Page 92 of The Final Cut

Nash gets out behind me and closes the door without sound. “Is Isabel still with her?”

Sabine’s throat works. “She left through the north corridor five minutes ago. The donors arrive in forty. She will be in the reception hall by then, smiling beside the flowers.”

She says flowers as if she would like to crush every rose in the building under her heel.

I look at her more closely. She is pale beneath her makeup. The hand at her radio is steady by discipline rather than ease. Sabine has served La Rosa long enough to know what Isabel is. Seeing is one thing. Disapproving is another. The second is more dangerous.

“What correction?” I ask.

Her mouth tightens. “The old one.”

Nash looks at me, eyebrow raised in question. I shake my head. Some things are best understood through disgust.

Sabine gestures toward the service entrance. “There are two men outside the chapel. One in the sacristy hall. A fourth near the north passage, but he follows Isabel’s movement and will be gone if she stays on schedule.”

“If?” Nash asks.

“If Delia refuses what Isabel wants quickly enough, Isabel may return.”

“What does she want?” I ask.

Sabine’s eyes come back to mine. “A recorded message…video. Delia telling Reva to come alone. To bring you if she can. To prove she still loves her sister.”

The words land with such cold, perfect familiarity that for one second I am sixteen again, standing in another hall, listening to Isabel teach a girl that love is most useful when held to the throat.

Nash says, “We move now.”

Sabine holds out a folded access card and two white catering jackets. “You will have eight minutes if you do this clean. Less if anyone panics.”

“Do you panic?” Nash asks.

“No.”

He takes the jacket from her. “Then we have eight minutes.”

Sabine looks at me while Nash shrugs into the coat. “Deacon.”

I pause.

Her voice drops. “If she asks whether Reva sent you, say yes.”

“She did.”

She nods, the gesture clipped. Then she steps back, keys the service door open, and lets us in.

The convent’s back corridors have kept their bones. Narrow passages. Stone floors. Walls too thick for modern wiring to hide properly. The catering route runs between the kitchen and reception hall, busy enough to give us movement, quiet enough to expose a wrong footfall. Sabine walks ahead with a clipboard, a woman with authority and no patience. People move for those women more often than they realize.

Nash carries a covered tray.

I carry another.

It would be funny in another life.

In this one, the weight of the tray reminds me to keep my hands calm.

We pass the kitchen, where two women in black dresses argue over table linens, and then slip into a side corridor marked for staff only. Sabine does not look back. She turns left at a statue of Sainte Aurelia holding a book and a thorned rose, then right past a locked storage room where the scent changes from butter and coffee to wax, dust, and old incense.

The first guard appears near the sacristy hall.