I keep the place running. Security. Systems. Eyes. I’m the quiet one. The one who notices things—the man who doesn’t belong, the hand that moves wrong, the door that opens at the wrong time. I clean up the messes before they become problems.
Nash…Nash decides what problems get erased.
Shiloh parks and cuts the engine. His hands stay on the wheel a beat too long. The quiet presses in.
We’ve brought a problem into Nash’s house. A womanwho just asked the wrongest of wrong questions in our bar, one that threatens one of our own.
A woman with soft eyes and hard edges, who can’t even see danger until it’s climbing the stairs behind her.
Shiloh gets out and looks at the house, then at the truck, then at the woman in the backseat. He grins at nothing.
“Hell,” he says, “would ya look at us. All domestic and shit, bringing women home.”
I ignore him and start toward the house, expecting Reva to climb out behind me, full of questions I don’t feel like answering.
That’s when I see her.
She’s asleep in the backseat, chin tipped down, hair slipping loose from whatever tie she had it in. Her face is turned toward the window, lashes dark against her cheek. Her mouth is parted slightly like she’s fighting a dream.
Exhaustion makes her look younger. Softer.
It also makes my irritation sharper, because she shouldn’t be asleep in a stranger’s car in the dark. She shouldn’t be so quick to shut her eyes when she doesn’t know who’s around her.
Shiloh reaches the door first, hand already on the handle. “Plumb tuckered out.”
He leans in like he’s about to scoop her up.
“Wait.” The word comes out harder than I intend.
Shiloh pauses, glancing back at me. A knowing huff leaves him. “Yes, sir.”
“I’ll get her. You can get her things,” I tell him.
Shiloh’s mouth twitches. “You sure you don’t want me to?—”
“I’ve got her.”
He lifts both hands in surrender and waits to grab for whatever Reva left scattered in the backseat. I open her door carefully.
Cool night air slides in. Reva doesn’t wake. She shifts once, a small flinch, then settles again. I reach in, slide one arm behind her shoulders and the other under her knees, and lift.
She’s lighter than I expect. Not delicate—just…small. Like a bird. Like something built for flight, not for being held.
Her head tips against my shoulder, and the warmth of her sinks through my shirt. For a second, my body goes still in a way it shouldn’t. My muscles tighten like they’re bracing for impact.
She smells like work—sweat, soap, faint citrus from the bar. Under it, something clean and familiar.
My jaw ticks. I carry her up the porch steps and intothe house.
Inside, the air is cooler, kept that way by old money and good air conditioning. The lights are low—small lamps, warm pools on antique tables. Old hardwood beneath my boots. A rug thick enough to drown sound. A ginger jar on a sideboard. Oil paintings in heavy frames, faces of dead men watching from their gilded prisons.
It’s too pretty for the things we do.
I turn down the hall toward a guest room—the one closest to my room, but who’s counting? Nash’s house has more bedrooms than we need. More space than makes sense. It was built for family gatherings and quiet legacies.
Now it holds us, monsters needing a cage between attacks.
Shiloh follows behind, arms loaded with Reva’s backpack and whatever else he grabbed of hers. He doesn’t speak. That’s how I know he’s paying attention. He’d be yammering on a mile a minute, otherwise.
