9. Reva #2
“I’m already living with ghosts,” I snap, my voice cracking with a sudden, sharp grief. “I need to know if they’re real. I need to see the closet. I need to see the stairs. I need to know how much of what I remember is real and how much my head filled in after they carried me out.”
Ever looks at Shiloh, a silent, weighted conversation passing between them.
I see the hesitation in Shiloh’s eyes, the protective instinct that wants to wrap me in cotton wool and keep me far away from the blood and the ash.
But Ever is different. He understands the need for grounding, even if the ground is covered in the debris of a life destroyed.
He knows that you can’t build a weapon on a fractured base.
“Nash gave orders to take you straight back,” Ever says quietly. “He wants you secure.”
“Nash isn’t the one who lost fifteen years of his life to a lie,” I say. I step into Ever’s space, looking up at him, forcing him to see the desperation in my eyes. “Please. Just take me there. I won’t stay long. I just need to touch the walls. I need to know it was real.”
Ever exhales slowly, a sound of surrender that carries the weight of all the rules he’s breaking.
He reaches out, his thumb brushing over the pulse point in my wrist, checking the frantic rhythm of my heart.
It’s a small, intimate gesture that makes my breath catch, grounding me more than any words could.
His skin is warm, a stark contrast to the icy, hollow dread in my stomach.
“One hour,” Ever says. “That’s it. Then we go back, and we don’t tell Nash about the detour. Understood?”
“Thank you,” I whisper.
The drive to my family’s old home takes us away from the vibrant, screaming chaos of the French Quarter and into the quiet, decaying outskirts where the city starts to lose its grip on the land.
The roads get narrower, the asphalt cracked and buckled by the roots of ancient trees.
The oaks get thicker here, draped with Spanish moss that hangs over the branches like funeral veils, gray and tattered in the stagnant air.
I keep my forehead pressed against the window, watching the world turn a monochromatic gray and green.
I have a vague memory of this road. I remember the way the light used to filter through the leaves, creating a kaleidoscope of gold on the dashboard.
It felt safe then. It felt like the trees were ancient sentinels guarding our little piece of the world.
Now, they just look like skeletons waiting for a storm to knock them over.
We didn’t live here very long. A few years, I think. My memories are spotty and full of holes, overrun by the one that haunts my childhood.
“I want to say this was…not my home-home, if that makes any sense?” It’s half-question, half-statement, directed toward Ever as we pull up to a set of iron gates rusted shut and choked by invasive vines. Ever slants a look my way.
“As I understand it, your family had been hiding here for several years before the Syndicate found them. So it was home, but not where you had spent the bulk of your childhood, no,” he replies.
I nod.
Ever has to get out, pulling a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters from the trunk to snip the chain. The screech of the metal as he forces the gates open is a jagged, violent sound that sets my teeth on edge and makes my skin crawl.
He returns to the truck and we make our way down the drive.
“How did they find us?”
Another look. “I’m not a hundred percent. Nash might know.”
The driveway is a ghost of its former self, overgrown with weeds and tall grass that push through the gravel like fingers reaching for the light. At the end of the long, winding path sits the house.
It’s a white Victorian, or it used to be.
Now the paint is peeling in long, sickly strips, revealing the gray, rotting wood beneath.
The boards over the windows look like bandages on an unhealed wound.
It’s smaller than I remember—everything from childhood is—but somehow more imposing, a rotting monument to the moment my life stopped making sense.
It sits there in the center of the overgrown lot, a hollowed-out skull of a home.
Ever kills the engine. The silence that follows is absolute, heavy and suffocating, broken only by the rhythmic ticking of the cooling car.
He doesn’t move to get out immediately. He just sits there, his large hands still gripping the wheel, watching the house with a grim, focused intensity as if he expects a ghost to walk out onto the porch.
“You sure about this, Reva?” he asks. His voice is soft, the sharp edges of his personality smoothed over by the gravity of the moment. He doesn’t look at me; he keeps his eyes on the house, scanning for threats that are fifteen years old.
I look at the front door, the wood dark and weathered, the glass above it shattered.
I can almost see the seven-year-old version of myself running across that porch, pigtails flying, laughing at a joke Delia just told, oblivious to the fact that a man with a rosary tattoo was already moving through the shadows toward us.
My heart is pounding against my ribs, a frantic, sickening rhythm that makes it hard to pull air into my lungs.
“No,” I say, my hand trembling as I reach for the door handle. “I’m not sure of anything. That’s why I’m here. I’m looking for a certainty I haven’t felt since the night this place died.”
I step out of the car, and the humid air hits me like a physical blow, thick with the smell of damp earth, rank vegetation, and the sweet, cloying scent of rot.
The house looms over me, a silent, accusing witness to a massacre.
I take a step toward the porch, my legs feeling heavy, like I’m wading through deep water.
I’m not a soldier yet. I’m just a ghost returning to the place where I was made, a survivor looking for the source of her scars.
Ever follows me, staying exactly two steps behind, his shadow merging with mine on the overgrown path.
He doesn’t try to lead me or offer a platitude.
He just exists in my periphery, a steady, dark anchor in a world that’s starting to blur into a fever dream of the past. I reach the bottom step and stop.
My throat closes up, the air suddenly tasting like dust and old copper—the metallic tang of blood that I can never quite scrub out of my memory.
I shouldn’t have come. I should have stayed in the bar with the laughter and the ridiculous talk of piercings and dragon-shifters. I should have stayed in the safety of the present.
But then I think of Delia’s face in the red light of Noir Night—the coldness, the way she looked at me like I was a stranger.
I think of the rosary beads on her wrist, a twin to the mark on Deacon’s skin.
I think of fifteen years in Chicago mourning a sister who was somewhere else entirely, being shaped by people who had already taken everything from us.
The anger returns then, a cold, sharp blade that cuts through the suffocating fear, giving me the strength to move.
I climb the stairs. The wood groans and cracks under my boots, a low, protesting sound that echoes through the empty, waiting trees.
I reach the front door and press my hand against the wood.
It’s cold, despite the oppressive heat of the afternoon.
It feels like the house is exhaling, a long, slow breath of stale air and forgotten, ugly secrets.
“Reva,” Ever says, his voice a low, vibrating warning. He’s right behind me now, the heat of his body a solid, living presence at my back, the only thing keeping me from floating away into the shadows. “We don’t have to go inside. We can turn around right now.”
“I do,” I say, my voice sounding distant, like it’s coming from the bottom of a well. “I need to see the closet, Ever. I need to see the stairs. I need to know if I remember what happened here, or if I only remember what my brain could survive.”
I push the door. It doesn’t move at first, held shut by years of grit, neglect, and the sheer weight of the past, but then it gives with a violent, screeching shudder.
The interior of the house is a cavern of deep shadows and dancing dust motes, the air so thick with the smell of mildew and stagnant time that I have to cover my mouth.
I step over the threshold, and for a second, the world recalibrates with a dizzying snap.
I’m not twenty-two anymore.
I’m seven.
The floorboards are clean. The lights are on. The phone is pressed to my ear, and the operator keeps telling me to stay quiet, sweetheart, help is coming.
Somewhere below memory, the house waits.
And up that staircase and at the end of the hall, so does the closet.