Someone who doesn’t know what to do with that yet.
Someone who feels like she’s haunting her own life.
Little ghost.
—Ash
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NASH
I waituntil the door shuts behind Reva before I move.
The room goes quiet in a way I know too well. Not silence, exactly. The hum of the vents is still there. The old pipes still tick inside the walls. Somewhere down the hall, a chair leg drags and somebody swears under their breath. But her absence changes the air.
I stay behind the desk a moment longer, forearms braced on the metal, and look at the door she just walked through.
Reva McEntire.
I snort. Bullshit name if I ever heard one. If she was going to choose an alias, she should have picked something that sounded a little less like the dowager queen of country music.
When she saidDeacon, she didn’t break eye contact.
People lie to me every day. They lie before I ask, while I ask, after I ask. Some cry. Some posture. Some talk too much because they think details make a story stronger. Most of them show me where the seam is to unravel their bullshit if I give them enough rope and enough quiet.
She gave me the name with nothing else and let it sit between us.
No shaking voice. No dramatic pause. No trying to sell me on why she deserved what she wanted.
Just the truth—or the part of it sharp enough to cut with.
I push off the desk and head for the door.
Shiloh is posted in the hall where I left him, shoulder to the wall, one boot heel propped behind him. Ever stands a few feet away, arms folded, face carved out of stone and temper.
Shiloh’s holding a fucking cat. A tiny orange one. I do a double take, then jerk my chin toward the office.
“Inside.”
Neither says a word. They just move. That tells me enough before the conversation starts.
I close the door behind them and stay standing. The chair can wait. If I sit now, it’ll feel like a business meeting. This isn’t that. I can already tell…Reva’s not business, even though Cal put us on her. She’s different.
I lean against the front edge of the desk and let my eyes move from Ever to Shiloh and back to the cat, which I can already tell is going to be a menace.
The three of us have stood in too many rooms like this over the years—church basements, motel bathrooms, safe houses with bad locks and worse wiring, back corridors that smelled like bleach and blood and old smoke. Different walls. Same weight.
Ever beats me to it. “What’d she tell you?”
Straight to the point. No circling. I have another question first, though. I turn my glare on Shiloh.
“What the hell is that creature you’re holding?”
He shrugs, holds the tiny animal up at eye level. It mews voicelessly, its claws poking out and then retracting.
“This…” he says, “is called the Cat Distribution System.”
I look at Ever. “Do I even want to know?”
