Page 197 of The Final Cut

Only a little, but enough.

Marisol turns her head to her daughters. “Anyone who belongs to La Rosa may wait for instruction.”

A few eyes lower.

Reva hears the difference. I know she does because her shoulders tense beneath Marisol’s hand. Delia hears it differently. She looks at the men, the women, the Volkovs, the doors, the old soldiers who have not stepped forward and have not walked away.

The chair is empty. The room is waiting to see who sits.

Nash’s hand brushes the inside of my wrist. A small warning. I had started to move toward the women again without a conscious decision to do so.

Ever’s hand settles at Reva’s back again, and Delia touches her wrist. Marisol stays close but doesn’t crowd. Nash speaks quietly with Konstantin. Deacon stands over Isabel long enough to make sure no miracle has the bad taste to occur, then looks toward us.

His eyes find Reva. Something passes through his face. Grief, maybe. Relief.

The end of a task he failed to finish fifteen years ago and was never going to complete the way Isabel wanted.

Outside, sirens start in the distance. Slow, then fading away. Konstantin keeps his word.

Nash turns back. “We need to move.”

Reva’s eyes open, and she looks at Isabel one more time. Then at Delia. Delia nods, and together, they step away from the body.

Not cleanly. Not easily. Reva is shaking, and Delia leans more heavily than she wants anyone to notice. Marisol keeps one hand near both of them, still learning which daughter will accept which kind of touch and when.

Ever retrieves the casing. Nash takes the gun. Deacon opens the side path through the church before anyone else reaches it.

I stay at Reva’s side.

The funeral was supposed to bury Viktor Volkov.

Instead, Isabel fell beneath the icons.

And La Rosa changed hands in a church full of witnesses who had already decided which queen they were willing to let die.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

REVA

Isabel’s house looks smaller without her in it, which is weird because she was not a big woman.

The ceilings are still too high, the rooms too polished, the floors too cold beneath all the expensive rugs. The garden still sprawls behind the terrace in perfect green lines, trimmed into obedience by people who probably learned long ago which flowers Isabel preferred and which ones displeased her. The whole place still smells faintly of roses, beeswax, old wood, and money that learned how to keep secrets.

But she’s gone.

Dead women take up a disturbing amount of space.

Delia sits at the head of the terrace table. No one told her to, but that is where the head of La Rosa sits, apparently. Not because of a crown or a title or some official declaration stamped on thick paper, but because every person who approaches her looks there first.

That is what power does. It teaches eyes where to land.

My sister despises the chair. I can tell by the way she sits in it.

Spine straight. Shoulders level. One hand resting near her water glass, the other in her lap, hidden beneath the edge of the table. Her face is composed, hair twisted at her neck, black dress simple enough to be respectful and sharp enough to warn. The rosary marks on her wrists are visible today, red and dark against her skin.

She didn’t cover them, and I understand why, but looking at them still scrapes against something raw in me.

Marisol sits to Delia’s right with a folder of documents in front of her, though she hasn’t opened it since lunch was brought out. She looks tired in the morning light. Younger than she did in the hospital chapel and older than she did in my childhood photographs, which is a sentence that makes no sense and fits anyway. Her dark hair is loose around her shoulders today, silver visible at her temples. She has stopped trying to hide the tremor in her hands when she reaches for coffee.