At first it’s only the tattoo again, glimpsed as the woman at his side turns and shifts closer. Rosary beads inked around a slender wrist. The same mark. The same sick sigil threaded through too many pieces of my life.
She turns, and the room, the music, the lights, the men, the entire poisoned underworld of Noir Night falls away.
Familiar eyes, familiar mouth, familiar bone structure under a stranger’s polish. My heart clenches. Misses. Then misfires completely.
No.
No no no.
Our eyes lock. The woman looks at me the way a person looks at a ghost. Or maybe a mistake resurrected.
My sister is dead, but somehow she’s standing in Noir Night with a rosary tattoo on her wrist.
She’s been here.
This whole time.
Living an entire world, an entire life…without me.
You say “yet” like it isn’t already over. That cat owns you. You just haven’t accepted the terms.
And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re breakable. I think you survived the kind of thing that leaves a permanent weather pattern in a person, and now everybody who cares about you keeps checking the sky.That can feel insulting. I understand that.
It can also be love, however badly expressed.
Feed the cat.
Let Cal fix what he can.
Keep going to work.
And try, when you can, to build a life that is not organized entirely around the worst thing that ever happened to you.
You won’t do it all at once. That’s not how these things work. But piece by piece is still a way of building something.
—Ash
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
DEACON
She’s here.
Of all the places for Reva Leigh Hart to wash up, of all the bad decisions she could have made and all the blood-dark roads she could have chosen to walk, she has somehow found her way to the one place I have spent the last fifteen years keeping her from.
New Orleans.
More specifically, Noir Night.
My kingdom, if a man can call a graveyard and a whorehouse and a den of expensive appetites a kingdom.
Mine. And Nash’s…I’ll give him that.
Now she’s in it, standing under golden lowlight in a dress that makes men stare and fools dream, with Nash Blackwood’s scent all over her. My little ghost of a girl looking at me like the floor has opened beneath her feet.
God help me, she’s not a child.
That part I’d already learned.
