Hey, I got a job. It’s nothing special. Just something to keep me busy while I work on my certification to get trained as an EMT.
Cal keeps telling me that’s what I need. Distractions. Routine. “Normal life.”
I don’t feel normal. I feel like I’m moving through someone else’s life, pretending I belong in it.
Like I’m already gone and just… still here anyway.
Like a ghost walking in haunted hallways.
I did something else, too. With my parents’ insurance money. I paid someone to get me a list of—you’re going to think I’m stupid. I don’t even want to say it.
I’ll just say I am obsessed—absolutely obsessed, Ash—with one single, solitary goal. It will happen one day, whether I’m twenty or thirty or even fifty.
I will have revenge.
—Reva
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EVER
The pea stonegravel driveway crunches under the tires like it’s welcoming me home.
Oaks lean over the drive from the other side of the split-rail fence lining the drive, making a tunnel out of shadows. Spanish moss hangs in slow curtains along the way, lending it a gothic sort of charm.
I’ve always thought the place looked like old money—quiet, polished, and completely unbothered by and separate from the world.
It’s the last place I should be bringing trouble.
And yet here she is in the back seat. Here Shiloh is, steering this truck toward the house like I didn’t just spend the last half hour telling myself we shouldn’t do this.
I shouldn’t have put her in the truck.
I shouldn’t have taken her keys.
I shouldn’t have decided—without asking anyone who matters—that she was safer with us than anywhere else in New Orleans.
That’s the problem with decisions made at two in the morning. They feel clean until the sun comes up.
The truck’s headlights wash over white columns and dark shutters, spotlighting a wide porch and rocking chairs that rarely get used. The house doesn’t look like it belongs to men like us.
It belongs to Nash.
Nash Blackwood doesn’t live like we do. Shiloh and me…we were throwaways. Kids in the system with garbage bags for luggage and chips on our shoulders as big as Louisiana. Nash was…is…old money.
Nash lives like the kind of man who was born into something nice and genteel and chose violence anyway. Half the cops in this city are on his payroll, and the other half are too scared to say his name.
He’s the reason Noir exists at all—Noir upstairs, the bar everyone sees. Noir downstairs, the part you don’t talk about unless you want to die young. The private room. The high-roller nights. The hostesses and the curated company. The money that moves too smoothly from one hand to another.
And then there’s the other work. The wet kind of workthat takes Nash out of town for days at a time. The work that pays better and bleeds worse.
Noir belongs to Deacon, too, but he’s more of a silent partner these days. When we cut ties with the Syndicate, we did so as absolutely as we could, which included our visible, public brotherhood with Deacon Cross. Deacon was our brother, though, in all but the biological sense of the word, and that break was public.
In the ways that truly mattered, he would always be our brother.
In our little triad, Shiloh is the one who smiles and makes the room easy for others to step into. He handles people. He reads them, plays them, disarms them without letting them see the knife.
He’s descended, somewhere along the line, from a pirate, and I don’t think the apple falls far. Shiloh Lafitte is charming, seductive…a bit of a beautiful trap.
