Page 51 of The Next Lie

I still don’t know if I heard you scream, though. That’s the part I keep touching, like a bruise.

Did you scream?

Did I hear you and stay quiet anyway?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

NASH

Ever does not apologize.

That’s the problem with men who believe they’re right. They don’t raise their voices. They don’t posture. They stand in front of you with the blood of consequences still warm in their veins and act as if their calm is the same thing as innocence.

He stands across from me in my study, his arms loose at his sides, face unreadable. I want to put my fist through it.

“You took her back there,” I say.

“Yes.”

My hand tightens around the edge of the desk. The old wood does not crack, which is a pity. Something in this room should.

“You took her to the house where her family was slaughtered and didn’t think to tell me.”

“She needed to see it.”

“She needs to stay alive.”

“She is alive.”

The answer comes too fast. My eyes narrow.

Ever sees it, because Ever fucking sees everything. Breath, pulse, weight shift, weapon angle. He has since he was a skinny little kid. He’s built an entire life out of watching—people, ordinary, everyday moments, little things that become disasters.

Which just makes what he did worse, not better.

“You think giving her what she wants is the same thing as keeping her breathing?” I ask.

His jaw flexes, the tiniest bit. Finally, a crack.

“She was coming apart,” he says. “Little by little. You saw her.”

“Yes. I saw her.” My voice drops. “I saw her covered in dust from a grave. I saw her come through my front door with her face wrecked and her hands shaking. I saw her look at me like she had crawled out of a hole I should have burned to the ground fifteen years ago.”

He doesn’t move. That poker-faced restraint will be the death of him. Maybe tonight, if he keeps looking at me like that.

“She needed the truth under her feet,” he says.

“She needed protection!”

“She needed both.”

“No.” I step around the desk. “She needed one of us to remember there are people in this city who would gut her just to see what color she bleeds.”

Ever’s eyes sharpen. Good. Let him feel the truth of it.

Let him stand there and picture Reva in that rotting house with no perimeter, no plan, no warning, no damn idea how many ghosts in New Orleans still have teeth.

“She was with me,” he says.