9. Deacon
CHAPTER NINE
DEACON
Reva does not just sit down and be quiet. She has to glare at me first.
That’s fine. I expect as much. She looks better than the way she looked on the mats with Ever, her eyes too bright, her thoughts tearing themselves wide open behind her face.
It’s her anger that keeps her here. Her anger that keeps the blood moving. Anger gives her teeth when grief wants to make a meal of her.
I take the glare and hold my hand out until she steps into the boat.
She refuses my help getting down. I let her have that much. The flat-bottom skiff shifts beneath her weight, rocking gently against the dock. Her hands fly out for balance, but she catches herself before I can touch her. Pride straightens her spine a second later.
Ever stands at the edge of the path behind her, arms folded, mouth hard. He does not ask where I’m taking her. He knows I wouldn’t move her without a reason. He also knows I wouldn’t take her far.
Not yet.
Reva drops onto the middle bench with all the grace of a woman making a point. “If this is a kidnapping, you’re doing a shitty job.”
I untie the rope from the cleat. “I will try harder next time.”
Her mouth tightens. She looks away first, toward the water. The skiff drifts a foot from the dock, just enough to separate us from land. Ever remains where he is, watching until I start the motor.
The engine coughs once, then settles into a low hum, and I guide us away from the cabin.
The house slides back through the cypress, glass and concrete hidden beneath rough siding and morning mist. From the water, it becomes what Nash intended it to be: a suggestion of shelter and little more.
Reeds swallow the angles. Branches break the roofline.
The dock disappears behind a screen of green and gray.
Reva watches it go, her jaw locked.
I steer into the narrow channel behind the property, keeping the motor low.
The skiff cuts clean through dark water, nosing past cypress knees and floating mats of green.
Spanish moss hangs in long, damp strands from branches overhead.
Mist clings to the water. The air smells of mud, rain waiting to fall, and the faint rot of living things becoming fuel for other living things.
The bayou has no interest in hurry. It dwells, living, lingering within each moment. That’s why I brought her here.
The cabin has too many people inside it. Too much love. Too much fear. Too many men trying to hold themselves back from reaching for her at once. Reva is smart enough to know why she is there and wounded enough to feel the cage wrapped around protection.
The swamp does not explain itself. It doesn’t soothe because someone asks it to. It just is.
Water and wood. Insects and birds. Roots sunk deep in muck and still reaching. It’s worked for me before, when I needed to calm the demons crying out for blood and vengeance and other things.
It didn’t make me better. It just gave my mind fewer walls to break itself against. It has this way of turning noise into a kind of weather, letting the worst of it pass through.
Reva sits rigid on the bench.
Her fingers work at the rubber bands on her wrist. She has not snapped one since we left the dock, but her thumb rests under the edge of the nearest band, ready. A weapon no one else would recognize.
My little ghost wants to be fierce. And she is. She just doesn’t believe it yet.
She thinks fierce should feel clean. Righteous. Unshakable. She thinks it should look like marching straight into Isabel’s house and taking her sister back by the throat of the world.
Fierce can be quieter than that.
Fierce can be a girl with blood under her nails sitting in a stolen slice of morning while the men who love her strategize around the damage. Fierce can be staying alive when death calls your name. Fierce can be saying no even when it comes out of panic.
She does not need to carry all of it alone. We will be fierce for her when she can’t be.
The channel widens.
A great blue heron stands in the shallows near a fallen tree, long legs still, neck folded into its body like a thought held carefully. It watches us pass with one yellow eye. Reva’s gaze catches on it, and her lips round in silent ‘O.’
Some of the tension leaves her shoulders.
I take the skiff farther into the bayou, through a cut only locals and men with too many secrets bother learning. The cabin is well out of sight now. The world narrows to water, grass, trees, and the dull thrum of the motor beneath my hand, the sun barely visible through the treetops overhead.
Minutes pass. She lets them.
When she finally speaks, her voice is rough from disuse. “Where are we going?”
“Nowhere.”
Her head turns. “What the hell kind of answer is that?”
“An honest one.”
“We’re in a boat, Deacon; boats usually go places.”
“This one is going nowhere with intention.”
Her eyes narrow, and I stifle a smile. She’s never more alive than when she wants to throw me into the water.
“I just wanted to get you out of there,” I say.
“We were in the middle of training. You can’t just—”
“You were spiraling.”
She rolls her eyes. “No, I was making several excellent points.”
“You were blaming yourself for being hunted by a woman who ordered your death when you were seven.”
The heron lifts from the shallows, wings spreading wide and slow. Reva watches it rise through the mist. For a few seconds, neither of us says anything. Its wings beat once, twice; then it glides low over the water and disappears between the trees.
“I shouldn’t have come back here,” she says.
The words are quiet enough that the motor nearly eats them.
I turn us into a side channel, deeper under the cypress canopy. “That sounds like a lie grief is whispering in your ear, little ghost.”
Her mouth pulls tight. “You make it sound poetic.”
“Well, it’s not. Just the truth.”
She looks down at her wrist.
Snap. The sound is small in the open air.
“Cal got shot because of me.”
“No, Cal got shot because Isabel ordered a man to shoot you, and he stepped in the way.”
She sniffs. “I’m the reason she had anyone to shoot.”
I nod. “That is true.”
Her head comes up fast, anger sparking.
I hold her stare. “You are the reason she is afraid. Do not confuse that with fault, though.”
She does not know what to do with that. Good. Let it sit. Let it bite back against the harsher lie she keeps trying to tell herself.
I slow the motor near a stand of cypress and let the skiff drift. Water taps against the hull. A dragonfly skims past, blue body bright as a sliver of glass. Reva’s hand lifts to follow its path, then drops. Somewhere farther off, something splashes and vanishes.
I did not bring her here to talk, but I talk anyway because some truths need open air.
“Shiloh came to the hospital last night.”
Reva’s eyes sharpen.
“To switch shifts with me,” I say. “Nash needed to return to Cal’s room after the doctor’s update. Shiloh came to take the hall.”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
The skiff drifts another foot. I correct with the motor, then cut it completely. Silence drops in around us, deep and wet.
“There was a shift change,” I say. “Nursing staff. Two real. One…substitute.”
Her fingers tighten around the edge of the bench.
I watch her face. I need to see when she understands. I need to see how much to give at once.
“She made it past the station with valid credentials and the right uniform. Wrong shoes. Wrong hands. No fatigue in her posture. She had a syringe in her pocket and Cal’s room number written on the inside of her wrist.”
Reva’s lips pinch. The color drains from her face, leaving rage behind it.
“She was there for Cal.”
“Yes. Or you, if you’d been there.”
“Did she get inside his room?”
“No.”
I see the next question coming before she asks it.
“What happened to her?”
The swamp holds still around us.
“I shut it down.”
Her eyes stay on mine. She knows me well enough now to hear what I’m not saying.
“How?”
I wave my hand in a dismissive gesture. “Permanently.”
A muscle flickers in her cheek.
“She was young,” I say.
I do not know why I add it. Maybe because Shiloh’s face when he saw her on the floor will stay with me longer than the girl’s face. Maybe because Reva deserves to know what her survival is costing people around her. Maybe because I am tired of truths arriving dressed in polite clothes.
“Too young. Younger than she should have been for that kind of work. Old enough to carry the syringe. Old enough to know what room she was walking toward.”
Reva turns toward the water, her throat moving.
“I take it Shiloh saw?”
“He came in as she reached the hall. Saw enough.”
“And he’s not okay.”
“No.”
The answer is simple because the thing is not. Shiloh can wear charm over almost any wound. He can laugh around terror, flirt through rage, turn sorrow sideways until a room breathes again. Last night, he looked at the dead nurse and saw a girl where I saw an active threat.
Both things were true. That is what will gut him.
Reva presses her thumb under the rubber band, then stops before snapping it. Her hand falls to her lap.
“That’s why he snapped at me this morning,” she says.
“If I had to guess.”
“I thought he was angry because I was being difficult.”
“He was angry because a young woman tried to kill Cal, and he could not make that fit inside the version of himself he gives you.”
Her brow creases.
“He wants to be your soft place,” I say. “Soft things bruise.”
She watches the water for a long time after that.
The heron appears again farther down the channel, or another one like it. Impossible to say. It steps through the shallows with priestly patience, stabbing once at the water, coming up with something silver and wriggling in its beak.
Reva’s shoulders lower another fraction. A breeze slides across the marsh, damp and cooler than before. The smell of rain thickens.
She looks up through the branches. “Does it look like rain to you?”
The question is so ordinary it almost hurts.
“I think it might rain,” she adds.
As if in agreement, a drop hits my forearm, then another.