2. Shiloh
CHAPTER TWO
SHILOH
By the time we get her upstairs, Reva has stopped shaking.
I hate the stillness more than the shaking. The shaking gave us something to work with—breath too fast, hands too cold, knees unsteady. This quiet is worse. It is the sound of a person retreating so far into themselves that the doors are beginning to lock from the inside.
Ever keeps a hand at the small of her back as we move through the upstairs hall, there in case her legs decide they’re finished pretending to be solid.
She lets him. That might worry me most. Reva Hart does not let men guide her.
She lets us crowd her sometimes, lets us rile her, or lets us put ourselves between her and danger when the situation is clear enough that arguing would waste time.
But she does not drift. She does not go pliant.
Tonight, she does.
I unlock my bedroom door because no one says where we’re taking her, and I’m not letting her out of my sight.
Nash’s room is too much Nash—dark, controlled, pin-neat.
Ever’s room is too sparse, too quiet. Mine has the biggest bathroom—oversized tub, soft lighting.
I’m a heathen with my fondness for fancy shit and expensive bourbon, but tonight, all that luxury just gives us somewhere to put her that doesn’t feel like an interrogation room.
Ever reaches the same conclusion. He opens the bathroom door, crosses the tile, and turns on the water. The old pipes knock once behind the wall before water splashes from the faucet into the tub in a steady rush. Reva stands just inside the room, staring at nothing.
The dress she wore to Noir Night clings to her body in all the wrong ways now.
Earlier, it made her look dangerous—sleek lines, bare skin, trouble I wanted to put my hands on.
Now it looks like part of the trap. It’s too tight across her ribs, too much club smoke caught in the fabric, too much proof that we dressed her up and walked her straight into a nightmare.
I shrug out of my jacket and toss it over the chair near the bathroom door.
Ever does the same with his, though he folds it once before setting it down because even a crisis does not undo whatever severe little rules live in his bones.
He is the anchor; I am the sail. Right now, we’re both trying to keep the ship from splintering against the rocks.
“Yank,” I say softly.
No reaction. I move into her line of sight, moving slowly. Reva has gone still, but violence sits under that stillness like a coiled spring. A wrong touch could bring all of it up at once, and I don’t think any of us are prepared for the mess that would follow.
“Reva.”
Her eyes flick to mine. Distant. Wrecked. Still fighting.
“We’re going to get you out of this dress,” I tell her.
Her gaze drops to herself as if she’s only just remembering she has a body. Then she looks back at me. “Why?”
The question is so flat it scrapes something raw in my chest. It’s the voice of a child who’s had everything taken and doesn’t see the point in the remainder.
“Because it smells like the club,” I say, trying to keep my tone light even though it feels like lead. “Because the club smelled like smoke and secrets, and I’m in a mood to drown at least one of those.”
It’s a bad joke. Too thin to stand. She does not smile.
Ever comes out of the bathroom, rolling his sleeves to his forearms, revealing the heavy ink that marks his skin. “Bath is running.”
His voice is lower than usual, a grounding hum.
He looks at me, then at Reva, then at the zipper running down the back of her dress.
On any other night, I could make this filthy.
I’d have a dozen lines ready about teamwork and zippers and how a woman should never wear anything I can’t get her out of in under ten seconds.
Tonight, every easy word feels like an obscenity.
“May I?” I ask her.
Her eyebrows pull together, a flicker of the old spark returning. “Since when do you ask?”
“Since now.”
Her throat works, a hard swallow that looks painful. For one second, I think she might throw something at me—a lamp, a curse, the entire weight of the last fifteen years. Instead, she turns her back. It’s a surrender that feels heavier than a fight.
I step behind her and find the zipper at the top of her spine. My fingers brush the skin at the nape of her neck, and she goes rigid. I stop immediately. Ever stops too, though he is several feet away. That's how closely we are both watching her, tracking every micro-tremor of her skin.
“Just me,” I say, my voice barely a whisper.
“I know that.”
The words are clipped, angry. Good. Anger means she’s still fighting. I lower the zipper inch by inch. The dress loosens around her ribs. Her shoulders dip forward as if she can finally breathe, then stiffen again when the fabric gapes down her back, exposing the fine-boned line of her spine.
Ever goes to the vanity and pulls out a clean washcloth. He finds a bottle of makeup remover I forgot I owned—left behind by some ghost of a woman from a different life. He wets the cloth and comes back.
“Sit,” he tells her.
Reva looks at him, then at the closed toilet lid he’s pointing to. She sits. No argument. The lack of defiance makes my pulse kick in a way that has nothing to do with desire. It’s the sound of a perimeter failing.
I crouch in front of her while Ever kneels to one side. Her dress has fallen loose around her chest, and I keep my eyes strictly on her face because this is not that kind of undressing. Wanting still knows how to breathe in the room, but tonight it’s keeping its hands to itself.
Ever lifts the cloth toward her cheek. “I’m going to take this off.”
She blinks at him. “The makeup,” he adds softly.
“I know what you meant.”
There’s a little bite in her voice now. Ever’s mouth barely moves, almost a smile.
He dabs the cloth beneath one eye, careful around the ruined line of mascara.
Black streaks come away against white cotton, looking like ink on a page.
Reva watches his hand as if she cannot understand how something so ordinary could still be happening while her world is in flames.
Water rushes into the tub behind us, filling the room with a rising bank of steam. The bathroom light is too bright, too honest, so I lean over and flick on the smaller wall sconce instead. Softer. Warmer. Better for hiding the things we aren't ready to face.
Suddenly, I'm desperate to fill the room with something other than this damnable tension.
“We’ll figure this out,” I say.
Her gaze cuts to mine, sharp as a glass shard. I should have known better. I do know better. But the words come anyway because I’m weak when women cry and worse when they refuse to.
“We will,” I continue, because stopping now would make it a lie. “Nash is with Deacon, giving him the third degree. He’ll get answers.”
“Everything will be okay,” Ever says quietly.
Reva goes very still. Ever realizes the mistake half a second after I do. She lifts her face away from the cloth, her eyes wide and wet and dangerous.
“Will it?” she asks.
Neither of us answers. We can’t. Her mouth twists into something that isn't quite a laugh and isn't quite a sob. “That’s what I thought.”
“Reva—”
“No.” She stands so suddenly Ever rocks back on his heels. The loosened dress slips an inch, and she catches it against her chest with a white-knuckled grip. “No more of that. No more of the soothing. The managing. The careful voices like I’m a bomb somebody left under the bed.”
I stand slowly, keeping my hands visible. “You can be a bomb tonight, Yank.”
“I’m not asking for your fucking permission.”
There she is again. Bleeding, half-broken, but her spine is coming back one vertebra at a time. God help me, I want to kiss the anger right out of her mouth, but I don’t move. That would be another kind of theft, another way of not listening.
She looks from me to Ever, her chest heaving. “What exactly did it look like?”
I hold her gaze, refusing to blink. “What?”
“Noir,” she says, her voice rising. “Delia. Deacon. Nash sending me out like I’m too fragile to hear words. What did it look like to everyone else?”
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.”