16. Reva
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
REVA
The carriage house is unlocked.
That probably says something about either the arrogance or the paranoia of the men who live here. Maybe both. The Blackwood property has gates, cameras, armed men, and enough implied violence baked into the landscaping that a locked door on an outbuilding would probably be redundant.
Still, the latch gives under my hand, and I step inside before I can talk myself out of it.
The morning is barely morning yet. Thin gray light slips through the high windows and cuts across the mats in pale strips.
The place is quiet, and I try to take a moment to breathe in the strange peace that all the exposed beams, brick walls, black rubber flooring, and equipment generates.
Its kind of brutal neatness seems to say everything here has a purpose, and there’s…
calm to be found in that. Heavy bags hang from steel mounts.
Free weights line one wall. A bench sits near the back.
There are racks of things I recognize and more things I don’t.
But there’s no peace this morning.
There’s also no Ever. No Shiloh. No Nash.
That’s good. I need somewhere to put this anger before it turns around and eats me alive.
It’s been building since Noir Night. Since Delia’s face appeared in front of me and split my life into before and after all over again.
Then Cal, with his careful voice and measured lies.
Then the house, the closet, the empty walls, the proof that wasn’t proof at all.
Then Deacon in the kitchen, taking up space like a shadow that all of a sudden learned how to breathe.
You were hidden. There’s a difference.
I hate him for saying it.
I hate him more because some part of me understands.
That part can go straight to hell.
I cross the mats and grab a pair of boxing gloves from the top of a wooden crate near the heavy bag. Someone left them there instead of putting them away. They’re black, cracked along the seams, and heavier than I expect. I slide one on, then the other.
Way too big.
My fingers don’t sit right. My wrists feel loose. I make a fist inside the glove and hate how clumsy it feels. Hate how wrong. Hate that even here, even trying to hit a stupid bag in an empty building, I don’t know what I’m doing.
I yank one glove off with my teeth, then the other, and throw them onto the mat.
For one second, I’m back in Cal’s living room in Chicago, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a bowl of popcorn between us while he watches two men beat the hell out of each other on television. He used to talk through the matches like they were lessons.
Hands up, kid.
Watch his feet.
Power starts in the hips.
Wrap your hands first unless you want to break something you need.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Even this belongs to him.
Fuck that noise.
I open my eyes and start searching shelves, drawers, bins. It takes me three tries to find athletic tape in a metal cabinet by the sink. The roll is white and half-used. I take it back to the mats and sit down because my hands are already doing something stupid and shaky.
I’ve seen this done a hundred times. That doesn’t mean I know how to do it.
I wedge the end of the tape against my wrist with my thumb and wind it around, too loose at first, then too tight. I peel it back, try again, loop it over my knuckles, around my palm, between my fingers. The result is ugly. Lumpy. Probably wrong in six different ways.
It’s fine. Ugly and wrong are still better than bare. I just need to hit something.
I wrap the other hand, worse this time because I suck left-handed, then shove both hands back into the gloves. They fit better with the tape filling the empty space. Still too big. Still not mine.
But good enough to throw a punch.
I stand in front of the heavy bag, hanging there like an accusation.
Then I plant my feet, and I hit it. The glove lands with a dull, disappointing thud. The bag barely moves.
I hit it again. Same thing.
A small, stupid sound crawls out of my throat. Not a sob. Not yet. Something closer to a laugh.
I swing harder.
My shoulder jolts. Pain shoots up my arm. The bag rocks half an inch and settles back into place, patient and smug.
“Asshole,” I mutter.
I hit it again. This time, I see Delia.
Not my Delia. Not the girl who made bubble beards with me in a clawfoot tub. Not the sister who stole marshmallows from my cereal and blamed ghosts.
The woman in Noir Night. Cold eyes. Rosary tattoo. The look she gave me when she said my name like it hurt her mouth.
I punch her face so hard my glove slides sideways off the bag. The bag barely shifts.
I punch again.
Cal replaces her.
Cal, with his careful silences and his steady hands and the life he built for me out of locked doors and edited truths. Cal teaching me how to change a tire. Cal sitting beside my hospital bed after a panic attack when I was fourteen. Cal knowing my sister was alive.
I hit him hard enough that pain snaps through my wrist.
“Damn it.”
I shake out my hand inside the glove and keep going.
The next face is the man with the rosary.
Not Deacon exactly. Not anymore. That would be easier, and apparently the universe has decided I do not get easy. The rosary becomes a flash of ink. A hallway. A shadow. A truth that keeps moving every time I get close enough to grab it.
I hit the bag until my breath starts scraping at the walls of my throat.
Then Deacon is there, anyway. His mouth on mine. His hand at my face. His voice telling me I have been trying for fifteen years.
Mine.
I punch him, too.
I punch the letters. Ash. Every page I answered without knowing who was on the other end. Every time I told a stranger something I couldn’t say to Cal because strangers were safer than fathers.
The bag moves this time.
Barely.
It makes me furious.
I step in and swing again, too wide, too wild. My body is all anger and no technique. Cal would tell me to stop throwing from the shoulder. Ever would tell me to set my feet. Shiloh would make some irritatingly useful observation about leverage.
None of them are here, so I do it all wrong. I do it wrong with everything I have.
Punch.
Punch.
Punch.
The gloves slip on my hands. Sweat runs down the back of my neck. My lungs burn. The bag thuds and sways and comes back at me every time, because that is what everything in my life does. It absorbs what I give it and returns.
I kick it.
The first kick is garbage. My shin clips the bottom edge, and I almost fall on my ass.
That makes me angrier.
I kick again.
Better.
Again.
The impact rattles up my leg. I welcome it. Pain is honest. Pain does not tell you it loves you while deciding which parts of the truth you’re allowed to keep.
I kick until my hip aches. I hit until my arms shake.
Faces come faster now. Delia. Cal. Deacon. The house. The closet. The blank-faced woman who gave the order. The woman who still wants the job finished. The dead. The living. Me at seven. Me at twenty-two. Me walking into New Orleans thinking revenge would have one name and one throat.
I hit until the bag blurs. At some point, the sounds change.
The thud of the gloves on leather keeps coming, but something else threads through it. A low, broken noise. Rough. Animal. Too close to my own chest.
I don’t stop. If I stop, I have to hear it. If I hear it, I have to know it’s me.
A low whistle sounds behind me.
That is the only warning I get.
Arms come around my body, one across my chest, one around my waist, pulling me back before my next punch lands. I jerk against them on instinct. My elbow drives back, but the angle is wrong, and the body behind me is solid enough to take it without moving.
Panic flares white. For half a second, I am trapped. My breath vanishes.
Then his voice reaches me.
“Reva.”
Ever. The name drops through the noise in my head like a stone through water.
I still fight him.
Not well. Not on purpose. My body hasn’t received the update that this is safe.
I twist, kick, try to shove an elbow into ribs, but Ever holds me through it.
He doesn’t squeeze. He does not force me to be still.
He just holds me with terrifying patience, giving me no room to hurt myself and no reason to believe he will hurt me.
“Reva,” he says again, lower this time. “I’ve got you.”
I try to answer. Nothing comes out. No, that’s not true.
Something comes out.
A sound I don’t recognize. A torn, keening noise that scrapes up from somewhere below language. It fills the carriage house, ugly and raw, bouncing off the brick and beams until there is nowhere for it to hide.
My knees give, and Ever goes down with me.
He takes the fall, turning us so we hit the mat together instead of me crashing alone. I end up half in his lap, half folded into myself, boxing gloves trapped uselessly between our bodies. The heavy bag sways in front of us like a witness who knows better than to speak.
Ever’s arms stay around me.
One hand comes to the back of my head. His fingers slide into my sweat-damp hair, smoothing it away from my face with slow, steady passes.
I hate that it helps.
I hate that I need it.
I hate that the sound keeps coming out of me anyway.
He murmurs against my temple. I can’t make out the words at first. They’re too low, too even, and my own breathing is wrecked. It takes a while for the room to come back. It does so in pieces.
The mats under my knees. The ache in my shoulders. The gloves on my hands.
Ever’s chest at my back. His voice.
“Breathe first. Fight later.”
I shake my head. He keeps smoothing my hair.
“Plenty of time to be angry.”
Another broken sound catches in my throat.
“I can’t,” I finally manage.
“You are.”
“No.” I try to drag in air, but it stutters. “I can’t keep doing this. Every time I get one answer, it makes three more places bleed.”
His hold tightens by a fraction. A month earlier I’d have felt trapped, but it’s an anchor now. Not a cage.
“Then bleed here.”
I go still.
He says it like it’s simple. Like he doesn’t understand that people spend their entire lives learning how not to do that.
They bleed in bathrooms with the shower running.
In ambulances after the patient is handed off.
In stairwells. In parked cars. In the half second before someone asks if you’re okay, and you lie so fast it sounds rehearsed.
He wants me to bleed here. With him.
The sound breaks out of me again, and I fold.
Ever rocks me.
He puts his arms around me and rocks, just a small, steady movement back and forth while I come apart in a way I have refused to let myself do since I was old enough to understand that grief could become its own entity if I allowed it.
He doesn’t tell me it’s okay. He doesn’t tell me to calm down. He doesn’t ask for the why behind my tears while I’m still choking on them.
He simply holds me until the keening turns into sobs, until the sobs turn into shaking, until the shaking becomes exhaustion heavy enough that I can feel each muscle surrender.
My cheek ends up against his shirt. My legs are folded awkwardly. One of the gloves presses into my stomach. I should move.
I don’t.
Ever’s hand moves over my hair one more time, then rests at the nape of my neck.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I snort. It is not a ladylike sound. Considering the morning I’ve had, though, it’s the best I can offer. I shake my head against his chest.
His mouth brushes my hair, light enough that I could pretend it didn’t happen if either of us were cowards.
We are many things. We’re not cowards.
“What do you want?” he asks.
I lift my head.
It takes effort. My neck feels loose, my eyes swollen, my whole body wrung out. Ever looks down at me, dark eyes steady and too gentle for a man who can break bones as efficiently as breathing.
The unfinished thing from last night sits between us.
I should apologize. Explain. Deflect. Make a joke sharp enough to cut the moment into smaller pieces.
I am too tired for the usual exit routes, though.
“I want you to kiss me.”
Ever’s expression changes. His gaze drops to my mouth, then lifts back to my eyes. “Now?”
I almost laugh. “No, Ever. I thought we’d schedule it for a more convenient trauma spiral.”
His thumb moves once at the back of my neck. He does not rush. That is the first thing that almost undoes me.
Ever lowers his mouth to mine like he has all the time in the world, like the kiss is not a thing he has been owed or denied or promised, but something we are choosing together in the wreckage.
His lips touch mine softly.
Once.
Then again.
A question.
I answer by leaning in.
His hand tightens at the back of my neck, and the kiss deepens. Slowly at first, then with a heat that rolls through me and changes the shape of this shitty morning. He tastes like coffee and restraint. His mouth is firm, deliberate, patient until I make a small sound against him.
Then patience slips.
He pulls me closer, one arm banding around my waist, and kisses me like the quiet ones always do when the leash finally snaps. Deep. Hungry. Still controlled, but only because Ever’s control is built from steel and bad intentions.
My gloves thump uselessly against his chest. I try to touch him and can’t.
Goddammit…of all the things…
That should not be funny. It is, though.
A laugh breaks into the kiss, shaky and wet and ridiculous. Ever pulls back half an inch, breathing against my mouth.
“What?”
I look down at the oversized gloves between us, then back up at him.
“Ever.”
His eyes search mine.
“I’m gonna need you to take these gloves off my hands so I can touch you now.”