Page 180 of The Final Cut

Marisol looks at each of us before settling on Delia, then me. Her hands fold in front of her. They tremble once before she stills them.

Deacon doesn’t sit. Neither does Nash. That tells me what kind of meeting this is.

“We don’t have time to make this gentle,” Deacon begins.

Marisol’s mouth curves without humor. “Then don’t.”

His face gives nothing away. “We intend to remove Isabel.”

The words are so blunt even I feel them. Marisol looks down at her hands.

Nash stands beside the desk, arms loose at his sides, gaze locked on her face. “She can hand power over gracefully, or she can do it violently. Her choice.”

Something in Deacon’s expression says everyone in the room knows which Isabel will choose, and nobody’s losing sleep over it.

Marisol closes her eyes for a second. When she opens them, she looks older than she did in the barroom holding Delia. “I suppose it’s no secret that I have no interest in ruling La Rosa. That’s the reason all of this started in the first place.”

Deacon glances at me.

His voice cuts cleaner than a knife. “Explain that. For Reva’s sake.”

My spine stiffens at his qualification. I almost tell him not to use me as a reason to drag open old wounds. Then Marisol meets my eyes, and the words die. I need to know. Maybe not kindly. Maybe not safely. But I need the truth, and apparently the truth always comes with blood on it in this family.

Marisol draws a slow breath.

When she speaks, her voice is soft, the edges of a Spanish accent more present than they were in the hospital. Stress, maybe. Exhaustion. Or the old self showing through the version of her that learned to smooth every sound for Isabel’s rooms.

“La Rosa isn’t like most crime syndicates,” she says. “It’s matriarchal. Old. Ritualistic. Built around mothers and daughters, even when the men are the ones holding guns.”

Delia’s face is carefully still beside her.

“When you and your sister were born, your grandmother was thrilled.” Marisol’s gaze moves between us, but it lands on me and stays there. “She had not one granddaughter to carry the line, but two. To her, it was a gift from God and a correction for my disobedience.”

“Disobedience,” I repeat.

“I disappointed her by getting pregnant by a white man.”

My father. Frank Hart.

The name moves through me with a dull ache. I have had so many years to grieve him that sometimes the grief feels worn smooth. Then someone says something like that, and suddenly he’s alive in a sentence again. A white man. An outsider. A person Isabel thought beneath her bloodline.

“My father wasn’t good enough for her.”

“No man would’ve been, honestly.” Marisol’s voice softens. “But your father was worse because he wasn’t someone she had picked, and I loved him anyway.”

The room goes very quiet. I don’t know what to do with that sentence.

Marisol’s fingers twist together once, then stop. “For a couple of years, we managed. You were small. Delia was bossy.”

Delia looks away.

I stare at her. “You were bossy as a toddler?”

“Well, I was older.”

“You have to let that go. They were mere minutes.”

“Very important minutes.”