Page 13 of The Next Lie

Ever glances at me. It’s too quick, a flicker of hesitation. Reva sees it instantly. Her laugh is quiet and vicious. “No. Don’t do that. Don’t look at each other to decide which part of the truth I can handle.”

My jaw tightens. She’s right, and the weight of that rightness is a physical pressure in the room. She takes one step toward us. She’s barefoot now, having lost her heels somewhere in the chaos. She looks smaller without them, but nothing about her energy feels small. It feels like a storm front.

“I’m confused,” she says. “So let’s talk about it. Who are the women in the club?”

The question lands wrong. I expected tears, or questions about Delia, or even an interrogation about Deacon. I did not expect her to step around her own freshly opened mausoleum and point at the architecture holding it up.

“What women?” I ask, though the answer is already a bitter taste in my mouth.

Her eyes narrow. “Don’t play stupid, Shiloh. It doesn't suit you. The women with the tattoo. The ones everyone gives room to. I saw them in Noir Night. I saw the way men moved around them. I saw the mark.”

Ever’s gaze drops for half a second. Reva catches that too, pouncing on the weakness. “No,” she says, her voice sharpening to a point. “You do not get to do that. Not tonight. Not after my dead sister walked up to me, alive as she'd been the last day I'd seen her, and told me I shouldn’t have come. I deserve answers.”

Her voice cracks on the last word. She hates that it does; I can tell by the way her teeth click shut after, hard enough I worry she’ll crack an enamel. I look toward the bedroom door, half-expecting Nash to appear through it by sheer force of will. He doesn't. He’s still at Noir with the man who carries the rosary mark on his arm, and I'm standing in my bathroom with a woman we all swore to protect, trying to decide how much truth belongs to me to tell.

“We should talk about that when Nash gets back,” I say.

Reva’s face changes. For one second, she looks so hurt I almost take the words back and replace them with every secret I’ve ever kept. Then the hurt burns off, replaced by a cold, glittering distance.

“Of course,” she says. “We should wait for Nash. Or Deacon. Or Cal. Or maybe the next person who’s known more about my life than I have and decided I wasn’t privileged enough to hear it.”

The hit is clean and deep. I absorb it because I deserve it. Ever steps closer, his voice low. “That isn’t what he meant, Reva.”

“I don’t care what he meant.”

“I mean,” I say, gentle because I cannot afford to be anything else, “that whatever this is, you should not have to hear it twice. Let us tell you once, with all of us in the room, so no one gets to hide behind what the others didn’t say.”

Her shoulders rise and fall with a hard, shuddering breath. Then another. “Fine,” she says. It is not an agreement; it is a temporary stay of execution. I take it.

Ever holds the washcloth out again. “Can I finish?”

Reva hesitates, then sits back down on the lid. The next few minutes move in fragments. Ever wipes the rest of the makeup from her face while I work the dress down her arms. I pause when the fabric catches at her hips, asking before I touch her skin. She says fine without looking at me. We ease the dress away and leave her in black lace that should make my pulse misbehave—and it does, because my body is not noble even when my heart is trying its damnedest to be.

I take one of my shirts from the hook behind the door—soft, worn cotton—and drape it around her shoulders while the tub finishes filling. She looks at the floor, her fingers tracing the hem of the shirt.

“Did you know?” she asks, her voice very soft.

Ever’s hand stills. I do too. The water keeps running behind us, but the silence in the room is absolute.

“About my sister,” she adds, finally lifting her head. Her eyes search mine, looking for the tell, the lie, the shadow.

“No,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

Ever sets the cloth beside the sink. “Neither did I.”

She studies us both, peeling truth from skin. I let her. I have lied with my mouth, my smile, and my hands. Every part of me was made pretty enough to get away with it. But not this. Not to her. Not now.

“I thought she died that night,” Ever says, his voice gravelly. “Same as you did.”

Reva’s mouth opens, then closes. The first tear falls. She turns her head fast, but we both see it. “I just don’t understand,” she whispers.

That guts me. Because Reva understands too much, usually. She watches rooms like she was born in a corner with a knife in her hand. She reads motive in posture and hunger in the space between breaths. Tonight, she is seven years old again, and cleverness cannot make the dead behave.

I crouch in front of her. “We didn’t know about Delia. But there is something we do know. Something from before.”

Ever’s gaze cuts to me, sharp and warning. I ignore it. Waiting for Nash was the plan, but then she asked the one question none of us has the right to delay.

“What?” she says.