Chapter 17 Reva
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
REVA
The meeting with Nash was a waste of my time. He didn’t even flinch when I said Deacon’s name.
He didn’t ask who. He didn’t ask why. He didn’t give me anything I could grab and shake loose except the smallest hitch in his breathing, so slight I might’ve missed it if I hadn’t been studying him as closely as I was.
Then he broke eye contact, rapped his knuckles on the stainless steel desk, and said, “I can’t help you.”
The words landed flat. Too flat.
Anger caught fast, bright and hot. “Can’t or won’t?”
He didn’t bother answering. It was dismissal by posture. By silence. By the noiseless scrape of his thumb along the surface of the desk as if the conversation was over before it had even begun.
My palms hit the desk before I could stop myself, metal ringing under the impact. That got a reaction.
Not much—but enough. His gaze lifted, slow and direct, and the room tightened around me. The air changed. His shoulders didn’t move, his face barely shifted, but the stillness in him went from patient to dangerous.
“Look,” I said, voice tight, “I work in your bar. I live in your house. If there’s a threat here—if he’s a threat—then that counts for something.”
His eyes darkened, giving meaning to the phrase I’d seen in romance novels all of a sudden.
I was fascinated by the shift, my attention caught on how the light seemed to disappear from his irises.
“Unless you want a firsthand lesson in what happens to little brats in my bar, you’re dismissed, Reva. ”
I swallowed back the heat that surged in my veins at his reply. Final answer. Last warning.
Fuck him. Fuck that.
I shoved off the desk, my lungs burning and my skin too hot under my clothes. Up close, he was worse—more compelling, more infuriating. The lines at the corners of his eyes. The full lower lip under the scruff that was more of a neatly trimmed beard. The clean male scent of him.
My body was picking a hell of a time to notice. I hated that almost as much as I hated him.
I backed toward the door before I said something that got me fired for real. “Fine,” I snapped. “Enjoy your little man cave.”
His mouth moved at one corner—barely there, gone before I could decide if it was annoyance or amusement.
I fled.
* * *
The rest of my shift breaks apart in my hands.
The trays sit too heavy on one arm. There are too many tables, too many people wanting another round. Jean Paul’s barking for limes; Sonny’s asking if I’m sick because my resting bitch face looks “meaner than usual.”
The Friday night noise swells bigger and louder while my head feels packed with static.
I work on fumes and spite.
Ever avoids me so thoroughly it becomes its own statement. He refuses eye contact unless he absolutely has to make it. Doesn’t linger in my orbit. Doesn’t give any sign at all that he just kissed me in a stockroom and then left me to choke on what it might mean.
Nothing, I guess.
Shiloh is worse in a different way. He watches me.
Not enough to make a scene. Just enough that I catch it in flashes—his gaze snagging on me when I pass, the tension in his mouth when I drift too close to the back hall, the way he goes quiet if somebody says something that lands too close to a bruise I’m still trying to hide.
It scrapes every nerve I’ve got left.
Every once in a while my mind jumps sideways—to the kitten. To that little white cross between its eyes. To the way it climbed my boot like it already knew me.
Shiloh took him before I walked into Nash’s office. He said he’d take care of him and not to worry, but I can’t help it—I’m worrying.
God only knows what they’re doing with him.
Are they going to let me keep him? If they’re not…I won’t go back. I’ll find somewhere else. Somewhere we’re both welcome, somewhere I can do what I want to do, what I need to do.
By the time I clock out, I’m done. Just…done. I’ve come all the way here, abandoned everything I had, for nothing. No answers. No help. No…killer…from my list.
That’s fine. If no one’s willing to help me, I’ll do what I should’ve done from the start. I’ll find Deacon myself, and I’ll end him myself.
The thought settles into me, like a blade sliding home where it belongs.
* * *
The house is dark when I pull in. Shiloh’s truck is absent, along with Ever’s bike, which I’ve caught glimpses of him riding a time or two. No light spills from between the curtains that cover any of the front windows.
There’s just the quiet and the weight of the place, all white columns and old-money bones and too many rooms.
I hesitate for a second as I cross the threshold, listening.
No tiny mews. No scratching. Which means either the guys haven’t gotten back with him yet or the kitten’s asleep…or the guys hid him somewhere so he wouldn’t wreck the house.
Or worse—he’s with Nash. The idea of Nash Blackwood holding a kitten is so absurd I almost laugh.
I go straight to my room, yank my duffel from the closet, and start throwing things in with both hands. If I’m leaving, I need everything I came with. Cash. My knife. Papers. Clothes. Charger. Keys.
I’ll have to wait until they get home to take my cat, but I’ll at least be ready to go when they get here.
I pack like an angry teenager about to run away from home. Jeans shoved in crooked. Shirts balled tight. Toiletries scooped by the handful. The old paperwork catches in my fingers and I freeze with it halfway to the bag, breath jammed in my throat.
Louisiana. My placement papers. A name I haven’t answered to in years, my real one—Reva Leigh Hart.
I wasn’t in the system long—maybe a month—just long enough to know it wasn’t anything I wanted to be a part of.
Cal came and the state gave him guardianship of me pretty fast, which was interesting in retrospect, considering he was a young-ish single man and I was a little girl.
I guess the fact that he’d worked for my parents—their chauffeur or security guard or something like that, he said—acted in his favor. That, and I had no other family.
I cram it all down, zip the bag, and stand there shaking.
The room feels too small. Too warm. My skin still smells like fryer oil and whiskey and sweat from the shift. I need the heat off me before I climb out of my skin. I need one clean second to think before I drive. To pause, maybe long enough for someone to come home so I can steal my kitten.
I could take a shower, but the pool is a better option. I’ll see them arrive home.
Only problem—I don’t have a swimsuit.
I legit don’t care at this point. Let them see me in my undies.
I grab a bath towel and head down to the pool, duffel in hand.
The pool lights throw blue across the patio, the water lit from below like something out of a sci-fi movie. Off to the side, the hot tub hums with a low mechanical throb, steam lifting into the heavy night. The air wraps around me hot and wet, thick enough to breathe.
I drop the towel and duffel by a chair, strip down to my bra and underwear, and I dive in.
Cool water closes over my head, and the whole world shuts up.
No Nash.
No Ever.
No Shiloh.
No Deacon.
No tiny orange kitten with a cross on his forehead staring at me like a message I’m supposed to understand.
Just pressure and silence and the burn in my lungs. One I can’t hide.
Under the safety and security of the water, I scream. I scream as loud and as long as I can with the water closing in around me, waiting to stake its claim.
Once I’m finally out of air, I surface and slick my hair back so that I’m treading water in the deep end while my pulse pounds out the last of the bar noise.
It helps. A little. The anger doesn’t leave. It just sinks lower and hotter, becomes an emotion harder to name.
It might be hurt, but I’ll never say that out loud. Instead I drift toward the edge and hook my arms over the tile.
My duffel sits three feet away under the towel, zipper closed, my flipflops lined up beneath it. I’m ready to go as soon as I get out and get dried off.
Good.
Ready to go…but I have to get the kitten first.
The thought slips in before I can stop it. Leaving a tiny animal in a house full of morally questionable men would be worse than abandoning my plan altogether.
I stare at my bag and start building a plan that gets uglier by the second.
Drive. Find somewhere to stay. Track Deacon. (How, though? I’ll figure it out later.) Get close.
Finish it.
No middleman. No asking permission. No more men telling me to wait, to stop, to forgive, to forget what happened to me.
The sliding door opens across the patio. I close my eyes once before looking up.
Fuck my life.
“We need to talk.”
Nash’s voice carries, roughened by the hour and the heat.
“Took your sweet time getting here. Where’s my cat?”
He steps outside in dark jeans and a black shirt, sleeves shoved up, feet and forearms bare. He isn’t dressed for bed. Men like Nash probably actually don’t sleep.
His gaze lands on the chair first. On the duffel. Then on me. The sequence tightens something in my stomach.
“He’s fine. Inside asleep with one of the others by now, I imagine.”
“He’s my cat,” I say, turning to brace my forearms on the edge, “he should be sleeping with me.”
“And yet here you are. You brought your bag to the pool, so it doesn’t look like you plan on sleeping.”
It isn’t a question.
I glance at the chair and then back at him. “Observant.”
“You were planning to leave tonight.”
Again, not a question.
I give him a bright, mean little smile. “Maybe I was going to take the advice I was given. Leave before it’s too late.”
Something shifts in his face at the wording. Small. Quick. There and gone.
“Ever said that to you.”
I tilt my head. “You all compare notes now?”
“We survive by comparing notes.”
The answer digs in between my ribs and twists. They have this brotherhood, this sanctity of loyalty that I’ll never be a part of. I both admire that and feel cut by it.