20. Reva
CHAPTER TWENTY
REVA
For a while after Ever says we can’t stay, nobody moves.
The living room is still full of the sound the drones left behind.
Not actual sound, because the bullets have stopped and the marsh has gone back to rain and wind and water slapping gently against the dock.
But the echo remains in my nerves, in the small white marks sprayed across the glass, in the pieces of broken drone smoking on the wet boards outside.
The cabin was supposed to be a safe haven. A space Isabel couldn’t touch.
A place made of concrete and steel, with cameras and reinforced glass, built by men with guns and plans and the kind of money to buy doors strong enough to make fear feel foolish.
Now the windows are bruised with the proof that she found us anyway.
I stand in the middle of the living room with Homer clutched against my chest, his claws dug into my shirt and his whole orange body vibrating with outrage.
Delia stands beside the sofa, one hand resting lightly on the back cushion to take weight off her knees.
Shiloh is near the hall, jaw tight, phone in one hand like he’s still expecting another hospital update to come through and gut us from a second direction.
Deacon is by the window, careful to stay out of the direct sightline, his bandaged side hidden under his shirt and his gun still in his hand.
Ever is in the doorway of his security room, eyes moving between the screens and the glass and all of us.
I look at him. “Okay. So what next, then?”
His expression doesn’t change. That’s its own answer.
“We move,” he says.
“To where?”
“Somewhere else.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have right now.”
I laugh once, a flat ugly sound that makes Homer pin his ears back.
“Great. Perfect. We can’t go back to Blackwood House because it’s too open and not protected enough.
We can’t stay here because the secret murder cabin with the magic windows isn’t protected enough.
Cal is still in the hospital. Isabel knows Delia is here… and I’m here. So we run again.”
“We relocate,” Ever says.
“Run, relocate, strategically flee into the swamp. Pick whatever word you like.”
Delia’s gaze shifts to me. She says nothing.
I set Homer down because if I keep holding him, I am going to squeeze the cat into a loaf, and even he does not deserve that.
He darts immediately toward Delia and plants himself on her foot as if he has chosen his side.
Fine. Let him. My hands are free now, which is dangerous, because they go straight into my hair.
I grip hard and pull until my scalp stings.
“When do we stop waiting?” I ask. “When do we stop letting Isabel choose which room, which hour, which person who bleeds? We waited at the hospital. We waited here. We waited while you went to get Delia. We waited while drones knocked on the windows to see how scared we’d be.”
“Reva,” Shiloh says softly.
I shake my head. “No. I am so sick of hearing my name like it’s a leash.”
Deacon moves before the sentence finishes.
He does not grab my wrists or tell me to calm down.
He steps in behind me, closes both arms around my body, and pulls me back against his chest with enough strength to stop the shaking without making it a fight.
His side has to hurt. I know it does because I taped the wound myself, but he doesn’t flinch when I hit his ribs with my elbow by accident.
He just tightens his hold and bends his head near mine.
“Breathe,” he says.
“I don’t want to.”
“Do it anyway.”
The simplicity almost undoes me.
My hands loosen in my hair. Deacon catches them, folds them down against my stomach, and holds them there under his own. His skin is warm. His grip is unyielding. I can feel his heartbeat against my back, slow and infuriating, while mine beats and bangs around my chest, looking for exits.
“I am tired of being hidden,” I whisper. “I’m ready to live.”
His mouth brushes the side of my head. “I know.”
“I am tired of people getting hurt because I’m alive.”
His arms tighten once. “That’s Isabel talking with your voice.”
I close my eyes. Delia makes a quiet sound, not agreement exactly, but close enough that I look at her.
She has tipped her head to the side, studying me in that unsettling way she has, like she is seeing the shape of the thought beneath the words.
She looks composed again, pale and bandaged and too still, but there is something different in her eyes now.
The drone fire did not rattle her the way it rattled me.
Or maybe she is only better at locking the rattle behind her teeth.
“She’s not wrong,” Delia says.
Ever turns slightly toward her. Shiloh goes still. Deacon’s arms remain around me, but I feel the shift in him, too.
Delia looks at the marked glass. “Isabel doesn’t know what to do with someone who brings the fight to her.
Not really. She understands obedience. She understands fear.
She understands punishment and retreat and people scrambling after she moves first.” Her gaze comes back to mine.
“She has always been the one to initiate.”
I swallow.
“So what happens when she isn’t?” I ask.
Delia’s mouth tightens. “She gets angry.”
“That sounds bad.”
“It makes her sloppy.”
Ever’s phone rings before anyone can answer.
Every weapon in the room seems to come awake. Ever checks the screen, then exhales through his nose. “Nash.”
“Put him on speaker,” Shiloh says.
Ever taps the phone and sets it on the edge of the desk. “You’re on.”
Nash’s voice fills the room, clipped and controlled, with the hospital’s low background noise humming behind him. “Why aren’t you answering my texts?”
“We were dealing with the drones,” Ever says.
“Talk to me.”
“Six confirmed. At least two armed. Surveillance and glass test. Three down, maybe four. Remaining pulled back.”
Another pause, colder this time. “Injuries?”
“No.”
“Reva.”
“I’m here,” I say.
“Delia.”
Delia’s brows lift faintly, as if she is not used to being accounted for by a man like Nash. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“Deacon?”
“Annoying as ever,” Deacon says near my ear.
Nash exhales, short and hard. It might be relief if he were another man. “So the cabin is blown.”
“Yes,” Ever says. “Likely tracked from the convent route. Delia recognized an old maintenance path that ties back to Sainte Aurelia.”
“Can you hold for thirty minutes?”
Ever looks at the glass, the feeds, the hallway, the distance between the living room and the reinforced interior rooms. “Yes.”
“Forty-five?”
“Yes.”
“Longer?”
“My preference is no.”
Shiloh’s jaw flexes. We all absorb the answer.
Nash says, “You don’t go back to Blackwood House. Too many public approaches, too many known cameras, too many people tied to us. I’ll have a new location by the time you hit the outskirts. I’m sending coordinates as soon as they’re clean.”
“You have a place ready?” I ask.
“I have more than one.”
“Because of course you do,” I start to say, then bite off the first words before they fully form because I am trying to stop leaning on old verbal crutches when fear gets loud. “Because you’re you.”
“Because paranoia is useful when people keep trying to kill my family,” Nash says.
My chest tightens around the word family. Shiloh looks down.
Ever asks, “Cal?”
“He’s good. Still sedated. No fever. Labs holding. I am not leaving until the replacement guard is in place, then I’ll meet you at the second location.”
“You shouldn’t say that on speaker,” Delia says.
Silence follows.
Nash asks, “Why?”
“Because if Isabel is listening, she now knows you intend to move.”
Ever’s face goes grim. “Line is encrypted.”
“Isabel likes owning people more than systems. Systems are cleaner. People are easier.”
Nash does not dismiss her. That matters. “Point taken.”
Delia looks slightly surprised by that.
Nash continues, “Ever, run assumption of compromised verbal traffic. Send only dead-drop coordinate confirmation. No destination spoken. Shiloh, prep medical and travel bags. Deacon, keep pressure on that wound if it opens. Reva, do what Ever says.”
My temper twitches. “You almost made it through without bossing me.”
“That’ll never happen, brat.”
The phone clicks with an incoming notification on Ever’s end.
“Coordinates pending,” Ever says.
“I’ll send final after I confirm the route. Move fast, but don’t move blind.” Nash pauses. When he speaks again, his voice has lowered. “Little wolf.”
I hate that my eyes burn.
“What?”
“Leaving this cabin is not losing.”
I close my fingers around Deacon’s wrist. “It feels like it.”
“I know. Do it anyway.”
He hangs up before I can answer, which is very Nash and therefore extremely rude.
For two seconds, everyone stays where they are.
Then the room shifts into motion. Ever turns back toward the screens, already shutting down feeds and wiping anything that cannot move with us.
Shiloh heads for the hall, calling over his shoulder that he’ll pack the first-aid kit, ammunition, cat food, and whatever muffins survived breakfast. Delia bends carefully to pick up Homer, who allows it with great dignity and no loyalty at all.
Deacon’s phone rings.
The sound is not loud, but the effect is immediate. No one speaks. Even Shiloh stops at the hallway entrance.
Deacon’s arms leave me slowly. I turn as he takes the phone from his pocket. The screen shows no name. No number. Just a blocked call that should not have found this device.
His face changes. Something older than fear and more controlled moves across his features as he answers, pressing the button to set the call on speaker. “Cross.”
The room holds its breath.
A woman’s voice comes through. “You have something of mine, Deacon. As well as an unfinished task.”
My blood turns cold. Isabel.
Delia’s fingers tighten around Homer until he complains and squirms. She loosens them at once, but her face has emptied of expression.
Deacon’s voice becomes flat. “Delia is not yours.”
A soft laugh. “Possession has never required permission.”
“You lost her.”
“I misplaced her,” Isabel says. “Temporarily. A vulgar inconvenience, and one you will correct if you have any memory left of who made you.”
Deacon’s eyes lift to mine. Whatever he sees there steadies something in him. Or maybe it makes him worse.
“You made a weapon,” he says. “Then you put it in a room with the only person it would choose over you.”
He pauses. “Actually, I take that back. Several people. It honestly doesn’t take much where you’re concerned, Isabel.”
Isabel is silent for half a beat.
Then she says, “Romance has made you theatrical.”
“Nah. This has nothing to do with either of those. You’re just a psychotic old cunt, and I’m done being your red right hand.”
My heart kicks hard.
Isabel’s voice sharpens beneath the silk. “Bring the girls back, and I may let you decide which one survives long enough to disappoint me again.”
Deacon’s hand tightens around the phone. “Go to hell.”
“I own too many rooms there already.”
“Then sit in one and wait for the fucking fire, bitch.”
Shiloh’s eyebrows lift despite everything.
I would laugh if I could breathe.
Isabel does not. She sighs. “You can run. Blackwood can hide you in every pretty hole he purchased against the day his sins found him. Rousseau can shoot my toys from the sky. Lafitte can charm nurses and frightened girls. None of it changes the order of things. La Rosa endures. La Rosa remembers. La Rosa wins.”
Delia makes the smallest sound at the back of her throat. Deacon looks at her, and something in his face shifts.
“Not this time,” he says.
“Ah.” Isabel’s voice gentles. “Still clinging to defiance. How tiresome.”
“Is there a point to this call?”
“There is. Do not bother trying to contact Sabine again.”
The room goes utterly still. Deacon’s eyes close, and his chest rises and falls in a breath.
Isabel continues, almost lazily. “Such a clever woman. Such poor balance near old stairs. Accidents are tragic in historic buildings. All that stone.”
Delia makes a choking sound.
I move before I think. My hand closes around hers, hard, the way I would grab someone going under water. Her skin is cold. For one second she grips back with enough force to hurt.
Sabine. I watched her on the video feeds we had.
The woman who opened the door. The woman who got Delia out. The woman who told Deacon not to waste what Delia chose. I barely knew her, and still the room loses oxygen.
Deacon says nothing. That scares me.
Isabel seems to savor it. “You take my things, Deacon, and I take yours.”
Delia’s hand trembles in mine, and something in me goes quiet.
I release my sister carefully and cross the room. Deacon does not stop me when I take the phone from his hand. His eyes open as my fingers close around it. There is grief in them, and rage.
I lift the phone.
“Isabel.”
A pause.
Then, softly, “Reva.”
She says my name like she has the right to taste it in her mouth. I smile, though she cannot see it. Maybe because she cannot see it.
“You keep sending other people to bleed for you,” I say. “You should come next time.”
Delia’s breath catches behind me.
Isabel’s voice turns cold. “Careful, child.”
“Why should I be careful for a woman who puts little girls on their knees?” My voice is soft.
“You know nothing about what it takes to lead.”
“I know enough to recognize a coward with clean hands.”
The silence on the line is the first thing all day that feels like victory.
Small. Temporary. Mine.
“I’m coming for you…nana.”
A choked sound of rage emits from the other end. I end the call.
For a moment, nobody moves.
Then Deacon takes the phone from me and crushes it in his hand, hard enough that the casing cracks. He drops the pieces on the table. Ever does not complain about evidence or tracking or the mess. Shiloh does not make a joke. Delia stares at the broken phone as if it is a door that just closed.
I turn to her. Her eyes are dry. Too dry.
“Sabine got you out,” I say.
Delia nods once.
I want to say I’m sorry, but the words feel useless and small, and I am tired of useless things.
Ever’s screens flash with a new notification. Coordinates, probably. Another place to hide. Another route through back roads and water and dark. Another set of walls Isabel will eventually learn how to test.
I look at the marked glass. The impact blooms spread across it like pale flowers. All at once, I see the pattern too clearly.
Hospital. Cabin. Convent. Drones. Calls. Corrections. Accidents.
Isabel moves, and we react. Isabel chooses, and someone bleeds. My hands curl at my sides.
“This ends now,” I say.
Ever looks up from the monitors. Shiloh turns in the hallway. Deacon’s gaze settles on me with a weight I feel all the way through my bones.
I look at Delia. My sister. My twin. The girl who survived by becoming useful to the woman who took everything from us. The woman who knows routes and rooms and guards and knives.
“We stop waiting for her to choose the time and place.”
Delia studies me for a long moment. She doesn't argue.
“We choose it for her,” I say.