Chapter 13 Reva #2
Snap. The band bites a raw line into my skin. I barely feel it over the rush in my head.
This is weakness. This is what happens when you let them get close, when you let yourself get distracted by mouths and hands and the illusion of safety.
I came here for one thing. I will not lose the thread because I got horny and stupid in a bar office.
Snap—
A knock skims across the door. Soft. Testing. I spin toward it, pulse in my throat.
“Reva?”
Shiloh. His voice comes through the dark low and careful, no lazy drawl, no teasing lilt.
I don’t answer fast enough, and the latch turns.
The door opens a few inches and lightning frames him in the hall—broad shoulders, chest and feet bare, one hand braced on the jamb like he came fast and stopped himself before barreling in.
“Hey,” he says quietly, seeing me. “You okay? I heard you…call out.”
Scream. He heard me scream.
Am I okay? I almost laugh.
“Power’s out,” I manage, breathless and furious at how wrecked I sound.
“I know.” He pushes the door wider and steps inside. “Storm shook the whole house.”
Another flash, another plunge into black. I choke on another scream, this one more of a whimper.
I hear him more than see him for a second. The whisper of his feet on old floorboards. The pause when he takes in the pacing, the sweat, my hand still wrapped around the rubber band cutting into my wrist.
“What happened?”
“Nightmare.” The word scrapes against my throat. “I’m fine.”
Lightning cracks again. His face appears for a heartbeat—jaw tight, eyes on me, not buying it.
“Yank.” Softer now. “You are many things. Fine ain’t one of ’em. At least not the way you’re implying.”
I hate how that almost undoes me. I yank the rubber band again. He notices.
“Hey.” Closer now but still not touching. “Look at me.”
The room goes black before I can.
I hear the click of his phone unlocking, then a small burst of white as he turns on the flashlight. He angles it down at first, then up toward the ceiling so it diffuses across the room instead of hitting me in the face.
The change is immediate.
It’s only a little light, weak and bluish. Nothing like the lamp. It’s still enough to drag me one step back from the edge.
Shiloh sets the phone on the nightstand where the lamp sits dead. The beam throws strange shadows across the carved headboard and paints the room in silver-blue.
“Temporary fix,” he says. “But it’ll do till the power comes back.”
My breathing stutters.
His gaze flicks from the phone to the lamp to me. Understanding moves across his face—not all the way, not the why of it, but the shape. He knows the dark matters.
He doesn’t make me explain. That mercy hits harder than it should, and I blink rapidly.
“Come here,” he murmurs.
I should tell him to leave. I should lock the door after him and ride this out alone, like I always do.
Instead, I take one step, then another, until I’m close enough to feel the heat coming off him.
He reaches slowly, telegraphing every movement. One hand settles at my waist. The other lifts, pauses beside my face, then brushes damp hair off my cheek.
His thumb strokes once beneath my eye. “Breathe for me.”
I hate that my body listens. I hate that it listens easier to him than to me right now.
He eases me backward until the backs of my knees hit the bed, then sits and pulls me down with him so I’m half-turned in his lap, one leg tucked awkwardly beneath me, my palms braced against his shoulders.
The phone light skims over his throat. Over the ink trailing across his collarbone and down his chest and arms.
Ink.
The thought hits like cold water.
The note I was sent said Deacon was seen at Noir. Maybe once. Maybe more.
I still don’t know what these men are tied to, who they answer to, which lines they’ll cross with a smile.
Trust is how you die. My hand lifts before I can stop it.
Shiloh goes still when my fingers lightly skim the ink over his collarbone, testing.
His mouth quirks, faint and gone in a blink. “That your way of sayin’ thank you?”
“I’m checking something.”
He studies me. Doesn’t joke this time. “Checking what?”
I don’t answer.
I trail my fingers over the tattoo at the top of his chest, deliberate as a search warrant.
Script. Blackwork. A wing. Thorned vines curling over muscle.
I follow each line with slow care, pretending the tremor in my hand is leftover panic and not the fact that he’s warm and breathing and watching me like I matter.
His pec jumps lightly under my fingers, and his breathing quickens. Mine does, too.
There are no rosary beads. No cross worked into the lines. No chain of black dots and tiny links burned into my memory from the one mark I’ve hunted so long it haunts me awake.
I keep looking. Keep touching him.
I shift closer for a better angle, using the light from the phone sitting on the bedside table. The beam catches on his skin, throws the ink into relief. More script. Knife. Smoke. Flowers maybe, done dark enough they read like bruises in this light.
Still no rosary. The iron clamp around my ribs loosens by degrees.
Shiloh’s voice drops to a near-whisper. “You, uh…finding what you need?”
I should lie.
Instead I say, “I didn’t find what I was afraid of.” My voice emerges husky, lower than usual.
His expression changes—not confusion exactly, but a sharpened awareness, like he heard the truth inside the part I didn’t say. He could push, but he doesn’t.
“Okay,” he says, and God, I don’t know what to do with a man who can leave it there.
My fingers keep moving, and I tell myself it’s because I’m confirming.
I know that’s a lie, though.
The pads of my fingers trace a line over his collarbone, drift down the center of his chest, map the edges of ink and heat and the rise-and-fall of his breathing. I should pull away once I know he doesn’t carry that mark.
I don’t.
His hand comes up and wraps around my wrist—not stopping me, just holding me there where my palm is spread over his chest.
“Reva.”
It’s my name and a warning and a question all at once. Rain hammers the windows. Thunder rolls close enough to shake the glass.
I look at him. Really look.
There’s no grin. No game. No charm sharpened into a blade. Just a man sitting in my bed in the middle of a storm with sleep in his eyes and concern on his face and my pulse under his thumb.
I kiss him first.
Not hard. Just my mouth brushing his, tentative enough to test if I still want this when it feels like this.
His inhale catches. Then he kisses me back, slow and careful in a way that nearly breaks me more than roughness ever could.
The first time with Shiloh was heat and adrenaline and need. A collision. Bodies and friction and the brief relief of not having to think.
This is something meaner.
Softer.
Complicated enough to be dangerous.
He cups my jaw and deepens the kiss by inches, giving me time to turn away at every stage. I don’t. I open for him with a sound I wish I could take back, and he makes one of his own low in his throat like he’s trying not to scare me with how much he wants this too.
Feeling is worse than lust. Lust is easy to weaponize. Feeling asks for things.
I shift in his lap, and the hard length of him presses hot against my thigh. His fingers flex at my waist.
“Tell me to stop,” he murmurs against my mouth, voice roughening. “I’ll stop.”
I should. I know I should.
The mission. Deacon. Noir. The fact that I still don’t know what game I’m standing in or who’s moving the pieces around me.
But the storm is loud and the room is dark and he put light beside my bed without making me explain why I needed it.
“Don’t stop,” I whisper.
His forehead drops to mine for one long beat, like he’s steadying himself.
Then his mouth slides to my throat.
I shiver hard enough my teeth almost click. His lips move over my pulse, not hurried, not claiming—just there, warm and real and too careful. My fingers go back to his skin, tracing ink because I need somewhere to put my hands and because touching him has turned into its own kind of anchor.
He kisses me like he’s learning me—what makes me gasp. What makes me tense and go still. What makes me shiver. When his hand skims under my sleep shirt and settles at my waist, he pauses.
“Still with me?”
“Yes.”
His thumb strokes once over my side. “Use your words, darlin’.”
I close my eyes. “I want this.”
A low curse leaves him, half relief, half restraint. He kisses me hard then, and the edge comes back—still controlled, still checked, but there. Heat under the tenderness. Hunger under the care.
That I understand better.
The phone light catches his shoulders, the spread of tattoos over his chest, the planes of muscle under skin that’s gone gold-silver in the blue glow.
I touch him again, openly now. No searching, no checking…just learning. His breath roughens under my fingertips.
“Jesus, Yank,” he mutters, and the endearment lands somewhere low and volatile in me.
He shifts us, easing me back onto the mattress. He doesn’t pin me. Doesn’t crowd me with his weight until I tug him closer. Even then, he braces himself on one arm like he’s holding back.
I hate that I notice. I hate that I like it, his care.
His hand slides between my thighs, slow enough that I feel every inch of the movement. He finds heat and damp already there and his eyes lift to mine.
“Storms turn you on, huh?” he asks, quiet and wicked and a little wrecked.
I glare at him, breathless. “Shut up, Lafitte.”
His smile is small and real. “There she is.”
Then he touches me properly and all thought leaves.
Not the frantic rush of the first time. No grabbing, no collision, no need to outrun what either of us might feel if we slowed down long enough to notice.
This is deliberate.
Patient in a way that feels almost cruel because he keeps me right at the edge and watches my face like he’s taking notes. His thumb circles. His fingers stroke. He kisses me through every break in my breathing and swallows the sounds I can’t seem to keep in.