Page 191 of The Final Cut

Together.

The word moves through me, strange and fragile and sharp.

We walk toward Isabel while the church watches.

I feel every eye on us, those of every saint and every man with a gun beneath his jacket. Marisol remains in the pew. Nash too. Ever doesn’t move. Deacon does, but only enough to become shadow behind us, his presence close and lethal without taking the moment from our hands.

Isabel watches us approach. Her smile doesn’t slip again.

“Ah,” she murmurs when we stop in front of her. “My girls. How dramatic.”

Delia’s voice is calm. “You always did like ceremony.”

“And you always mistook imitation for command.”

Delia smiles, thin and sharp. I’ve seen that smile only a few times, and never directed at me. I’m grateful for that now.

Konstantin steps aside, leaving Isabel with a clear path to the door. That path is blocked by us.

Isabel’s gaze flicks to the Volkov men stationed near the exits. Then to her own guard. He looks away.

It is slight, and it is everything. Her nostrils flare.

“I will remember this,” she tells Konstantin.

He lifts one hand and turns it lazily in the air. “For the next five minutes, perhaps.”

A sound moves through the room. Not a laugh, but something close enough to bruise.

Isabel’s face goes white beneath her veil.

Konstantin walks away from her then, straight down the side aisle without another word. As he passes Delia, his gaze touches her face. She doesn’t look away. The air between them goes taut for half a second, quiet and dangerous, then he continues toward the doors with two of his men following.

Delia’s shoulders remain level. Mine do not.

My breathing has gone too fast. I slow it because Ever would coax me to slow it if he saw, then make that low approving sound when that worked, and I refuse to be a praise whore in the middle of a church coup.

Isabel looks around. Really looks this time.

The guard near her pew doesn’t reach for his weapon. The men by the doors stay still. A woman near the candles lowers her eyes. One of the old La Rosa soldiers who came with her steps backward into the shadow of a pillar, as if distance might save him from the choice he already made by doing nothing.

Her people are strangely disinclined to step in.

This is Marisol’s army, I realize. Not soldiers with rifles storming through doors.

Silence.

Women who stop giving warnings. Men who decide survival lives on the other side of Isabel’s fall. Allies who withdraw support in public, where everyone can see the gap open beneath her feet.

Leave that to me, Marisol said.

Isabel draws herself up slowly. For the first time since I saw her at the masquerade, she looks old.

But only for a moment. Then pride fills the cracks.

“Get out of my way.”

Her voice is quiet. It doesn’t shake. Some awful part of me respects that.