Chapter 11 Ever
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EVER
The pea stone gravel driveway crunches under the tires like it’s welcoming me home.
Oaks lean over the drive from the other side of the split-rail fence lining the drive, making a tunnel out of shadows. Spanish moss hangs in slow curtains along the way, lending it a gothic sort of charm.
I’ve always thought the place looked like old money—quiet, polished, and completely unbothered by and separate from the world.
It’s the last place I should be bringing trouble.
And yet here she is in the back seat. Here Shiloh is, steering this truck toward the house like I didn’t just spend the last half hour telling myself we shouldn’t do this.
I shouldn’t have put her in the truck.
I shouldn’t have taken her keys.
I shouldn’t have decided—without asking anyone who matters—that she was safer with us than anywhere else in New Orleans.
That’s the problem with decisions made at two in the morning. They feel clean until the sun comes up.
The truck’s headlights wash over white columns and dark shutters, spotlighting a wide porch and rocking chairs that rarely get used. The house doesn’t look like it belongs to men like us.
It belongs to Nash.
Nash Blackwood doesn’t live like we do. Shiloh and me…we were throwaways. Kids in the system with garbage bags for luggage and chips on our shoulders as big as Louisiana. Nash was…is…old money.
Nash lives like the kind of man who was born into something nice and genteel and chose violence anyway. Half the cops in this city are on his payroll, and the other half are too scared to say his name.
He’s the reason Noir exists at all—Noir upstairs, the bar everyone sees. Noir downstairs, the part you don’t talk about unless you want to die young. The private room. The high-roller nights. The hostesses and the curated company. The money that moves too smoothly from one hand to another.
And then there’s the other work. The wet kind of work that takes Nash out of town for days at a time. The work that pays better and bleeds worse.
Noir belongs to Deacon, too, but he’s more of a silent partner these days.
When we cut ties with the Syndicate, we did so as absolutely as we could, which included our visible, public brotherhood with Deacon Cross.
Deacon was our brother, though, in all but the biological sense of the word, and that break was public.
In the ways that truly mattered, he would always be our brother.
In our little triad, Shiloh is the one who smiles and makes the room easy for others to step into. He handles people. He reads them, plays them, disarms them without letting them see the knife.
He’s descended, somewhere along the line, from a pirate, and I don’t think the apple falls far. Shiloh Lafitte is charming, seductive…a bit of a beautiful trap.
I keep the place running. Security. Systems. Eyes. I’m the quiet one. The one who notices things—the man who doesn’t belong, the hand that moves wrong, the door that opens at the wrong time. I clean up the messes before they become problems.
Nash…Nash decides what problems get erased.
Shiloh parks and cuts the engine. His hands stay on the wheel a beat too long. The quiet presses in.
We’ve brought a problem into Nash’s house. A woman who just asked the wrongest of wrong questions in our bar, one that threatens one of our own.
A woman with soft eyes and hard edges, who can’t even see danger until it’s climbing the stairs behind her.
Shiloh gets out and looks at the house, then at the truck, then at the woman in the backseat. He grins at nothing.
“Hell,” he says, “would ya look at us. All domestic and shit, bringing women home.”
I ignore him and start toward the house, expecting Reva to climb out behind me, full of questions I don’t feel like answering.
That’s when I see her.
She’s asleep in the backseat, chin tipped down, hair slipping loose from whatever tie she had it in. Her face is turned toward the window, lashes dark against her cheek. Her mouth is parted slightly like she’s fighting a dream.
Exhaustion makes her look younger. Softer.
It also makes my irritation sharper, because she shouldn’t be asleep in a stranger’s car in the dark. She shouldn’t be so quick to shut her eyes when she doesn’t know who’s around her.
Shiloh reaches the door first, hand already on the handle. “Plumb tuckered out.”
He leans in like he’s about to scoop her up.
“Wait.” The word comes out harder than I intend.
Shiloh pauses, glancing back at me. A knowing huff leaves him. “Yes, sir.”
“I’ll get her. You can get her things,” I tell him.
Shiloh’s mouth twitches. “You sure you don’t want me to—”
“I’ve got her.”
He lifts both hands in surrender and waits to grab for whatever Reva left scattered in the backseat. I open her door carefully.
Cool night air slides in. Reva doesn’t wake. She shifts once, a small flinch, then settles again. I reach in, slide one arm behind her shoulders and the other under her knees, and lift.
She’s lighter than I expect. Not delicate—just…small. Like a bird. Like something built for flight, not for being held.
Her head tips against my shoulder, and the warmth of her sinks through my shirt. For a second, my body goes still in a way it shouldn’t. My muscles tighten like they’re bracing for impact.
She smells like work—sweat, soap, faint citrus from the bar. Under it, something clean and familiar.
My jaw ticks. I carry her up the porch steps and into the house.
Inside, the air is cooler, kept that way by old money and good air conditioning.
The lights are low—small lamps, warm pools on antique tables.
Old hardwood beneath my boots. A rug thick enough to drown sound.
A ginger jar on a sideboard. Oil paintings in heavy frames, faces of dead men watching from their gilded prisons.
It’s too pretty for the things we do.
I turn down the hall toward a guest room—the one closest to my room, but who’s counting? Nash’s house has more bedrooms than we need. More space than makes sense. It was built for family gatherings and quiet legacies.
Now it holds us, monsters needing a cage between attacks.
Shiloh follows behind, arms loaded with Reva’s backpack and whatever else he grabbed of hers. He doesn’t speak. That’s how I know he’s paying attention. He’d be yammering on a mile a minute, otherwise.
The guest room door opens with a soft click.
Toile curtains. Velvet bedding. A lamp with a shade that looks expensive enough for someone’s mama to scold you for touching it. The kind of room you’d expect a woman to sip tea in while pretending the world isn’t ugly outside her doors.
I cross to the bed and lower Reva onto it as carefully as I can manage.
Her eyes flutter open. For one second she looks at me like she doesn’t know where she is. Like she can’t place the shape of the room. Then awareness slides in, sharp and sudden.
Her gaze snaps around. “What—”
“You’re at our house,” I say.
She pushes up onto her elbows, hair falling into her face, breathing shallow. “Your house?”
Shiloh steps into view behind me and drops her backpack near the dresser. The sound makes her flinch.
“You’re safe,” Shiloh says, too gentle.
Reva’s eyes narrow. “I didn’t agree to this.”
“You did,” Shiloh says, then grins when she glares. “Kinda. You said, and I quote, ‘you’re not making me do anything I don’t want to.’”
Reva swings her legs off the bed, preparing to stand. Her knees wobble for a split second—sleep still clinging to her—and she covers it with anger.
I speak before she can get fired up, pointing toward the hallway. “Bathroom’s right outside, in the hall. Your door locks if that makes you feel some kind of way. Get some sleep.”
Her mouth opens like she wants to argue. That stubborn line in her jaw shows up even half-asleep.
Shiloh moves around me, and before I can stop him, he leans down and presses a kiss to her forehead.
“Night, Yank.”
Reva goes still. So do I. It’s not jealousy. Not exactly.
It’s irritation. Heat. Something I don’t have a name for, and I don’t want to come up with one.
I step back, then out of the room, shutting the door with more force than necessary.
Shiloh follows me into the hallway with that same easy grin.
“You’re welcome,” he murmurs.
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“You don’t ask me to do a lot of things.” He leans his shoulder against the wall, unbothered. “You carried her in like she weighs nothin’. Didn’t know you had that in you, big guy.”
I stare at him until his grin fades a notch. I rub a hand over the back of my neck. My skin feels too tight.
“She’s not stayin’ here long,” I say.
Shiloh’s smile returns, faint and irritating. “Sure.”
I turn away before I say something I can’t take back. Because the truth is simple, and I don’t like simple truths. I should have sent her packing.
And yet…
I didn’t.
* * *
The next time I see her, it’s late morning.
Sunlight warms the kitchen, turning it bright and honest—walnut cabinets, old brass fixtures, a wide farmhouse table that looks like it’s seen decades of breakfasts that didn’t involve blood or anyone’s blood money, for that matter.
I sit at the table, barefoot, hair mussed, a mug of chicory coffee in my hand. A paper bag is spread before me on the table, powdered sugar dusted across it like snow.
Beignets.
I ran out earlier this morning to a café ten miles out to get them. God knows neither one of us can cook.
I sit with my coffee and donuts and revel in the quiet. This is one of my favorite times of the week, the one time I allow myself a treat.
Reva appears in the doorway a minute later, led by Shiloh’s hand at the small of her back. Her hair is still messy. A hoodie hangs off one shoulder. She looks faintly shell-shocked.
She scans the room with unconcealed curiosity, then the windows, then the hall behind her.
I grunt a ‘morning,’ swallowing around a bite.
Reva’s voice is scratchy. “It’s…late.”
“Welcome to our hours,” Shiloh replies.
She glares at him. Then she looks at me. “You.”
I don’t respond.