She got the cat because of me.
Christ, even that.
The orange cat from her family’s house the night everything burned down—Mr. T, Delia had called him with all the solemn confidence of a little girl who assumed the world could still be named into kindness. I took him because I could not stand the thought of the animal being abandoned to whatever came next. Fire. Hunger. A neighbor’s boot. A shelter that smelled like bleach and dying hope.
It seemed a small mercy.
The joke, of course, was on me. Mr. T was not a mister at all, but a lady cat of statistically unusual coloring, which I learned much later and against my will from a veterinarian who found the whole thing amusing. One of her descendants got out recently and came back swollen with kittens. I saw to it all of them were fixed, fed, and sent off to homes I deemed acceptable.
That, too, is apparently the sort of man I am.
Monster. Keeper. Reluctant curator of orange and jobless cats.
I have a ridiculous list of sins and salvations.
And always, threaded through all of it, Reva.
I destroyed everything remotely decent in my life to keep her safe. Not with one grand gesture. Those are for stories and idiots.
I did it slowly.
Deliberately.
One choice at a time.
I stood in rooms I should have burned down and smiled at men I should have gutted because proximity kept her alive. I let the Syndicate believe what it needed to believe. I gave pieces of myself to causes that deserved none of them. I kept Noir Night alive even when the rest of my relationship with Nash and our brothers fractured, because this one enterprise remained useful. Necessary. A point of intricate interdependence in a world built on betrayal.
The Syndicate wanted order.
Noir gave them leverage, entertainment, a place where commerce and vice and power could drink from the same glass.
It gave me eyes where I needed them. It gave me access. It gave me a way to keep one hand on the throat of the city and another around the fragile, invisible perimeter of the girls I had failed to save properly the first time.
Girls.
No. They’re not girls now. They’re women.
Delia was the sacrifice. There is no kind way to say that, and I have no use for kind lies tonight. I could not protect Delia from the Syndicate.
Not in the ways that mattered most.
There were too many eyes. Too many obligations. Too many old debts and new appetites circling her the instant it became clear what she was worth to the machine. I did what I could. Directed. Softened blows. Taught her where to bend so she would not break.
But she was marked.
A necessary offering laid on an altar I was not powerful enough to overturn without losing everything too soon.
Reva, though?—
Reva I could save.
I spirited her away. Untouched by as much of it as I could manage for fifteen years.
And now here she is, threatening to upend the whole rotted architecture of my life, and for what? To kill me?
The laugh that tries to rise in me is bitter enough to choke on.
If only you knew, little ghost. If only you knew.
