Chapter 25 Ever
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
EVER
I can’t fucking sleep, and it’s driving me crazy.
That isn’t unusual. Sleep and I have never been on especially friendly terms, but tonight is worse than most. Part of it is the sound of Nash with Reva sometime around eleven—muffled through walls and distance, but not so muffled I can’t hear enough to know exactly what’s happening.
Blackwood House carries sound strangely. Old bones. Too many hallways. Too many secrets packed into the plaster.
Too much room to imagine things I’d rather not, because I’d give my right hand to be the one making Reva scream in pleasure.
The other part of it is the kitten.
The little orange traitor—Homer, I think she settled on—has decided my bed is an acceptable substitute when Reva doesn’t come back to hers, and sometime after midnight, after pacing across my ribs, kneading my side through the blanket, and curling into a vibrating ball of heat against my hip, it falls asleep as if it pays rent here.
I lie on my back in the dark, staring at the ceiling, one arm folded behind my head, the other trapped under six pounds of striped audacity, and listen to the house settle around me.
A creak. Pipes ticking. Wind scraping its fingers against the old glass.
Then something changes.
It’s small. So small most people would miss it. A shift in the air more than a sound. A subtle change in the rhythm of the house. I open my eyes, already alert, already knowing.
A few seconds later, the kitten’s head pops up. It lets out a questioning little chirp, then springs off the bed and trots toward the door.
Well. That’s interesting. I sit up.
I drag on a pair of jeans, step into the hallway without bothering with a shirt, and keep to the darker edge of the corridor. I don’t have to go far. From the bend near the back stairs, I can see her.
Reva.
She’s moving with care, but she’s not as quiet as she thinks she is. Shoes in one hand. Bag slung over her shoulder. The kitten reaches her ankles, indignant but quiet, and she stoops to gather him up with a small sound under one arm. As I watch, she sticks him in her bra, then continues walking.
She pauses every few steps like she expects someone to materialize out of the shadows and stop her.
No one does.
I lean on the rail and watch. Curiosity keeps me there. A little bit of pettiness does, too.
I could wake Nash. Probably should. He’d want to know the second she made a move, and there’s a certain logic to cutting this off at the knees before she ever reaches the front door.
But I don’t.
Maybe because he had her tonight and I didn’t. Okay, that’s absolutely what it is.
But there’s more too.
Maybe because she chose to slip out after being in his room instead of coming upstairs, and some mean, ugly part of me wants to see what that earns him come morning. Especially after he was such an asshole about me taking her in the woods.
Maybe because I want to know where she thinks she’s going. What she’s up to.
She makes it to the back entrance, fights with the latch for half a second, and disappears into the night.
I wait another beat, then go to my room, pick up my phone, and watch the tracker Shiloh sewed under her skin move with her. There’s another, on her vehicle, but I don’t bother to pull that one up on the app. The one in her arm will be more precise.
A small blinking dot slides away from Blackwood House, gaining in speed.
I slid the chip to Shiloh when I brought him the medical kit to stitch up Reva’s wounds.
It was one of those things I’d had in my arsenal and been mulling over for a few days, ever since we’d been tasked with keeping an eye on her.
I just hadn’t known exactly how I was going to go about implanting it without her knowing about it.
The cut she suffered was kind of a twisted blessing in that respect, I guess.
The GPS on her SUV is mine, too. Redundancy matters. And you never know when someone as feisty as Reva would figure out she was being tracked. Better to have both and only need one than to suffer because of idiocy.
I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark, phone in hand, and let her run.
The gesture feels almost generous.
The tracker moves through the city, then slows. Stops. Shifts once more. Settles.
I find the address in Google. A motel. Not a great one, but she’s probably not flush with funds. We could push some into her account, but that would make things too easy for my firefly.
I stare at the map a moment longer, then lie back down and close my eyes, phone on my chest. A notification will vibrate if she moves. I can rest for a few hours, knowing she’s alone and safe.
Nash is in the kitchen when I come down early the next morning. Shiloh sprawls at the table with a mug of coffee and the kind of lazy-alert expression that usually means he’s been awake long enough to become irritating on purpose.
Nash looks up when I walk in. His gaze flicks past me and then back. “You look like shit.”
“Thank you.”
Shiloh lifts his mug. “You always know just what to say in the morning.”
I pull a clean mug from the cabinet and fill it from the coffee pot. Nash made the coffee this morning; it’s strong enough to walk on its own two feet.
“Reva ran last night.”
That gets both of their attention. Nash goes still in that particular way he has, the one that says his mind is already ten steps ahead, rearranging pieces on the board. “When?”
“Few hours ago.”
“And you didn’t wake me.”
“No.”
Shiloh’s mouth twitches. “Was this an oversight, sweetheart, or were you just being a bitch?”
I take a sip and look at him over the rim of the mug. “Take your pick.”
Nash’s eyes remain on me. Cool. Measuring. Icy. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know if I should say. Was her evening with you so terrible that she felt she had to run?”
I know I shouldn’t as soon as the words come out of my mouth. His attitude about the whole woods thing is still poking at me, though, and fuck him.
Nash goes still. He sets his mug down. “You want to run that by me one more time?”
“You heard me. She looked like she couldn’t wait to get out of here. What the hell happened, Nash?”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear the implication in your statement, and I’m going to be the adult in the room and answer your actual question.”
His tone is level, but every line of his body radiates fury. I’m not sure I’ve ever come quite this close to something I can’t walk back with him. And still, I can’t seem to bring myself to care enough to apologize. I offer a brief, conciliatory nod.
“I told her about Deacon. And I told her we wouldn’t be helping her kill him.”
Shiloh’s breath leaves him in a whoosh of sound. “Shit on a popsicle stick, that’d do it.”
“She’s at a motel off the interstate.” I set my coffee down. “Tracker’s still live on her. SUV, too.”
The room relaxes.
Shiloh leans back in his chair. “So she bolted after all that and made it as far as a bargain-bin mattress and complimentary ice machine. Christ. I kinda expected more from her.”
“She’s not exactly swimming in cash,” I mutter. “You know what we were paying her.”
Nash folds his arms. “So I think we let her have a little leash. See what she does with it.”
Shiloh arches a brow. “That your official diagnosis?”
“For now.” Nash’s gaze shifts, thoughtful instead of angry. “She knows we can find her. Or she should, if she’s smart enough. If she still ran, then she wants us to see what she does next—or she’s desperate enough not to care.”
“Either way,” I say, “she’s more useful moving than caged.”
Nash nods once. “We rotate surveillance. No need to drag her back yet. We watch. We wait. When she gives us a reason, we yank her back.”
Shiloh tips his chair onto two legs. “And if she does something stupid?”
Nash’s mouth curves without humor. “Then we decide how much of her skin we want to leave intact when we bring her home.”
I glance at the tracker again. Still motionless. Still there. Still mine to follow.
“I’ll take first watch,” I say.
Nash studies me, but only for a second. “Fine.”
Shiloh makes a show of sighing. “I suppose this means I’m invited.”
“You’re useful with locks and secondary recon,” I say.
“I’m useful in countless ways.”
“None of them relevant.”
He grins. “Shot to the heart.”
By the time we leave, I’ve already packed a bag of necessities.
Laptop. Receivers. Spare batteries. Adhesive-backed micro-cams. Listening devices small enough to disappear in the hem of a curtain or the seam of a lamp base. Tools. Gloves. A change of clothes. A compact case with enough surveillance gear to make a federal prosecutor sweat.
Shiloh glances into the backseat and whistles. “Romantic. Honestly, Ever. I’m impressed, and a little bit scared of how efficiently ruthless you are. Especially about her.”
I shut the hatch. “Get in.”
We take one of the dark compact SUVs from the far garage—not one Reva’s seen before, not one she’d clock on instinct.
The motel is exactly the kind of place I expected.
A long, sun-faded strip of rooms with exterior doors, cracked pavement, a flickering vacancy sign even in daylight.
The sort of place that rents anonymity by the hour and loyalty by the night.
Her SUV is backed into a spot three doors down from a dead vending machine.
I park across the lot where we can see her door without being obvious about it.
We wait.
By late morning, she emerges in jeans and a shirt she must’ve slept in, hair loose, eyes hidden behind sunglasses too large for her face.
She checks the lock on the door, glances once up and down the walkway, then heads toward the street with the purposeful gait of someone trying hard not to look haunted.
The kitten stays behind. Which makes me want to spank Reva’s ass for the audacity. Poor neglected feline.
Shiloh looks over. “You want me on her?”
“Please.”
“What are you doing while I’m gone, exactly?”
“Housekeeping.”
He laughs under his breath. “You are such a creep. I truly, truly love that for you.”
“Go.”