10. Reva
CHAPTER TEN
REVA
The foyer swallows me whole.
It isn’t just the dark; it’s the way the air feels stagnant and heavy, like it’s been holding its breath for fifteen years, waiting for someone to come back and finish the exhale.
I take one step, and then another, my boots crunching on a layer of grit and broken plaster that sounds too much like bone grinding against bone.
The floorboards are warped, bowing under my weight as if the house itself is trying to decide whether to support me or let me fall through to the crawlspace below.
Ever is a solid, silent presence at my shoulder.
I don’t have to look at him to know his jaw is set and his hand is hovering near the hem of his shirt, ready for a threat that hasn’t lived here in a decade and a half.
His cedar scent is a sharp, grounding contrast to the cloying scent of wet rot and ancient dust. He doesn’t say anything to break the silence, and for that, I could kiss him.
“The wallpaper,” I whisper, my voice catching on the dry air.
It used to be cream with tiny blue cornflowers. Now it’s a jaundiced yellow, peeling away from the drywall in long, jagged strips that look like scorched skin. I reach out, my fingers trembling as I brush the surface. The texture is chalky and cold, leaving a smear of gray dust on my fingertips.
The physical contact is a mistake.
It’s a tether, pulling me back to a version of this room that was full of light and the smell of my mother’s lavender floor wax.
“Reva,” Ever says, his voice a low vibration that I feel in my teeth. “Stay behind me. The floor might not be stable.”
“I know where the soft spots are,” I tell him, though that’s a lie.
I know where the floor gave a little when I was seven. I know where the vent used to rattle when the heat kicked on, and I know exactly which stair squeaked if you didn’t step on the far left side. I move toward the staircase, my heart a frantic, uneven pulse in the base of my throat.
I’m not an EMT right now. I’m not a woman hunting a ghost with a rosary tattoo. I’m just a little girl who forgot to say goodbye.
The banister is thick with dust, the mahogany beneath it grayed and dull.
I climb the stairs, each one a groan of protest from the wood.
Ever follows, his footsteps heavier than mine, more deliberate.
He’s watching the shadows in the corners, the places where the boarded-up windows let in thin, sickly slivers of gray light.
He isn’t looking at the ruins; he’s looking for what might be hiding in them.
It’s what he does.
He guards. He monitors. He exists in the space between the danger and the person he’s decided to keep alive.
We reach the upstairs landing, and I stop.
To the left is the master bedroom. To the right, the bathroom with the clawfoot tub where Delia and I used to make bubble beards. Straight ahead, in the master, is the closet.
It’s a small, unremarkable door, the white paint cracked into a thousand tiny veins.
It looks smaller than it does in my nightmares.
Everything in this house is smaller, as if the memories have been stretching the dimensions of my reality while I wasn’t looking.
“You’re shaking,” Ever observes.
He doesn’t move to touch me, but I can feel the heat radiating off him. It’s a physical weight, a pressure that keeps me from shattering. He’s standing close enough that if I leaned back an inch, I’d hit his chest.
I want to lean. I want to disappear into the broad, tattooed expanse of him and pretend that none of this is real.
“It’s just the cold,” I lie.
New Orleans in the afternoon is never cold. It’s a humid, suffocating oven, but inside this house, the temperature feels like it’s dropped twenty degrees. It’s the kind of chill that comes from the ground up, the kind that settles in your joints and makes you feel old.
“It isn’t the cold, firefly.”
His hand moves then, slow and careful, his fingers brushing against the back of my arm. He doesn’t wrap his hand around me. He just anchors me. His touch is rough, calloused from years of work I try not to think about, but it’s the steadiest thing in this rotting world.
I reach for the doorknob.
The brass is tarnished, turning a dull, sickly green. It’s cold—colder than the air, colder than the wood. I turn it, the mechanism grinding with a screech that echoes down the hallway like a dying animal.
The door swings open, and the smell hits me first.
It isn’t rot. It isn’t mildew.
It’s cedar.
Faint, ghostly, but unmistakable. Beneath it is the scent of my mother’s wool coats, a heavy, comforting smell that has no business being here after fifteen years of abandonment.
I step inside the small space, empty now of my dad's shoes, my mother's clothing. I snap my rubber bands on my wrist. Once. Twice.
It’s dark, the only light coming from the room where Ever stands like a monolith. I sink to the floor, my knees hitting the hardwood with a dull thud. My breath is coming in ragged, shallow gasps, the kind of respiration I’ve seen a hundred times in the back of the rig.
Panic.
Hypoxia of the soul.
I press my back against the rear wall, my hands opening and closing against the dusty floor.
“I thought it would be different,” I whisper, my voice breaking. “I thought I’d see something. Feel something. I don’t know.”
Ever is on the floor in an instant.
He’s too big for this space, his shoulders nearly brushing the sides of the closet, but he doesn’t seem to care.
He drops down beside me, his presence taking up all the air in the small room.
He doesn’t offer a platitude. He doesn’t tell me it’s going to be okay.
He just reaches out and takes my hands in his, pinning them against my thighs before I can start raking my nails across my skin.
“Look at me,” he commands.
It isn’t a suggestion. It’s an order, delivered with the flat, unblinking intensity that makes Ever Rousseau the most terrifying of the three.
I look.
His eyes are dark, nearly black in the shadows of the closet, but they are focused. They are the only thing in this house that aren't decaying.
“Breathe, Reva. Four counts in. Four counts out. Do it now.”
I try to follow the rhythm, but my lungs feel like they’re full of broken glass.
The memories are hitting me now—not as images, but as sensations.
The phone pressed to my ear. The 911 operator’s voice, thin and far away, telling me to stay quiet.
The ache in my knees from crouching too long.
My hand clamped over my mouth so no sound could get out.
Stay quiet, sweet girl. Help is coming.
But before that—
Before the closet—
“He was here,” I choke out, my eyes fixed on the doorframe.
Ever’s grip on my hands tightens. Not enough to hurt, but enough to bring me back. “Who, Reva?”
“The man with the rosary.” The image sharpens and blurs at the same time, like my brain is trying to protect me and betray me all at once. “Before. In the hall. I saw him before I hid.”
It isn’t Deacon as he is now—scarred, weary, holding a glass of bourbon in the dark of Noir Night. It’s a shadow. A lethal, silent shadow that moved with terrifying grace. A flash of ink. Painted beads around a wrist. The red of them inked into skin.
And eyes.
Gray eyes.
River-stone gray.
The same eyes that have been looking at me for the last week like he knows exactly how many pieces I am in.
“The man I came here to murder,” I whisper.
I am crying now, the tears hot and fast, carving tracks through the dust on my face.
I lean into him, my forehead hitting the junction of his neck and shoulder.
He lets go of my hands and wraps his arms around me, pulling me into his lap.
He’s so big that I feel like a child again, tucked away in a fortress made of muscle and ink.
He doesn’t say anything, but I can feel the rumble of a growl in his chest, a low, protective sound that makes my heart ache.
“I don’t understand,” I sob into his shirt. “If he was here, if he knew, why am I alive? Why did everyone else end up under sheets and I got to keep breathing?”
Ever’s hand comes up to the back of my head, his fingers tangling in my hair, pulling me tighter against him.
He doesn’t have the answers.
Or maybe he does.
Maybe they all do, in pieces, and no one wants to be the one to hand me the knife.
Right now, he isn’t a source of information. He’s a shield. He’s the physical manifestation of the word safe, even if the safety he offers is wrapped in violence and secrets.
We sit there in the dark of the closet for a long time, the silence of the house pressing in around us.
I can feel the steady, rhythmic beat of his heart against my ear, a mechanical certainty that anchors me to the present.
My breathing eventually slows, the jagged edges of the panic smoothing over into a dull, heavy exhaustion.
I pull back slightly, wiping my face with the back of my hand, feeling the grit of the house on my skin.
“You’re a mess,” Ever says softly.
He reaches out, his thumb brushing a stray tear from my cheek. His touch is so gentle it hurts, a jarring contrast to the intensity of his gaze. He looks at me the way he looks at the security feeds at Noir—like he’s cataloging every flaw, every tremor, and deciding how to fix it.
“Yeah, well,” I say, trying for a sarcasm that falls flat. “It’s a haunted house, Ever. Being a mess is part of the tour package.”
“I don’t like you being here,” he says, his voice dropping to that dangerous, quiet register. “This place is a grave. You shouldn’t be spending your time in graves.”
“I had to know,” I tell him.
My gaze moves over the cramped space. The warped floorboards. The empty hangers still rusting on the rod. The old wallpaper peeling away near the baseboard. There is no sign of me here. No proof scratched into wood. No little-girl mark left behind to say Reva was here. Reva survived this.
That almost makes it worse.
“I thought there would be proof,” I say. “Something. Anything.”
Ever’s expression shifts.