in my life to keep her safe. Not with one grand gesture. Those are for stories and idiots.
I did it slowly.
Deliberately.
One choice at a time.
I stood in rooms I should have burned down and smiled at men I should have gutted because proximity kept her alive.
I let the Syndicate believe what it needed to believe.
I gave pieces of myself to causes that deserved none of them.
I kept Noir Night alive even when the rest of my relationship with Nash and our brothers fractured, because this one enterprise remained useful.
Necessary. A point of intricate interdependence in a world built on betrayal.
The Syndicate wanted order.
Noir gave them leverage, entertainment, a place where commerce and vice and power could drink from the same glass.
It gave me eyes where I needed them. It gave me access. It gave me a way to keep one hand on the throat of the city and another around the fragile, invisible perimeter of the girls I had failed to save properly the first time.
Girls.
No. They’re not girls now. They’re women.
Delia was the sacrifice. There is no kind way to say that, and I have no use for kind lies tonight. I could not protect Delia from the Syndicate.
Not in the ways that mattered most.
There were too many eyes. Too many obligations. Too many old debts and new appetites circling her the instant it became clear what she was worth to the machine. I did what I could. Directed. Softened blows. Taught her where to bend so she would not break.
But she was marked.
A necessary offering laid on an altar I was not powerful enough to overturn without losing everything too soon.
Reva, though—
Reva I could save.
I spirited her away. Untouched by as much of it as I could manage for fifteen years.
And now here she is, threatening to upend the whole rotted architecture of my life, and for what? To kill me?
The laugh that tries to rise in me is bitter enough to choke on.
If only you knew, little ghost. If only you knew.
Across the room, she is still staring at Delia like the world has split in two.
Good.
Let it split.
Some truths only enter cleanly when they arrive all at once, violent and undeniable.
Nash is watching me with that flat, aristocratic menace of his, no doubt measuring every twitch of my face against whatever puzzle he believes he is close to solving.
He has always been too perceptive for his own good.
Beside him, Ever looks half a heartbeat from tearing the room apart with his hands.
Shiloh, for all his theatrical ease, has gone very still.
They matter more than I ever intended them to. That is another truth I have tried not to examine too closely.
They were boys once. Sharp and dangerous and half-feral with old grief, shaped by the same brutal system even if they hadn’t come from the same blood.
Nash’s father was no less difficult—the kind of man who built rot into his son’s inheritance—but Ever and Shiloh were different.
Different beginnings. Same ending. Foster care, hard lessons, and a world that taught them young that love was weakness unless you learned how to weaponize it.
None of them made it to the final initiation, passed the final test to be tattooed with the rosary. I saved them from that. I gave them the escape and took the brunt of their pain. Theirs and Reva’s.
I stayed entangled with all of them because practicality and loyalty demanded it, and because some sentimental, deeply stupid part of me respected what they’d made of themselves.
Nash understands the weight of power. Ever loves like a wound he’d rather bleed from than heal.
And Shiloh laughs at darkness as if daring it to bite harder.
And now here they are with her.
Circling her.
Claiming her.
Thinking they have discovered something unique when I have been starving for years.
Perhaps they have. Love changes shape depending on when or how it reaches you.
What lives in them may be truer than what lives in me. Cleaner, at least. They met her as a woman. They desire her in the open. They are free to take what she offers and give back in kind without every touch being haunted by history and guilt and old blood that’s coated in lies.
I do not resent them for that. I just resent the part of me that still thinks she’s mine.
Delia shifts, uncomfortable under her sister’s stare.
Her wrist is bare tonight except for the tattoo, and I think absurdly of how small her hand used to be in mine when she was learning to walk in heels, to smile on command, to survive a room by making men underestimate her.
She is beautiful now in a way that has cost too much.
She is controlled. Gilded. Sharp enough to pass inspection.
The sacrifice learned to wear silk like armor.
She went pale at the sight of her sister and hasn’t recovered.
For all my preparation, I did not think this moment would arrive quite like this. Not tonight. Not in the center of Noir with the gaming room humming and half the city’s worst secrets breathing just down the hall.
Yet here it is. And perhaps there is no better place for the truth to be born than in hell. Reva’s eyes cut back to me.
There it is again—that feral blend of fear and fury and recognition beginning to flower. She knows me from the bathroom now. From the letters. From the shape of my voice fitting into the negative space of too many missing answers.
It’s okay. Let her hate me for all the right reasons, finally.
I take one step toward her and watch every man around her tense. So predictable. Almost touching.
If I extended a hand now, would she take it or bite me? Probably the latter. I admire that about her.
“Sheathe your claws,” I say softly.
The words are for her, but not only for her. They are for the Blackwood men, for Delia, for the room, for myself.
They are a command and a plea both.
Because once this starts—once the truth begins to spill free—it will not stop where anyone wants it to. It will cut through Syndicate loyalties, through old bargains, through everything Nash thinks he knows about his father’s legacy and everything Reva believes about the night her family died.
She came here to find a murderer. Instead she has found the architecture. The machine. The family beneath the blood.
And me.
This—her in my club, her sister at my side, the Blackwood heirs bristling around the girl I have spent half my life saving from the truth—this is the beginning.
And when Reva finally learns what I did that night, what I spared and what I destroyed, what I chose for Delia and why, she will either put a knife in my throat—or she will understand that every terrible thing I became, I became to keep her alive.
I almost smile at the thought.
Either way, she will be mine a little longer.
And that, for tonight, is enough.