I know he means well. I know that. But sometimes it feels like everybody decided I was something breakable fifteen years ago and never bothered to update the file.
I’m not breakable, Ash.
Bent maybe. Mean on occasion. Chronically unimpressed. But not breakable.
Also, because apparently the universe likes irony, a stray cat has startedhanging around outside my building. It is orange. It is hideous. It is super bossy.
I haven’t let it in.
Yet.
—Reva
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
REVA
They dressme like I’m an offering on the altar of war.
That thought stalks me from the second Nash tells me we’re going back to Noir.
It’s not a suggestion. It’s a directive.
It comes after the shooting in the yard, after Shiloh covers me with his body in the bed of his truck and the night cracks wide open around us, after the men spend a grim, furious hour prowling Blackwood House with guns and hard eyes and clipped voices while I sit on the edge of my bed trying to keep my body from shaking apart while Homer sits in my lap trying to escape.
Someone is trying to kill me.
Or silence me.
Or scare me into running again.
Maybe it’s Deacon. Maybe it isn’t. But the men all come to the same conclusion with the kind of brutal efficiency I’m starting to understand is natural to them: Deacon is the starting point.
Noir is where threads cross.
Noir is where power pools and weapons need to be drawn.
And if somebody wants me dead badly enough to fire into Blackwood’s backyard, then putting me in front of Deacon will start bringing things to light.
It’s what I wanted. It’s exactly what I wanted. Which probably explains why excitement and dread have been twisting together inside me all evening until I can’t separate them anymore.
I am finally getting my opportunity.
I might also be walking into the mouth of the thing that has been devouring my life since I was seven years old. Systematically destroying every single thing I ever loved or thought I loved.
Nash gave me the choice in name only.
I argued on principle. Asked him what he’d do if I said no. If I refused to go. If I decided I wasn’t interested in being paraded into one of the darkest corners of his world just because he’d decided it was the smart play.
That he was getting his way.
He looked at me from where he stood by the window in my bedroom, sleeves rolled, expression flat and dark and unreadable.
“You can stay,” he said.
Lie.
“Or you can come.”
