Chapter 16 Nash
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NASH
I wait until the door shuts behind Reva before I move.
The room goes quiet in a way I know too well. Not silence, exactly. The hum of the vents is still there. The old pipes still tick inside the walls. Somewhere down the hall, a chair leg drags and somebody swears under their breath. But her absence changes the air.
I stay behind the desk a moment longer, forearms braced on the metal, and look at the door she just walked through.
Reva McEntire.
I snort. Bullshit name if I ever heard one. If she was going to choose an alias, she should have picked something that sounded a little less like the dowager queen of country music.
When she said Deacon, she didn’t break eye contact.
People lie to me every day. They lie before I ask, while I ask, after I ask. Some cry. Some posture. Some talk too much because they think details make a story stronger. Most of them show me where the seam is to unravel their bullshit if I give them enough rope and enough quiet.
She gave me the name with nothing else and let it sit between us.
No shaking voice. No dramatic pause. No trying to sell me on why she deserved what she wanted.
Just the truth—or the part of it sharp enough to cut with.
I push off the desk and head for the door.
Shiloh is posted in the hall where I left him, shoulder to the wall, one boot heel propped behind him. Ever stands a few feet away, arms folded, face carved out of stone and temper.
Shiloh’s holding a fucking cat. A tiny orange one. I do a double take, then jerk my chin toward the office.
“Inside.”
Neither says a word. They just move. That tells me enough before the conversation starts.
I close the door behind them and stay standing. The chair can wait. If I sit now, it’ll feel like a business meeting. This isn’t that. I can already tell…Reva’s not business, even though Cal put us on her. She’s different.
I lean against the front edge of the desk and let my eyes move from Ever to Shiloh and back to the cat, which I can already tell is going to be a menace.
The three of us have stood in too many rooms like this over the years—church basements, motel bathrooms, safe houses with bad locks and worse wiring, back corridors that smelled like bleach and blood and old smoke. Different walls. Same weight.
Ever beats me to it. “What’d she tell you?”
Straight to the point. No circling. I have another question first, though. I turn my glare on Shiloh.
“What the hell is that creature you’re holding?”
He shrugs, holds the tiny animal up at eye level. It mews voicelessly, its claws poking out and then retracting.
“This…” he says, “is called the Cat Distribution System.”
I look at Ever. “Do I even want to know?”
Ever shakes his head, sucking on the corner of his lip. “Nope.”
“Shit. Fine, whatever. That’s your little red wagon.” I put my hands on my hips. “She told me she’s looking for an assassin. I don’t think Cal knows anything about that, or he would’ve mentioned it.”
Neither of them flinches.
“You already knew she was asking.”
Ever’s jaw ticks. “We knew she was sniffing around. She’d said just enough to be dangerous.”
Shiloh shrugs one shoulder and drops into the chair across from my desk, sprawling on instinct even though his eyes stay sharp. “She tried it with me first. Then with a couple girls upstairs. Thought she was being smooth.”
“She was definitely not being smooth,” Ever says.
Shiloh turns his head and looks at him. “Says the man kissin’ her in a stockroom like he was trying to knock sense into the both of ’em.”
Ever’s stare cuts hard enough to split wood. “You wanna run that back, and this time don’t leave out whatever happened last night?”
The room compresses.
I don’t raise my voice. “You can fight over her in a minute. Listen first.”
They both go still, not because they like being checked, but because they know the tone and what it means.
I look at Shiloh. Then Ever. “She gave me a name.”
That gets them. Shiloh’s mouth loses what was left of the grin. Ever doesn’t move at all, and that’s louder on him than cursing.
“It’s Deacon she wants dead.”
I watch it hit. Recognition runs through both of them, ugly and immediate. Old history has a shape to it. You can see it when it walks into a room.
Shiloh shifts the kitten slightly and scrubs a hand over his scruff. “Well. Shit.”
Ever’s eyes drop once to the floor and come back up. “She said his name to you? We haven’t been able to get it out of her, and we’ve been trying.”
“Plain as day.”
“Did she have any idea who she was saying it to?” Shiloh asks. “Any at all?”
“If she does, she didn’t show it.”
Ever shifts his weight, uncrosses and recrosses his arms, and I catch the tension in his hands before he buries it again. “Shit. You think she’s gonna be a problem?”
“She’s already a problem,” I say. “Question is whose problem she’s going to end up being.”
I let the silence work for me a few seconds, then point at Ever.
“Start talking. Everything you know. No trimming and no holding back. I know a little from Cal, but he doesn’t even know why she’s here.
He just said she told him she had questions she wanted answers, which we all know probably isn’t a good thing. ”
Ever doesn’t like the order. I can see that in the set of his shoulders. He gives it anyway.
“So, the paperwork in her bag doesn’t match the story she’s telling.”
“You searched her things.”
He looks at me without blinking. “Shiloh did. You want me to be sorry?”
I hold his stare another beat. “No, I want details.”
Shiloh tips his head back and looks at the ceiling like he’s already tired of this conversation, but he’s listening to every word.
“She’s telling people she comes from Virginia originally.
It’s not the truth, obviously. We know from Cal and the stuff in her bag that she’s from here.
She didn’t have much in her bag, but there was some state paperwork.
School records. Foster placement—with Cal—from years ago.
And then there’s her name. Reva Leigh Hart. ”
My jaw tightens before I can stop it. Warning bells going off in my head because I know that name. We all do.
Ever clears his throat and picks the thread back up. “Okay. So we know who she is. She travels light. Keeps what matters close and leaves everything else behind. Knife in her boot. Another under the mattress.”
“And so she’s decided to return, after all these years. Decided she needs Deacon Cross dead. I think that picture is pretty clear, even if she doesn’t understand all the parts of it.” I pause. “Why is she sleeping in my house?”
Ever’s expression doesn’t shift. “There were two attempts on her before we took her. It’s not like she’s there to rob or kill us.”
I hold his eyes a little longer than necessary. “That your professional opinion or your she’s-a-pretty-girl one?”
His mouth flattens. Shiloh coughs into his fist to hide a laugh.
I move on before the room turns sideways again. I don’t need an answer. “Anything else?”
Shiloh goes quiet for a moment, rubbing his thumb along the edge of his lower lip while he thinks. I know that look. He’s deciding what belongs to him and what belongs to the room.
When he answers, his voice is lower.
“I don’t know. There’s just something about her. Storm took the power out last night and—” He stops, eyes cutting toward Ever, then back to me. “She had a nightmare.”
I look at him and wait. Because there’s more to the story.
He meets my stare straight on. “The rest is none of your business.”
Something sharp passes through me, and I let it pass without showing on my face. My fingers curl once against the desk edge, then flatten.
He’s drawing a line. Shiloh doesn’t do that often. At least not with me.
I file it away and nod once. “Fine. Keep your confidence.”
Ever looks between us, irritation coming off him in waves. “You’re getting noble now?”
Shiloh cuts him a look without any smile in it. “You can call it whatever helps you sleep.”
Ever pushes off the wall like he’s about to come across the room.
“Enough,” I say.
One word. It holds.
That part has never changed between us. They’ll snarl, they’ll swing, they’ll bleed if they need to. Over stupid shit. When it matters, they stop when I tell them to stop.
It isn’t because I’m bigger. It’s because we learned a long time ago what happens when we fracture at the wrong moment.
The three of us. We were four, once.
Deacon slips into my mind—old and familiar and never welcome.
He was older than us when Mother Superior put us to work.
Old enough to seem grown when the rest of us were still trying to shave and pretending we didn’t shake after our first jobs.
She gave us errands first. Watching. Carrying messages.
Collections. Things a desperate kid can tell himself aren’t really bloodwork if he keeps his eyes half-closed.
That didn’t last. It never does with people like her.
I can still smell the chapel wax in some of those rooms. Incense over bleach. Rosaries hanging over sins too ugly to name in daylight. She liked the theater of holiness over violence. Made people easier to own.
The memory turns my stomach if I look at it too long, so I don’t. I drag my mind back to the men in front of me.
“I’m guessing Deacon’s been around?” I raise an eyebrow.
Shiloh lifts a shoulder and glances down as the creature tucked against his chest gives a small mew. “Off and on. Not since she’s been here, though. Or at least, only in Noir Night.”
We don’t say what that means out loud. We don’t say how contact with Deacon works because it has always worked the same way—sporadic, strategic, and never for no reason.
A call that comes at the wrong hour. A face in the bar for ten minutes and gone before midnight.
Information traded in pieces. Favors no one names as favors.
Our estranged brother in a manner of speaking, he never cut the line completely.
None of us did. We couldn’t.