Her throat bobs in a swallow.
“Just myself. A past I’ve already lived and can’t outrun.”
I don’t push. I store every tell like a hoarder—how her gaze drops for a second, her chest tightening, her fingers curling like she’s trying to hold on to something that isn’t there.
When the silence stretches too thin and I feel her distancing herself still further, I pry myself away and hunt for my clothes in the tangle on the floor.
Dressed, I write my number on the hotel’s notepad and leave it on the nightstand, tapping my finger against it. “You won’t call, but I’m gonna leave this anyway. I’d like to see you again, Reva.”
She says nothing.
A piece of me stays behind once I’m out the door and bleached by the godawful yellow hallway light. Something’s wrong—in my bones.
Not regret. Not exactly. It’s more a sense of being watched, the brush of eyes on my skin a tangible thing.
Or maybe it’s the feeling that Reva didn’t walk into trouble tonight. Trouble walked into her. Found her when I was supposed to be on watch.
I exhale and shake my head, then go sit in the truck to keep watch until morning.
She asked me if we fucked… like she couldn’t trust her own body to tell her the truth. And that says one thing clear as daylight—someone touched her in the dark.
I’m gonna find out who.
Then I’m gonna tear their insides out.
Such a pessimistic viewpoint. You remember, Reva.
That’s enough. Your family, for example…you keep them alive in your memories, yes?
—Ash
CHAPTER SIX
REVA
I wake up too early,too aware of my own skin.
The place between my legs throbs with the expected soreness from Shiloh—his girth, the way I’d taken him, the way I’d wanted him. But something else lingers too. Something deeper. An unsettled wrongness that doesn’t match the simple math of sex.
Like my body physically holds a secret my brain wasn’t invited to understand, let alone accept.
I stare at the ceiling for a long time, trying to recreate and reconstruct the night before, the way I’d write an EMS report for Captain Lange.
Writing an incident report involves a structured set of procedures for clarity. Timeline. Sequence. Cause and effect. You don’t let emotion run the call—you let the facts build thepicture.
The bathroom is a black hole, though. It swallows the logic whole, leaving only sensation behind. And questions. So many fucking questions.
I can’t make the report take shape.
The space beside me on the motel mattress is empty. Cool. A depression in the pillow where his head isn’t. A shallow valley shaped like memory.
My jaw clenches.
I stretch until the yawn loosens the knots in my tongue, then I lie still again, because if I move too fast, I’ll think about it. And if I think about it, I’ll remember the part that matters.
I’ll remember asking Shiloh if we’d done something. If the darkness in the bathroom had been shared with a face I’d been getting to know instead of a stranger.
I’ll remember his answer—we kissed. That’s it.
