13. Eve
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Eve
The police tape is still up when we get there.
Yellow plastic stretched across my door, fluttering in the stairwell draft like set dressing for a show I never auditioned for. Except this is my life. My home. The one place in the world I was supposed to be able to lock behind me and breathe.
Tyler’s waiting in the hall, face gray, arms crossed so tight it looks like he’s holding himself together by force. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a year.
“I came by to drop off Mom’s casserole,” he says, like that detail matters, like saying the small true thing keeps the big one at arm’s length. “She’s been losing her mind that you’re not eating. Found the door hanging off the latch.”
Dean’s hand settles at the base of my spine as we duck under the tape and step inside.
It’s a war zone. Every piece of furniture overturned, the couch dumped onto its back, chairs flung into corners.
My books are everywhere, dozens of them, pages torn loose and crumpled, spines cracked open and abandoned facedown on the floor.
The shelf my dad built me for my twenty-fifth birthday lies toppled across the wreckage.
My bedroom is worse, the closet emptied and the clothes slashed into ribbons, makeup smeared down the bathroom mirror in greasy streaks, the bed gutted, feathers still drifting in the air from the pillows like the room is snowing the aftermath of someone’s rage.
And on the living room wall, in foot-high dripping red letters: WHORE DIES NEXT.
My knees think about quitting on me.
“We dusted for prints,” Detective Rodriguez says, stepping out of the hallway, grim. “Nothing usable. Whoever did this wore gloves and knew what they were doing. This wasn’t a smash and grab. Nothing was taken. This was a message.”
“Or someone they hired knew what they were doing,” Dean says, tight. “My brother has resources, even out on bail.”
“Mr. Valentine’s monitor confirms he was at his residence during the window.” Rodriguez rubs his eyes with one hand. “Ms. Nash, as I keep having to say, isn’t under any restrictions at all.”
“She threatened me,” I say, and the words tear loose. “She burned my storage unit. She called me and told me she’d take everything. She’s stood outside this man’s apartment and watched us through the windows. What does she have to do, hand you a signed confession?”
“We’re building the case.” He sounds tired. “I know that’s cold comfort while you’re standing in this.”
Tyler steps between me and the detective, my baby brother who used to cry over splinters, who I taught to tie his shoes, who is now standing in my ruined living room looking ready to commit something he’d go to prison for.
“With respect, Detective. Storage fire, death threats, and now this. What’s the escalation you’re waiting on before it counts?
Because from where I’m standing the next one’s the wall, and then it’s her. ”
Rodriguez doesn’t have an answer for that, and the silence where the answer should be is the worst thing in the room.
The drive to the loft is a blur of wet streetlight and nobody talking. My hands won’t hold still. Every time I close my eyes I see the wall, the red running down the plaster in long thin streaks where the paint pooled and dripped.
The loft feels different tonight. The brick and the high ceilings that felt warm a week ago feel cavernous now, full of corners and shadow and places a person could stand. I sit in the middle of it, small, with my arms wrapped around my own knees.
“You’re staying here,” Dean says, and there’s no give in it. “Until the trial’s over. Until we know who’s doing this and they’re somewhere they can’t reach you. I’m not negotiating, so don’t get that look ready.”
“What if it never stops?” My voice splits down the seam. “What if this is just my life now. Listening for sounds. Checking the locks twice. Waiting for the next message, the next fire, the next wall. What if she never stops until.”
“Then we never stop being ready for her. Together.” He kneels in front of me and takes both my hands, his palms warm and rough and solid, the most real thing in the cavernous room.
“You are not doing this alone, Eve. Not one night of it. You reach over in the dark and I’m there. That’s the deal now. That’s permanent.”
Sleep finally drags me down out of sheer exhaustion, the kind that wins whether you want it to or not. Dean’s arm is around me, his heartbeat steady at my back, and for a little while I let myself believe the locks will hold.
The nightmare finds me anyway.
Kiara with a blade, the edge catching candlelight.
Simon laughing somewhere in the dark, the easy charming laugh that used to make me feel chosen and now makes my skin try to crawl off my body.
Red paint running down white walls, pooling on the floor, then rising, climbing the way water climbs, up the legs of the furniture, up toward the bed, toward me, while I can’t move, can’t run, can’t.
I wake up screaming.
I’m fighting arms that aren’t trying to hurt me, swinging at ghosts that dissolve the second I make contact with the dark. My throat is raw. My face is wet. My heart’s going so hard it hurts.
“Eve. Eve, you’re safe. It’s me. You’re safe.” Dean’s voice cuts clean through the panic, low and steady and certain. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Nobody’s here but me.”
His arms come around me and pull me into his chest, one hand spreading into my hair, the other drawing slow circles on my back, the exact motion my mother used when I was small and the monsters were imaginary and a nightlight could kill them dead.
These monsters have a license plate and a grudge.
“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I whisper into his chest. It tastes like surrender, and I hate the taste of it.
“You don’t have to take any of it on your own.” He pulls back just far enough to cup my face, to make me meet his eyes in the dark. “Eve. I need to tell you something. I’ve needed to say it for a while and I keep finding reasons not to, and I’m done finding them.”
“What?”
“I love you.”
The words hang there between us, simple and enormous, taking up the whole dark room.
“I’ve loved you for years,” he says, and his voice stays steady even while his hands shake against my cheeks.
“I loved you when I had no right to. I loved you when you belonged to him, when I had to watch you wear his ring and laugh at his jokes and make yourself smaller to fit in his life. I loved you from across dinner tables and from the passenger seat of my own car and in a thousand seconds I had to swallow because saying it would have cost you something.” His thumb catches a tear I didn’t know was still falling.
“And I love you now. With the whole world on fire around us and a death threat drying on your wall across town. None of it changed it. None of it ever could. I’m not going anywhere, Eve. Not for any of them.”
My breath stops. Something locked away so long I’d forgotten the shape of it cracks open in my chest, and what comes out isn’t fear and isn’t grief. It’s relief so total it feels like falling.
“I love you too,” I say, and it comes out wrecked and absolutely true. “I think I loved you before I let myself know it. I think I’ve been in love with you since a balcony and an argument about an ice sculpture, and I spent years calling it something else because the truth was inconvenient.”
He kisses me, soft, and the nightmare loosens its grip on my throat.
And then the kiss changes, deepens, his hand sliding from my jaw back into my hair, and I realize I don’t want soft tonight.
I don’t want to be handled like the breakable thing the wall says I am.
I want proof. I want to be reminded that I’m alive and wanted and here in this body that someone just promised to destroy, and that the red paint doesn’t get to be the loudest thing in my head.
“Dean.” I pull him over me. “Make me forget the wall. Just for tonight. Be the loud thing instead.”
He goes still, searching my face in the dark. “You’re sure. After today, after all of it.”
“I need you. Not to fix it, because you can’t, and I love you for never pretending you can. Just to be the louder thing in my head than she is.”
So he is.
It’s slower than the courthouse and fiercer than the first night and something entirely its own, a third language neither of us has spoken until tonight.
He undresses me like he’s reassuring me I’m still whole, still all here, still in one piece despite the word drying on a wall across town.
Every inch of fabric he peels away he answers with his mouth, his hands following the path his eyes take, slow and certain, pressing the words into my skin between kisses.
I love you. I’ve got you. You’re safe. You’re mine.
He says it against my collarbone, against the inside of my wrist, against the jump of my pulse in my throat, like he means to write over every place the fear touched today with something that belongs only to us.
By the time his mouth moves lower I’m shaking, and it has nothing to do with the nightmare anymore.
He eases my knees apart and lowers his mouth to me like it’s the only place he’s wanted to be all day, his tongue slow and patient on my clit, his fingers sinking into me until the first wave takes me quiet and almost grief-shaped, my hands locked in his hair and his name breaking apart on my tongue.
He works me through every second of it, then kisses his way back up, the inside of my thigh, my hip, the soft place under my ribs where I’ve held my whole body clenched for days.
By the time he settles over me I’m crying again, but it’s a different crying, the kind that comes when something clenched for too long finally lets go all at once.
“Look at me,” he says, and pushes his cock into me slow, every inch of it deliberate, filling me until we both have to breathe through it, and I do, I hold his eyes through all of it.
He fucks me like he has nowhere else to be for the rest of his life, deep and unhurried and devastating in his gentleness, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other laced tight through mine against the pillow.
I feel every drag of him everywhere, in my chest as much as between my legs, and the loft that felt cavernous an hour ago shrinks down to just this, just him, just the warm steady weight of him grounding me to the bed and the dark and my own skin.
And when he says it again, low and broken right against my mouth, buried to the hilt in me with his heart slamming against the hand I’ve got flat on his chest, “I love you, I love you, God, Eve, I love you,” it goes all the way in, deeper than he does, past every wall I ever built.
His thumb finds my clit and works it slow in time with every thrust, and the second wave climbs higher than the first, gathering up everywhere he’s touched and everywhere he hasn’t yet, and when it breaks I come apart around his cock and the words at once, clenching around him on a sob that has nothing sad in it at all.
He follows a breath later, spilling into me with my name in my hair, his whole body going taut and then loose, holding on like he’s anchoring us both to the bed, to the floor, to the world.
After, we lie tangled in the dark, his hand splayed flat over my heart like he’s counting the beats to make sure they keep coming.
“Still scared?” he asks, quiet.
“Terrified,” I admit. “But it’s quieter now. You drowned her out. For a few hours, anyway.”
“Then I’ll do it every night she’s in your head.” He presses his mouth to my hair. “That’s the job. I’m good at it. I have references now.”
I laugh, wet and surprised, and fall asleep on his chest, and for the first time since the wall, I don’t dream at all.
Dean’s phone buzzes at six.
It pulls me up out of the first dreamless sleep I’ve had in weeks. He’s already awake, half-dressed at the window, phone in hand, his face grim in the gray light bleeding through the curtains we keep closed now.
“Eve. Wake up.”
“I’m up.” I sit, the blankets pooling. “What is it. What happened.”
“The police caught someone for the break-in. A traffic camera got him leaving your building two streets over.” He crosses to the bed and holds out the phone.
A mugshot fills the screen, a face I’ve never seen, white, mid-thirties, the forgettable kind you’d pass on a street and never register.
“Jake Reiner. Two priors for breaking and entering.”
“I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him in my life.”
“He’s talking, Eve.” Dean’s eyes lift to mine, and something fierce and bright is kindling in them. “He’s been talking all night. He says he was hired. And he’s giving up names.”