11. Nash
CHAPTER ELEVEN
NASH
Ever does not apologize.
That’s the problem with men who believe they’re right. They don’t raise their voices. They don’t posture. They stand in front of you with the blood of consequences still warm in their veins and act as if their calm is the same thing as innocence.
He stands across from me in my study, his arms loose at his sides, face unreadable. I want to put my fist through it.
“You took her back there,” I say.
“Yes.”
My hand tightens around the edge of the desk. The old wood does not crack, which is a pity. Something in this room should.
“You took her to the house where her family was slaughtered and didn’t think to tell me.”
“She needed to see it.”
“She needs to stay alive.”
“She is alive.”
The answer comes too fast. My eyes narrow.
Ever sees it, because Ever fucking sees everything. Breath, pulse, weight shift, weapon angle. He has since he was a skinny little kid. He’s built an entire life out of watching—people, ordinary, everyday moments, little things that become disasters.
Which just makes what he did worse, not better.
“You think giving her what she wants is the same thing as keeping her breathing?” I ask.
His jaw flexes, the tiniest bit. Finally, a crack.
“She was coming apart,” he says. “Little by little. You saw her.”
“Yes. I saw her.” My voice drops. “I saw her covered in dust from a grave. I saw her come through my front door with her face wrecked and her hands shaking. I saw her look at me like she had crawled out of a hole I should have burned to the ground fifteen years ago.”
He doesn’t move. That poker-faced restraint will be the death of him. Maybe tonight, if he keeps looking at me like that.
“She needed the truth under her feet,” he says.
“She needed protection!”
“She needed both.”
“No.” I step around the desk. “She needed one of us to remember there are people in this city who would gut her just to see what color she bleeds.”
Ever’s eyes sharpen. Good. Let him feel the truth of it.
Let him stand there and picture Reva in that rotting house with no perimeter, no plan, no warning, no damn idea how many ghosts in New Orleans still have teeth.
“She was with me,” he says.
“And if that wasn’t enough?”
Silence, and I see something move behind his eyes. I won’t call it doubt—I know him too well for that. Ever does not give doubt much room to breathe. But something small and dark and useful enough for me to twist.
I take hold of it.
“If it had gone wrong,” I say, “you would have had to bury her beside the house you decided she needed to see.”
His mouth tightens. I am not being fair. I don’t care. There is a point past fear where a man stops being fair, and I hit it sometime between finding out she had left this house and imagining every possible way she might not return to it.
“She asked me,” Ever says.
“She is twenty-two and traumatized.”
“She is not a child.”
“No,” I snap. “She is a woman with fifteen years of lies under her skin and a target painted on her back.”
Ever takes one step closer. “We can’t just keep her locked up here forever,” he says. “She’s not yours to keep in a glass house.”
He aims for the tenderest place and, damn him, finds it.
“She is mine to keep alive.”
“Then fucking do it without making her a prisoner.”
The room goes very still. A lesser man would step back. Ever is not a lesser man. That is why I trust him with her. It’s also why I want to break his jaw.
The contradiction sits between us, ugly and familiar.
From above, faint movement carries through the old bones of the house. Floorboards. A door. She’s moving around up there. My attention snaps toward the ceiling before I can stop it, and Ever notices, his gaze following mine.
His expression changes, the fight draining out of him. “She’s trying, Nash.”
My throat works around something I don’t want to name. “I know.”
“She went back there because she needed to know if any part of her own mind could still be trusted.”
“I know that.”
“She came out.”
I look at him.
Ever’s voice lowers. “That matters.”
It does. God help me, it does. But so does the fact that she might not have. I turn away before I do something that cannot be taken back.
“You need to go somewhere.”
Ever doesn’t answer immediately. For one dangerous second, I think he’s going to refuse. Then his boots move against the floor. He passes me, shoulders tight, violence locked into every inch of him and held there by will alone.
At the doorway, he stops. “I’d do it again,” he says.
I look over my shoulder. His face is blank, but his eyes are hot. He strides across the foyer. The front door opens. Slams.
I stand in the doorway of my study with my shirt sleeves rolled up and my temper held in both fists.
I hear her before I see her. Soft steps at the top of the stairs. Careful, but not hesitant. Reva does not know how to do hesitant for long. Even when she is afraid, she gets angry fast enough to make fear chase her.
She appears at the landing in black leggings and one of Shiloh’s oversized hoodies.
The thing swallows her whole, sleeves hanging over her hands, dark fabric brushing mid-thigh. Her hair is damp. Her face is clean, scrubbed raw as though she’s tried to wash off more than dirt.
The hoodie irritates me for reasons that have nothing to do with Shiloh.
Well. Not entirely nothing.
But mostly, it is the reminder that she came to New Orleans with a duffel bag and a death wish, and we have had her in this house for God knows how many days while she rotates through the same few pieces of clothing and whatever she steals from us. That should have been handled already.
Tomorrow, it will be. If she lets me send someone, fine. If not, I will take her myself and terrify a boutique into closing for the afternoon.
Her gaze drops to the front door, then to me.
She comes down the stairs one step at a time, and I hate every bruise the day has left on her. Not the visible ones. There are none of those. The damage is elsewhere, behind her eyes, in the way she holds herself like something inside her is still crouched in that closet.
“Where’d Ever go?” she asks.
“Gone,” I say. My voice isn’t loud. I get quiet when I get angry.
She takes another step down. Then another. “Don’t be angry at Ever, Nash. I needed to see the house. I needed to know that my memories were real.”
The fact that she thinks I can be directed out of my anger right now is kind of cute. Ever knew better. He knew the best course of action was to just walk away for a while.
I watch her descend, my gaze tracking every movement. Her bare throat above Shiloh’s hoodie. The pulse fluttering there. The way her hand trails along the banister even though she pretends she does not need it.
“You needed to see a grave,” I say. “You needed to walk through a crime scene the Syndicate already erased once. Do you have any idea how much of a target you were, sitting in that house? Do you think I’m keeping you here because I like the company, Reva?”
She rolls her eyes. “Of course you like my company. Duh.”
I don’t take the bait, and she huffs. She reaches the bottom of the stairs and stops five feet away. Not close enough and entirely too close for my peace of mind.
“I think you’re keeping me here because you’re a control freak who can’t handle the fact that I’m not one of your soldiers. I’m not Shiloh, and I’m definitely not Ever. You don’t get to decide where I go or what I look at.”
The words hit where they are meant to, and I half-smile despite myself.
Good girl. Still standing. Still swinging. Still determined to make me insane.
“In this house, I decide everything,” I growl, stepping toward her. “I decide who breathes and who bleeds. And right now, I’ve decided that you’re done playing tourist in your own trauma. You want to be a weapon? Kill people? Fine. But weapons don’t get to wander off the firing range.”
“I’m not a weapon yet.” Her anger rises to meet mine, bright and reckless. “Right now, I’m just a girl who was lied to for half her life. And if you think making me a prisoner in this house is going to make me more compliant, you’ve got the wrong girl, Nash.”
I close the distance before I can think better of it.
My hand catches the front of Shiloh’s hoodie. I don’t yank. I just hold her there, my knuckles brushing the hollow of her throat. I feel her breath catch. Feel her pulse hammer against the back of my fingers.
Her eyes stay on mine, unflinching. No surrender from her, of course not. That would be too easy.
“So fucking stubborn,” I whisper. “Stubborn, impulsive, and completely oblivious to the shadow you’re standing in. You think the Hart house was scary? That was a memory. The people coming for you now are very, very real. And they won’t stop at the closet door.”
Something moves across her face.
Fear.
Then anger comes, fast enough to eclipse it.
“Then let them come,” she says, voice trembling and still somehow full of teeth. “I’m tired of waiting for them. I’m tired of you all treating me like I’m made of glass. If I’m going to die, I’d rather do it in the open than hiding behind all of you.”
My jaw locks. There are sentences a man hears and knows they will stay with him. That’s one of them.
If I’m going to die.
She says it like death’s a possibility she has already made peace with, and something old and violent inside me answers.
No. I don’t fucking think so.
I let go of her hoodie and take her arm in a firm grip. She stumbles half a step to keep up when I turn.
“Where are we going?” she demands. “Nash, let go of me.”
“My room.” My voice is low enough to sound calm. It is not. “We’re going to have a talk about consequences, Reva. And you’re going to listen…to every single word.”
My room is on the ground level, tucked past the study and away from the places where everyone else drifts through the house. It is a space built for order. Dark wood. Charcoal gray linens. Bourbon. Leather. Control.
Usually. Tonight, control feels like a rumor someone started about me.