Page 73 of The Final Cut

“Follow?” I ask.

“Tracker drone is already on it,” Ever says.

There is a reason I pay for his equipment and tolerate his moods.

Deacon lowers his binoculars. “We have enough from here. Sabine will not wait long.”

I give the house one last look.

Behind those walls, Delia is either a prisoner, a daughter, a soldier, or some cursed arrangement of all three. Reva wants her out because love does not respect tactical sequencing. Deacon wants her out because guilt ages badly inside men like him. I want her out because every hour Isabel keeps one sister, she tightens the leash around the other.

I also know extraction will bring Isabel’s eyes straight to Reva if we do it poorly.

That is the razor we rest on.

We leave the property on foot, moving through the side streets without speaking. The Garden District shifts around us, all dark porches and old trees and houses pretending not to see what happens after midnight. Deacon takes the lead twice, choosing alleys and narrow cuts I would’ve missed. I let him. This is his territory in the way rot belongs to wood it has lived in too long.

Our meeting place sits five blocks away, behind a shuttered florist that supplies arrangements to half the old families who prefer their cruelty with lilies. The front windows are dark, the security grate pulled down. A narrow passage runs alongside the building to a small courtyard where buckets, broken stems, and floral wire have been rinsed into the drain for years. The air smells of bruised roses and old water.

Sabine Martel waits under the awning.

She is anything but soft.

That’s my first impression, and it corrects some unhelpful part of me that wanted Deacon’s former lover to look like a mistake he could regret in obvious ways. Sabine is tall, narrow, elegant in black trousers and a gray blouse, hair twisted at the nape of her neck. Her face is beautiful in the way knives can be beautiful when the light hits them cleanly. She wears no jewelry except small gold hoops in her ears and a thin chain at her throat.

Her eyes go to Deacon first. They stay there long enough to tell me several things. There’s history here, along with anger and affection, buried where sensible people bury weapons.

“You brought Blackwood,” she says.

“You said you wouldn’t speak twice,” Deacon answers.

“I said I wouldn’t wait twice.”

“I heard both.”

Her mouth tightens. “You always did enjoy deciding which part of a woman’s sentence mattered.”

Deacon’s expression doesn’t change. I have to cover my mouth, feigning rubbing an itch along my jawline. She is…formidable.

Sabine turns her gaze to me. “Mr. Blackwood.”

“Ms. Martel.”

“You are taller than your reputation.”

“You are less cautious than yours.”

That earns me a faint smile. “My caution is the reason we’re not meeting inside that house.”

Deacon steps under the awning, keeping enough distance that anyone watching from the street would not read any prior intimacy unless they knew what to look for. I know what to look for. Reva would too, and I’m doubly glad she is not here. The night has already asked more of her than any woman should have to pay.

“Delia,” Deacon says.

Sabine’s smile disappears, and she dons a cloak of professionalism like it’s a second skin.

“She is alive. Bruised wrist. No broken bones or anything like that I have seen. Isabel has kept her close since the gala, though not locked in her room every hour. She wants the staff watching her without appearing to watch her.”

“Discipline?” I ask.