Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
REVA
The problem with a cage is that you don’t know how strong the bars are until you hit them.
Mornings should feel normal.
Coffee in the kitchen, sunlight through the windows. A quiet house with polished floors and too many doors.
Instead, everything feels staged. Domestic as camouflage to hide the monsters where they live.
Ever made coffee. I know because I can smell it all the way down the hall—dark roast and chicory and something rich enough to make my mouth water in spite of myself.
My body does not care how good the coffee smells.
I’m too aware of footsteps. Doors. Breathing. The fact that I didn’t choose this roof, no matter how politely Nash framed it.
The ironic thing is, I might have, if I’d had a choice. It’s pretty here. Peaceful.
I came to New Orleans on purpose. I came with a name and a plan and just enough nerve to get me here. I thought if I found the right place and pushed hard enough, I’d get to Deacon and finish what I came to do.
Instead, I’ve got three men standing between me and the truth, acting like they’re doing me a favor by getting in my way.
I didn’t ask for any of this.
Speaking of Ever.
I crack the door of the little sunroom I hid myself away in and peek out.
He’s there in the kitchen, half-turned toward the coffee pot. He’s been watching me all morning. The way his shoulders angle when he hears the hinge move tells me he’s been listening out for my every move..
I shut the door again a little too fast, my heart hammering harder for the effort.
I tucked myself away in the sunroom, where Shiloh had apparently left the kitten this morning, with a cup of coffee to sulk in private. The continual expectation for me to give and reveal and do as they wished, with nothing in return, was like a rock in my shoe. Irritating.
The kitten—I need to come up with a name for him—is crawling all over me, his sharp little claws swatting at my hair one moment and his gaze intently focused on my eyelashes the next, until I worry he’s going to leap at them.
I stick a finger out for him to bat at, and he accepts it gracelessly, standing on his hind legs and then falling backwards.
In spite of my irritation with the men, I laugh. Is this what my life has turned into now—basically hiding away from my prison guards? I can’t breathe, blink, use the bathroom, or even masturbate without one of them seeing it and deciding whether I’m allowed?
No.
Absolutely not.
I set the kitten—he looks like a Homer, I think—down, grab the doorknob, yank the door open, and head straight for the front of the house before I can overthink myself into staying put. I will do as I want, Nash’s rules be damned.
“I’m going for a walk,” I call out.
Announcing. Not asking.
Something small and stupid and mine.
If they’ve caged me, I at least want to know how far the bars go. It’s morning. I’m walking, not breaking into Fort Knox. Maybe I want air. Maybe I want to prove I can still leave a room without permission.
Maybe I want to know if they took more than my keys when I wasn’t looking.
I don’t look back when I step out the front door.
The hill drops from the porch to the road in a long green slope. The morning sun is already bright enough to sting, gold on the grass, heavy and shimmering with heat and humidity.
I make it halfway down the lawn to the street before I feel it. That awareness tickling my shoulder blades.
I turn my head sharp.
Ever stands near the porch, squinting into the light, one hand braced on the column like he’s got all day. Sun catches on his tattoos, turning the dark ink alive against his skin. He looks carved out of the same heat he’s standing in.
My shadow. Again.
“Stop following me,” I snap, loud enough for him to hear.
“Stop acting like you don’t know you’re gonna be followed.”
I laugh at him because if I don’t I might scream. “You didn’t even let me get to the road.”
“In the time it would take you to get from the door to the road,” he says, “you could be dead.”
The words hit hard enough to make me want to slap him.
I spin back around and keep walking.
The neighborhood isn’t really a neighborhood.
Not the way a neighborhood is in cities like Chicago.
Too much land between houses—I can’t even see the next one.
Too much money built into privacy. Trees crowding the edges.
Marsh not far off, if the air is any indication—salt and rot and wet earth under the heat.
I hear Ever behind me before I make it much further. He’s not close, but he’s not trying to hide, either.
Fine. If he wants to follow me, he can follow me.
“Don’t,” I call over my shoulder anyway and veer off toward the tree line.
“Damnit, Reva, hold up. I’m not wearing shoes.”
“That’s your sign. Go home, Ever.”
I walk faster. Petty? Yes.
Reckless? Also yes.
At this point I’m running on anger and embarrassment and too little sleep to care about anything except making my position clear. He asked me if anyone would miss me if I disappeared. Then he caught my wrist and looked at me like he could read every ugly thing I didn’t say.
So yes, I walk straight into the woods because I want one damn place where nobody is staring at me while I fall apart.
Shade closes over me in strips, sunlight breaking through thin oak branches and hanging moss. The ground goes soft in patches, roots lifting under leaves, scrub palmettos crowding the narrow spaces between trunks.
I keep moving.
My boots hit hard because I want them to.
I am not tactical. I am not stealthy. I am pissed off and trying to outrun the feeling of being managed.
For the first minute or two I can still hear him behind me, cursing as he steps on something—a rock or a branch.
Then I can’t.
I don’t notice right away.
I’m too busy replaying the last twenty-four hours and getting angrier every time my brain lands on a different man. Nash and his rules. Ever and his hands and his warnings. Shiloh and the gentleness in his voice and the way that somehow makes him more dangerous, not less.
They know about Deacon, and the fact that I want him dead.
So what exactly am I to them? A problem? A witness? A stray they’ve decided to collar until they can have me put down?
A thought hits like a spark in dry grass. Maybe they aren’t protecting me from him. Maybe they’re protecting him from me.
I break into a jog before I mean to.
Branches whip at my arms. I jump a root and nearly roll my ankle on the landing. My lungs start burning almost immediately in the wet heat, breath pulling harder, louder. The path—if you can call it that—isn’t a trail so much as a slightly less impossible line through the brush.
I tell myself I’ll stop in a minute.
I don’t.
I push farther than I should, because the idea of turning around and seeing one of them smirking at the edge of the trees makes me want to bite somebody.
By the time I slow, my chest is heaving and sweat’s glued my shirt to my back. I brace one forearm against a tree trunk and lock my elbow, trying to breathe through the stitch stabbing my side.
Air in. Air out. Again.
Tiny victory, I think wildly. I lost him.
The thought barely forms before the woods shift around me and everything goes wrong.
It’s the silence first.
Birdsong cuts off so abruptly it feels physical, like a hand flattening over the mouth of the morning. The insects don’t stop completely, but the rhythm shifts. The hair rises on my arms.
I straighten too fast and turn, teeth already bared.
“Ever?”
Nothing. No Ever. No answer. No annoyed voice telling me I’m making this harder than it has to be.
A twig snaps somewhere behind me. Too close. Deliberate. The sense of being watched hits so hard my stomach drops.
“This isn’t funny,” I call, louder now, forcing my voice steady. “I’m not doing some cat-and-mouse thing with you.”
No answer.
The trees all look the same. Brush. Moss hanging in gray sheets that hide too much. Heat. No clear line back to the house. No clear line anywhere.
Every bad decision I’ve ever made seems to arrive at once and stand in a circle around me.
Run.
I pivot toward another sound. That’s when somebody grabs me from the other side.
Pressure slams into my arm and then a hand bands across my throat, jerking me backward so hard my skull clips bark. Thought disappears. My body takes over, pure animal panic. I claw at the arm, kick, twist, try to drop my weight.
He’s behind me. Bigger. Keeps me pinned between him and the tree.
I bite.
My teeth sink into flesh, and he grunts, curses low and hoarse, yanks me harder. Another arm snakes around my middle and drags me back flush to his chest.
Something sharp scrapes across my side—hot and fast. A bright sting blooms under my ribs and vanishes under the tidal surge of adrenaline.
No. No no no—
I kick backward like a mule and catch shin or ankle. He stumbles, swears again, grip tightening at my neck.
“Easy there.”
The whisper scrapes every nerve raw. Cold terror punches through the adrenaline. Secondary location. Don’t let him move you. Don’t let him—
I scream. I throw my head back. My skull connects with something hard but I don’t get the satisfying crunch I’m praying for. My throat burns from the effort. I taste copper. My heel slams back again and again.
And then the woods explode to my right.
Ever comes out of the brush hard and fast, all unleashed violence and no warning. He doesn’t yell my name. Doesn’t posture. Doesn’t waste a second.
He hits my attacker with a brutal punch to the jaw that snaps the man’s head sideways but doesn’t break his hold. Ever pivots, drives in closer, and hooks a hand around the arm at my waist. His thumb digs somewhere near the wrist and the man makes a strangled noise, grip loosening just enough.
“Drop,” Ever snaps.
I fall before he finishes the word.
My knees slam dirt and roots. Pain shoots up my legs. I scramble sideways on hands and boots while the two men collide against the tree, all grunts and impacts and flashing limbs.