Page 189 of The Final Cut

Marisol gave us the name before dawn.

Viktor’s son and the new head of the family. Late-thirties or thereabouts, tall, dark-haired, hard in the face, dressed in a black suit that looks expensive and punishing. He doesn’t fidget. Doesn’t look around to make sure people are watching him. He stands near the coffin with one hand resting on the back of his mother’s pew and accepts condolences with the bleak courtesy of a man who understands death as both personal and political.

At one point, his gaze moves over the congregation.

It touches Nash. Deacon. Me.

Then Delia.

There’s nothing obvious in his expression. No smile. No widening eyes. There’s no visible spark from the man at his father’s funeral. Still, his gaze stays on her a fraction too long.

Delia notices. Her chin lifts by a degree.

Konstantin’s mouth doesn’t move, but something in his eyes changes. Interest, maybe. Recognition. The look warriors give when another blade catches light across the room.

Then he looks away.

Delia’s fingers tighten once against her knee.

The service moves around us in a language I don’t know. Voices rise and fall. People cross themselves. A priest swings incense until smoke curls through the light. I sit still with my hands in my lap and try not to think about God watching all this pageantry from the walls around us while criminals calculate bloodlines over a dead man’s body.

Maybe saints are used to worse.

Maybe everyone is.

Isabel sits near the front on the opposite side of the church.

Not in the first pew. That would be too intimate. Not far enough back to look lesser. She has placed herself exactly where power tells grief it may pass. Black dress. Black gloves. Black veil. Pearl rosary wrapped around one wrist, every bead pale against the fabric.

She has three men with her.

Well. She had three men.

Two left midway through the service after one quiet word from a Volkov soldier near the side door. The third remains at the end of her pew, though he has spent the last twenty minutes looking increasingly aware that every man near him answers to someone other than Isabel.

Good. Let him sweat through his suit.

Marisol’s hand shifts beside Delia. Delia covers it with her own for one second, so quick I might’ve imagined it.

When the final prayers end, the congregation begins to file out slowly. People move toward the front first, touching the coffin, murmuring to the family, stepping around each other with the practiced gravity of funeral etiquette. The Volkov men direct traffic without seeming to. A door opens to the side hall. Another closes near the rear.

We stay seated.

All of us.

My pulse beats in my throat.

Shiloh’s hand slides over mine on the pew between us. He squeezes once, then lets go before anyone watching can turn comfort into weakness. Ever’s shoulder brushes mine on the other side when he shifts, a silent check. Deacon remains still, but his presence at my back feels like an unsheathed knife.

Nash doesn’t turn around.

He doesn’t have to.

I know what his face looks like right now.

Cal should be here, some fractured part of me thinks.

Then I turn that thought over and feel sick for wanting a man in ICU to stand in a church full of criminals and make me braver.