Page 70 of The Final Cut

For the first time in fifteen years, I let myself think a thought that does not belong to her.

Over my dead body.

DELIA

AGE 16

A girl disappeared from St. Agnes. I’m not sure exactly when. She was here one day, then…not here.

Everyone says she was placed. That is the word they use when they want a thing to sound cleaner than it is.

Placed.

As if she were a vase moved from one table to another.

She was fourteen. She had a chipped front tooth and sang when she thought no one was listening.

Today, the halls are quiet.

I think I am beginning to understand what this family protects.

Itself.

CHAPTER TWELVE

NASH

NASH

From the street, Isabel del Rosario’s house looks peaceful. That’s the first lie.

The second is that it looks like a home.

Gas lamps burn behind black iron. Pale columns rise from a deep porch wrapped in shadow, and the oak trees along the walk hang heavy with moss, their branches cutting the moon into small, broken pieces. Every window glows with muted shades of gold, soft enough to suggest dinner parties, old money, women in silk moving from room to room with nothing more dangerous than gossip in their mouths.

I know better.

A house like this is a weapon with shutters. The front gate is theater. The flower beds are sight lines. The magnolias near the east wall have been trimmed high to clear a shooter’s view from the second floor. A camera sits hidden inside the filigree above the pedestrian gate, another in the porch lantern, a third tucked near the carriage house where no casual guest would look twice.

Beside me, Deacon watches the property without moving. He’s been still for seven minutes. I’ve been timing it.

The bastard can make himself look less like a Friday night date and more like a bad decision someone’s daughter left waiting under a tree than anyone I know. Black clothes, black gloves, gray eyes turned toward the house where Delia Hart is being held by a woman who shares her blood and would spill it without blinking.

“South balcony,” Ever says in my ear. His voice comes through clean and low, stripped to the most essential function. “Two men. One smoking. One on phone. Same patrol cycle as before.”

I lift the small lens to my eye and track the upper line of the house. “I see them.”

“Camera at the east gate rotates every forty seconds. Blind pocket lasts six.”

“Not long enough.”

“No.”

Deacon says nothing. He’s busy watching the second-floor windows, gaze trained for movement.

Delia is behind one of them, or she was thirty minutes ago when Ever caught a figure crossing behind a half-drawn curtain in the west wing. The feed was too distant to confirm, but Deacon knew the room. It’s Delia’s room when Isabel wants her close. A pretty phrase for a locked door.

We shouldn’t be here.