Page 66 of The Final Cut

Reva, breathing.

Reva, standing in the wrong place again.

Isabel continues, calm and inexorable as Sunday Mass. “Send someone else to the hospital. Someone who understands subtlety and can blend in.”

“We lost the last one.”

“We lost a girl with ambition and poor instincts.” Paper rustles. “Do better this time.”

My stomach turns.

“Yes, Mother. And the parameters?”

“Boudreaux dies, but only after he tells us where they took the girl.”

The girl.

That’s all Reva is to her. No name. No blood. No proof of the child who once sat at Isabel’s table with sticky fingers and dark hair tied in two crooked bows.

Just…the girl.

“And if he doesn’t know?”

“Then figure out who does.” Her voice remains smooth. “Blackwood, Rousseau, Lafitte. They will take her somewhere they consider controlled. Men like that always mistake walls for power.”

“And Cross?”

The house seems to hold its breath with me. Isabel’s answer is very soft.

“Bring me Deacon Cross.”

My pulse hits once, hard.

“He may resist.”

“He betrayed me.” Her voice stays gentle. “Resistance would at least show he remembers he was trained properly. And do something about Noir. The others need to learn their lesson, as well.”

The floor creaks beneath my heel. The office goes silent.

I step forward at once, chin level, breath even, moving as if I have been walking the whole time. The door opens before I pass, Isabel standing inside the frame.

She’s wearing pale blue silk with her customary, traitorous string of pearls at her throat, her hair swept into a low twist. She looks rested. Beautiful. Untouched.

There’s never any blood on Isabel. That’s what her soldiers are for.

Her eyes move over me slowly.

“Delia.”

“Isabel.”

Her mouth curves. She likes hearing her own name from me. She likes knowing she trained Nana out of my mouth.

“You are early.”

“For dinner.”

“Hungry?”