Page 11 of The Next Lie

No.

Delia.

I don’t know how to write your name like that. It feels like using a stranger’s toothbrush.

I’m so fucking angry I can barely see straight. You were alive. You were right there. Three feet away from me. Close enough to touch, but when I tried, you looked at my hand like it was something dirty.

I mourned you for fifteen years, and you corrected my fucking nickname.

I don’t know what to do with that.

CHAPTER TWO

SHILOH

By the time we get her upstairs, Reva has stopped shaking.

I hate the stillness more than the shaking. The shaking gave us something to work with—breath too fast, hands too cold, knees unsteady. This quiet is worse. It is the sound of a person retreating so far into themselves that the doors are beginning to lock from the inside.

Ever keeps a hand at the small of her back as we move through the upstairs hall, there in case her legs decide they’re finished pretending to be solid. She lets him. That might worry me most. Reva Hart does not let men guide her. She lets us crowd her sometimes, lets us rile her, or lets us put ourselves between her and danger when the situation is clear enough that arguing would waste time. But she does not drift. She does not go pliant.

Tonight, she does.

I unlock my bedroom door because no one says where we’re taking her, and I’m not letting her out of my sight. Nash’s room is too much Nash—dark, controlled, pin-neat. Ever’s room is too sparse, too quiet. Mine has the biggest bathroom—oversized tub, soft lighting. I’m a heathen with my fondness for fancy shit and expensive bourbon, but tonight, all that luxury just gives us somewhere to put her that doesn’t feel like an interrogation room.

Ever reaches the same conclusion. He opens the bathroom door, crosses the tile, and turns on the water. The old pipes knock once behind the wall before water splashes from the faucet into the tub in a steady rush. Reva stands just inside the room, staring at nothing.

The dress she wore to Noir Night clings to her body in all the wrong ways now. Earlier, it made her look dangerous—sleek lines, bare skin, trouble I wanted to put my hands on. Now it looks like part of the trap. It’s too tight across her ribs, too much club smoke caught in the fabric, too much proof that we dressed her up and walked her straight into a nightmare.

I shrug out of my jacket and toss it over the chair near the bathroom door. Ever does the same with his, though he folds it once before setting it down because even a crisis does not undo whatever severe little rules live in his bones. He is the anchor; I am the sail. Right now, we’re both trying to keep the ship from splintering against the rocks.

“Yank,” I say softly.

No reaction. I move into her line of sight, moving slowly. Reva has gone still, but violence sits under that stillness like a coiled spring. A wrong touch could bring all of it up at once, and I don’t think any of us are prepared for the mess that would follow.

“Reva.”

Her eyes flick to mine. Distant. Wrecked. Still fighting.

“We’re going to get you out of this dress,” I tell her.

Her gaze drops to herself as if she’s only just remembering she has a body. Then she looks back at me. “Why?”

The question is so flat it scrapes something raw in my chest. It’s the voice of a child who’s had everything taken and doesn’t see the point in the remainder.

“Because it smells like the club,” I say, trying to keep my tone light even though it feels like lead. “Because the club smelled like smoke and secrets, and I’m in a mood to drown at least one of those.”

It’s a bad joke. Too thin to stand. She does not smile.

Ever comes out of the bathroom, rolling his sleeves to his forearms, revealing the heavy ink that marks his skin. “Bath is running.”

His voice is lower than usual, a grounding hum. He looks at me, then at Reva, then at the zipper running down the back of her dress. On any other night, I could make this filthy. I’d have a dozen lines ready about teamwork and zippers and how a woman should never wear anything I can’t get her out of in under ten seconds. Tonight, every easy word feels like an obscenity.

“May I?” I ask her.

Her eyebrows pull together, a flicker of the old spark returning. “Since when do you ask?”

“Since now.”