16. Reva
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
REVA
The boat comes in fast across the dark water.
I feel it before I see it, a low vibration moving through the dock, through the walls, through the floor beneath my bare feet.
Ever has the perimeter feeds up across every screen in the war room, the cabin lit in strange slices of security light while the marsh beyond the glass stays black and wet.
Rain drags thin silver lines down the monitors.
For a second, all I can see is motion—the boat cutting toward the dock, Nash standing at the bow, Deacon at the rear, another shape between them wrapped in a coat too large for her body.
Delia.
I am out of the chair before Ever says my name.
He catches my arm at the door, firm enough to stop me, and I turn on him with every raw piece of me already in my throat.
His face is calm, but his eyes are on the screen, tracking the dock, the water, the trees.
He wants to open the door as badly as I do.
That is the only reason I manage not to snarl at him.
“Code first,” he says.
“They’re right there.”
“They enter the code first.”
The words are quiet, and the quiet does what yelling would not. It holds me in place long enough for Nash to step off the boat and enter the code. Ever verifies it, answers through the comm, and releases me. I am moving before he finishes telling them the house is clear.
The back hall feels longer than it should.
Every locked door, every reinforced seam, every silent camera watching from the ceiling reminds me that this place was built to keep people out and keep me in.
I know why. I know Isabel would love nothing more than for me to run into the open like a girl with no sense of survival.
I know staying here was part of the rescue.
Knowing doesn’t make it easier to stand on the right side of the door while my sister comes through it bleeding.
The lock disengages. Rain-heavy air pushes inside ahead of them, carrying the smell of river mud, cold metal, and blood.
Nash enters first with his weapon low and his eyes sweeping the hall before they settle on me.
He is wet through the shoulders, hard-faced, controlled in that terrifying way that means he is holding everything together by will alone.
Deacon follows him, one hand pressed to his side beneath his coat.
Then Delia steps inside.
For one suspended second, I cannot move.
She looks smaller than she did at the gala.
Smaller than she did beside the pool. The dark coat hangs from her shoulders, and wet hair clings to her cheeks.
Her face is pale, her mouth tight, her posture too straight for the way she is favoring one leg.
One hand is curled against her chest. The other hangs at her side, wrapped in blood-streaked gauze that someone must have pressed there in the van.
Beneath the hem of the coat, one bare foot peeks out, scraped and dirty, and there is blood at both knees.
My body reaches for her before my mind gives permission.
Delia flinches. It is tiny—a breath. A tightening around the eyes. The smallest recoil from touch.
But I stop with my hands halfway lifted.
“Don’t,” she says.
The word is rough and immediate, pulled out of her before she can dress it in cruelty. That makes it hurt more, somehow. I lower my hands because she asked me to, and because for the first time since she came back into my life, I understand that reaching for her can be another kind of taking.
“Okay,” I say.
Her gaze flicks to mine, wariness reflected in her eyes. She didn’t expect me to stop.
Nash closes the door behind them. Locks slide back into place, one after another, the sound clean and final in the hall. “Kitchen,” he says. “Everyone sits where I can see them.”
Delia’s mouth tightens like she wants to argue on principle, but she moves without speaking. The fact that she saves her energy frightens me almost as much as the blood.
I follow them into the kitchen, watching the hitch in her walk, the tension through Deacon’s jaw, the way Nash stays close without crowding either of them.
Ever moves past us to retrieve the medical kit from the concealed cabinet near the pantry.
The room fills with wet clothing, controlled breathing, and all the words no one knows how to say.
Then I see Delia’s wrists clearly.
Red bead marks ring both of them. Deep, angry impressions pressed into the skin. There are raw places where something cut or rubbed too hard, and beneath the torn edge of her dress, her knees are scraped bloody with bits of white stone clinging to the wounds.
I go cold.
My thumb finds the rubber bands on my wrist and snaps one before I realize I have moved. Pain flashes against my skin. It does nothing useful, so I snap it again.
Delia sees me looking at her knees.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she says.
“Then stop bleeding where I can see it.”
Something moves across her face. It might be anger. It might be the beginning of a smile that has forgotten how to live. Whatever it is, she crushes it quickly and looks away.
I start pacing because standing still will turn me into something worse. The rubber band snaps again. My chest feels too small for my lungs, and all I can see is Delia on a chapel floor while Isabel watched or ordered or smiled from another room with her hands clean.
“I’m going to kill her,” I say, half under my breath.
Nash turns toward me.
“I’m going to fucking kill that bitch.” My voice rises despite every effort to keep it steady. “What the hell did they do to you? What did they do?”
Delia looks down at her injuries like she’d forgotten they were visible. “It’s an old correction.”
My stomach turns. “Correction.”
She says nothing.
I look at the raw grooves, the broken beads, the blood dark beneath Ever’s careful hands. “I’m going to kill her.”
“Reva.”
I stop because the sound of Nash’s voice gives me a wall to slam against.
He doesn’t raise it. He doesn’t soften it either. “You are the one here with medical training. Use it.”
The command cuts through the rage cleanly enough to leave a path.
My hands are shaking, but I know what to do with wounds.
I know gauze and antiseptic, pressure and tape, breath and pulse.
I know how to look at blood and see the body beneath it instead of the violence that made it.
That skill has never felt like a mercy before.
Tonight, it gives me somewhere to put my hands.
Ever sets the kit on the table and opens it.
Deacon lowers himself into a chair because Nash points to one, and Delia sits only after Nash pulls out another chair and steps back, leaving her the space to choose it.
She lowers herself carefully. Her jaw tightens when her knees bend, but she does not make a sound.
Of course she doesn’t.
No. I push that thought away. I will not make her pain into proof of how strong she is. Isabel has probably done enough of that for both of us.
I turn to Deacon first because his blood is spreading along his side, darkening the black fabric. Delia turns at the same time. We both notice. We both react. The shared motion makes the room feel suddenly too bright.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Just a graze. Do her first.”
“Shut up. Knife or bullet?”
“Bullet,” Delia says before he can answer.
Our eyes meet over him.
Her concern is as real as mine, just different. The knowledge sits between us with teeth. She sees my hands go to his shirt, sees the ease of the touch, and her expression closes so fast I could almost believe I imagined the hurt.
Almost.
“Shirt up,” I tell Deacon.
His eyes stay on mine. “It’s shallow.”
“I didn’t ask for your diagnosis.”
He lets me lift the shirt.
The graze runs along his left side under the ribs, raw and ugly, but the bleeding is already slowing.
I clean it with more force than strictly necessary, checking the depth, the angle, the edges of torn skin.
No bubbling. No deeper channel. He will ache, swear he does not, and continue being impossible.
“You need strips,” I say.
“Fine.”
That is too easy, which means he knows better than to argue with me right now.
Ever crouches near Delia with gauze, warm water, and the sort of careful patience that makes my throat hurt. He does not reach for her. He places the supplies on the table within her sight, then sits back on his heels with his hands open.
“Your palm first,” he says. “If you’ll let me.”
Delia studies him as if kindness requires dissection.
After a long moment, she opens her hand.
The cut across her palm is shallow but dirty, the skin torn where something sharp pressed into it.
Her wrist has deeper marks from the rosary beads, some red, some already purpling.
Ever cleans around the wounds, slow and precise, stopping when her fingers flex against pain.
He doesn’t tell her to relax. He doesn’t make the mistake of telling her anything about her own body.
Smart man.
The rubber bands sit tight around my wrist, and I want to snap them until they break.
Instead, I finish taping Deacon’s side. “Hold still.”
“I am.”
“You’re breathing wrong out of spite.”
His mouth almost moves. “I’ll work on that.”
“Do.”
Delia makes a small sound when Ever pulls a glass bead fragment from the torn skin near her wrist and drops it into the metal dish. It clicks against the bottom, tiny and awful.
I leave Deacon before I can think about it. “I’m getting towels. And clothes. We’re probably gonna need some more soon, just fyi.”
Nash watches me cross to the laundry room but doesn’t stop me. Maybe he knows towels are safer than murder. Maybe he knows I need a task that doesn’t involve looking at my sister’s wrists and knees for another second.