The Cartel's Next Lie

1. Reva

CHAPTER ONE

REVA

Sometimes, you want to burn the whole fucking world down and start over from ash.

Not because it’ll fix anything.

But because at least then the ruin would make sense. At least then you could stand in the middle of all that blackened nothing and say, yes. This is what happened. This is what’s left. This is what they took from me.

Instead I’m standing in Noir Night with the bass pounding upward through the floor and into the soles of my feet, the lights cutting over bodies and silk and smoke, and nothing makes sense.

Not the woman in front of me.

Not the discordantly familiar shape of her mouth, the eyes I used to see across the breakfast table. The voice that just said my name—older but hers.

My sister is dead.

Delia is dead.

I know this the way I know the scar on my knee came from falling off my bike when I was five. The way I know Cal hates cilantro and keeps a spare gun sitting on top of the refrigerator in his kitchen. The way I know my own name.

Delia is dead. She died with the rest of them. I saw—

My thoughts stop there.

They don’t break. They don’t blur. They just stop, slammed hard against some wall inside my skull.

I saw...

I did see it. I saw the carnage.

Didn’t I?

The room tilts a little, or maybe it’s me who tilts. Someone near the bar laughs too loudly. Glass clinks. The bass drops low enough to crawl through my ribs. Men and women move around us like this is still only a club and not the place where my entire life has split open for the second time.

Delia is three feet away from me.

Alive.

My gaze scours her, starving for information.

She’s an older replica the girl in my memories, and although as twins we look similar, we’ve grown different as we grown older.

She’s sharper. Thinner in the face and sleeker, tougher, somehow, in the body.

Her dark hair is pulled back in a sleek knot that makes her cheekbones look carved.

I think she may be taller, or maybe it’s just higher heels.

Her lips part. For one second, I think she might reach for me.

For one stupid, desperate second, I’m seven again, looking for the sister who used to steal the marshmallows out of my cereal and tell me monsters couldn’t get us if we kept our feet under the blanket.

Then her eyes flick to the side, to Deacon. Her face barely changes, and still, I see it. A warning. A plea. Maybe an accusation.

Deacon goes still.

The air thins, until suddenly I’m dragging glass through my lungs with every breath.

“Deedy,” I say. My old nickname for her comes out wrong. Small. Shredded around the edges. Because that’s what I’ve been reduced to.

She flinches.

That tiny movement does more damage than a scream could have. My sister—my dead sister, my alive sister—takes half a step back as if my voice touched her with something dirty.

I lift my hand anyway. My body moves before my brain catches up. My fingers stretch toward her sleeve, toward proof, toward skin and bone and heat.

“Deedy…you’re alive.”

Tears spill down my face. I don’t feel them at first. I only know they’re there because my lips taste salt when I breathe through my mouth.

“You’re alive,” I say again, and this time the words come with a sound I hate. A cracked, ugly thing. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob. “How are you—how are you standing here?”

My fingers brush her arm. Delia jerks away.

She pulls back so hard her shoulder hits the edge of a narrow table behind her. A glass wobbles. Someone grabs it before it spills. Delia doesn’t notice. Her eyes are locked on my hand.

The floor drops beneath me. I’m still standing, but something inside me falls.

“It’s Delia,” she says. “Not Deedy.”

It’s no more than a whisper, but it may as well be a shout.

I stare at her.

I have imagined finding my family in every impossible way grief knows how to imagine. I have dreamed of my mother opening a door with flour on her hands. My father sitting at the kitchen table, newspaper folded beside his coffee. Delia flopping onto my bed and telling me my hair looks stupid.

I’ve imagined so many different scenarios, they all started to blend together in the purest form of torture.

I have not imagined my sister looking at me as if my touch burns.

“Delia,” I reply.

Her jaw tightens. Her gaze cuts to Deacon one more time, and whatever passes between them makes my stomach fold in on itself.

“I don’t know what this is, but I can’t do this,” she says.

The words are controlled. Too controlled. She sounds like someone reading a line she has practiced until it stops cutting her mouth.

“What?” I shake my head. “No. No, you don’t get to—”

“You can’t be here.”

My pulse hammers so hard my vision flickers at the edges.

“I can’t be here?” I repeat. “You’re dead.”

Something moves across her face. Pain, maybe. But it is gone before I can hold it still long enough to name.

“You should never have come.”

The room narrows around us.

“What does that even mean?” Anger is rising in counterpoint to the pain, and I swipe it aside.

She looks at me then. Really looks. For the first time since I saw her across the room, her eyes meet mine and stay there.

My sister’s eyes used to be warm brown. I remember them that way. Warm. Impatient. Alive with every thought she wasn’t supposed to say out loud.

These eyes are brown too, but there is nothing warm in them.

“You don’t know what you’ve done,” she hisses.

Then she turns and walks away.

Just like that. No explanation.

No hug, or I love you.

No I missed you or I’m sorry.

No I thought you were dead too.

She walks away from me, slipping between two men near the curtained hall, and my body refuses to follow.

For a second, I cannot move at all.

I hear Shiloh say my name. I feel Ever’s presence on one side of me, solid and tense. Nash is somewhere behind me, quiet in the way that usually means violence has stepped into the room and is choosing which throat to close first.

Deacon, the coward, says nothing.

My hand is still lifted.

I curl it into a fist.

Skin presses into my palm. Nails bite deep enough to hurt. Good. Pain is real. Pain has edges. Pain doesn’t turn into your dead sister and walk away in a black dress.

I force air into my lungs and uncurl my fingers, searching for my rubberbands. Shit. I took them off; they didn’t go with the ‘look,’ Sonny said. They’re not there.

Another breath. Too shallow.

Another. Worse.

My chest tightens. The bass in the room seems to move inside my body now, a hard thud beneath my ribs. My throat closes around all the things I want to scream.

I want to burn it down.

Noir. Noir Night. The Syndicate. This city. Every man who knew. Every file, every photograph, every whispered name.

All of it.

I want flame in the walls.

I want ash on my tongue.

I want someone to tell me why my sister is alive and why she looked at me like I was some kind of threat.

“Reva.”

Ever’s voice is low near my ear.

I drag my gaze toward him, but the club blurs. His face won’t hold still. The lights smear over his cheekbones. His mouth moves again.

I know he is speaking.

I cannot make the words form anything useful.

My lungs seize.

No.

No, not here.

I bend forward, one hand pressed to my chest, the other still locked in a fist. Air scrapes in and rushes out too fast in a pained wheeze. My body tries to breathe for me and fails at it. The room goes soft at the edges, then sharp, then soft again.

The closet…I am back in the closet.

Dark wood against my spine. Dust in my nose. My knees pulled to my chest. My hand clamped over my own mouth because the lady on the phone said be quiet, sweet girl, you stay quiet until someone comes.

Gunshots.

A scream cut short.

Deedy.

Did I hear Delia scream?

I try to grab the memory, but it slides away from me. Not gone. Worse. There, but covered in fog.

After. What happened after?

Police lights. Red and blue through the slats of the closet door. A man’s voice calling my name. Not Cal. Someone else. A stranger trying to sound gentle and failing because there was blood in the house and adults suck at pretending when children are watching.

“Reva Hart? Honey, can you come out?”

I didn’t.

I remember that.

I stayed in the closet until someone opened the door.

Hands reached in. A woman’s hands, maybe. Or a man’s. They were covered in gloves. I remember the smell of latex and gunpowder and leather shoes. I remember someone wrapping a blanket around my shoulders even though I wasn’t cold.

I remember stairs.

Do I?

My knees almost buckle as I see it in flashes—the hallway outside my parents’ room. The staircase. The living room. A sheet on the floor.

No, not on the floor…it was laying over top of something.

White cotton, dragged from a bed. Too thin to hide the shape underneath. A dark stain soaking through near one edge.

Someone saying, “Don’t let her look.”

I saw the blood. I heard the shots. But the bodies—

Did I see their faces?

Did I see Delia?

Did I see her dead?

My breath breaks apart.

I can’t find the answer.

I can’t find anything.

“I saw them,” I whisper.

No one answers.

“I saw them.”

My voice pitches higher. Panic saws through it. “I saw them. I know I saw them.”

Shiloh steps into my line of sight, but I don’t know how he got there. His face is wrong too, stripped of charm, his mouth tight, his eyes too bright.

“Yank,” he says softly.

I shake my head. He reaches for me, and I flinch.

The movement hurts him. I see it. I hate that I see it. I hate that anything outside this tearing inside me still has the nerve to matter.

“Don’t,” I say, but I don’t know who I’m talking to.

Don’t touch me.

Don’t leave me.

Don’t lie.

Don’t say her name.

Don’t tell me I fucking imagined my own family dead.

A hand moves at the edge of my vision.

Deacon.

He takes one step toward me. His face has gone pale beneath the club lights, his eyes fixed on me with something raw enough that I want to claw it out of him and make him explain.

He reaches. Nash moves faster. His palm lands flat against Deacon’s chest, stopping him cold.

“Not you.”

The words cut through the noise, quiet and absolute.