Across the room, she is still staring at Delia like the world has split in two.
Good.
Let it split.
Some truths only enter cleanly when they arrive all at once, violent and undeniable.
Nash is watching me with that flat, aristocratic menace of his, no doubt measuring every twitch of my face against whatever puzzle he believes he is close to solving. He has always been too perceptive for his own good. Beside him, Ever looks half a heartbeat from tearing the room apart with his hands. Shiloh, for all his theatrical ease, has gone very still.
They matter more than I ever intended them to. That is another truth I have tried not to examine too closely.
They were boys once. Sharp and dangerous and half-feral with old grief, shaped by the same brutal system even if they hadn’t come from the same blood. Nash’s father was no less difficult—the kind of man who built rot into his son’s inheritance—but Ever and Shiloh were different. Different beginnings. Same ending. Foster care, hard lessons, and a world that taught them young that love was weakness unless you learned how to weaponize it.
None of them made it to the final initiation, passed the final test to be tattooed with the rosary. I saved them from that. I gave them the escape and took the brunt of their pain. Theirs and Reva’s.
I stayed entangled with all of them because practicality and loyalty demanded it, and because some sentimental, deeply stupid part of me respected what they’d made of themselves. Nash understands the weight of power. Everloves like a wound he’d rather bleed from than heal. And Shiloh laughs at darkness as if daring it to bite harder.
And now here they are with her.
Circling her.
Claiming her.
Thinking they have discovered something unique when I have been starving for years.
Perhaps they have. Love changes shape depending on when or how it reaches you.
What lives in them may be truer than what lives in me. Cleaner, at least. They met her as a woman. They desire her in the open. They are free to take what she offers and give back in kind without every touch being haunted by history and guilt and old blood that’s coated in lies.
I do not resent them for that. I just resent the part of me that still thinks she’s mine.
Delia shifts, uncomfortable under her sister’s stare.
Her wrist is bare tonight except for the tattoo, and I think absurdly of how small her hand used to be in mine when she was learning to walk in heels, to smile on command, to survive a room by making men underestimate her. She is beautiful now in a way that has cost too much. She is controlled. Gilded. Sharp enough to pass inspection.
The sacrifice learned to wear silk like armor.
She went pale at the sight of her sister and hasn’t recovered.
For all my preparation, I did not think this moment would arrive quite like this. Not tonight. Not in the center of Noir with the gaming room humming and half the city’s worst secrets breathing just down the hall.
Yet here it is. And perhaps there is no better place for the truth to be born than in hell. Reva’s eyes cut back to me.
There it is again—that feral blend of fear and fury and recognition beginning to flower. She knows me from the bathroom now. From the letters. From the shape of my voice fitting into the negative space of too many missing answers.
It’s okay. Let her hate me for all the right reasons, finally.
I take one step toward her and watch every man around her tense. So predictable. Almost touching.
If I extended a hand now, would she take it or bite me? Probably the latter. I admire that about her.
“Sheathe your claws,” I say softly.
The words are for her, but not only for her. They are for the Blackwood men, for Delia, for the room, for myself.
They are a command and a plea both.
Because once this starts—once the truth begins to spill free—it will not stop where anyone wants it to. It will cut through Syndicate loyalties, through old bargains, through everything Nash thinks he knows about hisfather’s legacy and everything Reva believes about the night her family died.
