Page 167 of The Final Cut

Delia’s head snaps up. “No.”

Reva sits straighter. “Why no?”

“Because if you drag her out of La Rosa without her choosing it, you put every person she has spent fifteen years shielding directly under Isabel’s knife.”

Shiloh’s face changes. “What people?”

Delia’s mouth presses thin. “Servants. Girls. Junior women with bad fathers and worse husbands. Boys Isabel decided were useful enough to break early. Anyone Mother has influence over because Isabel thinks compassion is harmless when it’s held in a cage.”

Reva stares at her sister. I feel the question move through her body.

Did she shield you?

Delia does not answer the unasked thing. Maybe she cannot. Maybe the answer is too large for morning.

Nash says, “Then we ask. We do not drag.”

“That may work,” Delia says. “If she believes both of her daughters are both protected.”

Reva’s laugh is brittle. “Love being discussed in third person by my own twin.”

Delia’s brows lift. “You are perching in an assassin’s lap during a cartel succession meeting. I assumed we had abandoned normal.”

Shiloh coughs.

Reva’s mouth twitches despite herself, then flattens again. “So we get her here if she agrees.”

“If she agrees,” Nash says.

I watch Delia while he says it.

Her face is composed, but her fingers move in Homer’s fur with careful precision. She knows where this is going. She may have known from the moment she sat in this room and saw all of us looking at her with the same conclusion in different shapes.

Nash sets both hands on the back of his chair. “There is no clean version of what comes next.”

“Surprising,” Reva mutters.

His gaze flicks to her, then back to Delia. “Killing Isabel is possible. Ending what she controls is harder.”

“She controls La Rosa,” Delia says.

“Yes.”

“And you think removing her creates a vacuum.”

“I know it does.”

Delia’s expression goes cold. “What are you thinking?”

No one speaks, and Reva shifts against me. I don’t look at Nash. This answer needs to come from me.

Delia has known me the longest. Not as this, maybe. Not as Reva’s man, not fully. But as the shape inside Isabel’s halls. The weapon near the wall. The boy turned soldier turned killer. The person who watched her become a silent queen in a nightmare built to make girls kneel.

“You,” I say.

Reva’s breath catches. Delia looks at me as if I slapped her. Then she laughs—once, a bark of sound. There’s no humor in it. No surprise either, which tells me enough.

“I don’t want La Rosa.”