Chapter 26 Reva #2
Or maybe that’s not true. Maybe it weighs exactly what a gun ought to weigh and I’m the one who’s changed around it. Maybe there is no version of this—of me, in a cheap motel room with a kitten on the bed and revenge in my bloodstream—that was ever going to feel natural.
My teeth chatter.
The room isn’t cold. The A/C unit wheezes more than it works, and Louisiana heat presses at the windows even this early.
Still, my teeth chatter. Having a gun in my hand makes the revenge real. It isn’t notes and names and plans anymore. It isn’t theory. It isn’t the shape of hatred living inside me like a second skeleton.
It’s metal. Weight. Choice.
I force my numb fingers to take the unloaded gun out of the bag and turn it over in my hands. The matte finish absorbs the light rather than catches it. Such a small thing, really. Compact. Almost ugly in its simplicity. Nothing ceremonial about it. No grandeur. No poetry.
It’s function is the thing—Death. It has the capacity to change multiple lives. Spread violence. Protect a family. Destroy one.
Could I use this?
The question rakes across something already bruised.
Will I be the same after?
Because the truth is, I’ve struggled so much with if I can do it. I don’t have a choice.
Having and using are two very different variables, and I know without a doubt I’m changed simply by taking this gun. Simply from the act of walking into Nash’s study and taking this weapon with the potential for ending a life. Mine. His. Someone else’s by accident.
Pop pop pop.
The memory comes without warning, stealing my breath and my mind and every inch of my body.
Gunfire like kernels over heat.
My child’s body gone rigid with terror.
The smell. God, the smell. Smoke and something coppery and something else I was too young to name but old enough to recognize as wrong forever after.
I’m seven again, trapped in a moment that keeps happening every fucking time I close my eyes.
The rest of the people I care about—my safety net, my home, my entire stupid beautiful little world—changing with the pull of a finger.
I rock on the bed and my grip slips, slick on the stock. I tighten it.
Anger rises and steadies me. Anger has always steadied me.
A child has no choice but to adapt when everything she loves is ripped away from her.
That kind of change isn’t something you flow with.
It’s something you endure. Something forced into your bones whether you asked for it or not.
You either become someone who can carry it, or it breaks you open and leaves you there.
The gun is cold in my hands, and I realize revenge doesn’t feel like power. It feels like crossing a line you can’t uncross.
Damn Nash for making me think that way.
Homer hops onto the bed and watches me with solemn little kitten eyes, as if he senses the change in the room. Or maybe the change in me.
“It’s okay,” I whisper, though I don’t know if I mean him or myself.
I check the chamber again. Unload. Load. Unload.
My fingers fumble the first few times. Shake. Miss. Overcorrect. I hate that. I hate weakness, especially my own. I set my jaw and do it again. And again. Slide. Check. Seat. Release.
Again, until my fingers ache on the fifth.
By the seventh time, my breathing evens a little.
By the eighth, my hands are steadier.
By the twelfth, I can almost pretend this is muscle memory instead of terror training itself to behave.
Then I stand.
The motel room is too small for this kind of violence, even pretend violence, which makes it perfect. I plant my feet shoulder-width apart and raise the gun toward the far wall. Toward where I think one of the cameras probably is.
Maybe the smoke detector. Maybe the lamp. Maybe some tiny black eye tucked somewhere stupid and smug.
“Bang,” I say softly.
My voice sounds strange. I do it again.
“Bang, bang, asshole.”
The words come rougher this time. Meaner. I lift the gun and sight along it like I’m aiming at a face I know too well and not well enough. A rosary tattoo. Dead eyes. The man who detonated my life and left me crawling through the wreckage of it.
“Bang.”
I lower the gun. Breathe. Raise it again.
“If you’re watching,” I murmur to the hidden room, to Ever, to Nash, to Shiloh, to whoever drew the short straw and got me today, “take notes.”
My hand doesn’t shake that time.
I spend the next hour in loops.
Strip. Clean. Reload. Dry fire on an imaginary body. Set the gun down. Pick it back up. Sit with it in my lap and stare at nothing. Stand again. Aim again. Let the memory come. Push through it.
Each repetition sands a little of the fear off the edges. Not all of it. Maybe not even most of it. But enough.
Enough that by the time my phone buzzes with Sonny’s text telling me she’s outside, I can tuck the gun back into the bag without feeling like I’m handling a live wire.
I glance once around the room before I leave. At the bed. At Homer, already curled into a patch of sun again. At the places I imagine eyes are hidden.
“Don’t miss me too much,” I tell them all.
Then I lock the door behind me and head downstairs.
Sonny is in a little white coupe that looks almost offensively cheerful in this parking lot. When she spots me, she leans over and shoves the passenger door open.
I slide in.
She takes one look at my face and says, “Okay, wow. We’re not even pretending this is casual.”
“I don’t think I’ve been casual a day in my life.”
“That is painfully true.” She reaches over and squeezes my hand once before pulling back. “You want to start with the superficial version or the horrifying version?”
“Let’s build toward horrifying.”
“Love that for us.”
I laugh, and it surprises both of us. The sound dies quickly, but it lingers long enough to feel human.
Sonny doesn’t press as she drives. She chatters instead, lightly, about some girl from high school who got bad Botox and can no longer fully blink, about a bartender she hates, about a pair of boots she almost bought but didn’t because they made her look like she was trying too hard to be Beth Dutton.
By the time we get to her place, my pulse has dropped from jackhammer to merely bad decision.
Her apartment smells like vanilla and dry shampoo and the expensive kind of candle that tries very hard not to admit it’s a candle.
Clothes are draped over the back of a chair.
Makeup sprawls across the bathroom counter like a cosmetic crime scene.
There’s music playing low from somewhere in the bedroom.
She turns on me the second the door shuts.
“Okay. Talk.”
So I do.
I don’t tell her all of it. Not the deepest parts.
Not the things that still feel like exposed nerve endings.
But enough. Enough that her expression shifts from amused to intent.
Enough that she knows this isn’t me trying to feel pretty for a fun night out.
This is strategy. Bait. Armor. Maybe a last meal disguised as lipstick.
When I finish, she folds her arms.
“You are absolutely out of your mind.”
“Yes.”
“And I’m helping you anyway.”
“Yes.”
She points at me. “Not because I approve.”
“Of course not.”
“Because if you go into Noir looking like sadness in a motel T-shirt, you’ll get eaten alive.”
That earns a tiny smile from me. “This is why I came to you.”
“Sit down.”
For the next two hours, Sonny does what women have done for each other forever—she turns me into a prettier version of myself.
She starts with my hair, dragging a brush through it with enough force to make me yelp once.
“Beauty is pain,” she says.
“This is not beauty. This is assault.”
“You’ll survive.”
She blows it out smooth, then curls in just enough shape to make it look effortless when I know damned well it wasn’t. She steps back, squints, adjusts, pins one side, then changes her mind and lets it fall.
Makeup comes next.
Not too heavy, she decides. Not for Noir Night.
Too much and I’ll look like I’m trying. Too soft and I’ll look too young…
which could be good, could be bad. She darkens my eyes until they seem larger, meaner somehow.
Smudges liner at the corners. Defines my mouth in a color deeper than I would’ve chosen but exactly right once it’s there.
Contours just enough to sharpen what grief and hunger have already started carving into me.
Then comes the dress. Or rather, the dresses.
Because apparently helping a friend prepare for possible emotional warfare also includes throwing half a closet on the bed and vetoing things with increasing disgust.
“No.”
“No.”
“Absolutely not.”
“That one makes you look approachable, which is not the goal.”
Finally she produces a black dress from the back of her closet and holds it up with a satisfied little hum.
“This,” she says.
It’s simple, which makes it worse. Or better.
Depends on your perspective. Black, body-skimming, low enough in the front to suggest without begging.
Thin straps. Bare back. Hem that hits a little above the knee.
The kind of dress that looks understated until it’s on a body, and then suddenly it becomes a weapon.
“I don’t know.”
“You do know. Put it on.”
So I do.
The fabric glides over my skin like a secret unveiled. When I step out of her bathroom, Sonny’s expression goes smug and vindicated all at once.
“Oh, that’s nasty.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means if a man sees you in this and remains capable of coherent thought, he’s either gay or dead inside.”
I look at myself in the mirror over her dresser and almost don’t recognize the woman looking back. Not because she’s prettier. Though maybe she is.
Because she looks…resolved.
The softness has been dialed down. The uncertainty, too. What’s left is something harder at the edges. More deliberate. This is a woman who could walk into a room full of dangerous men and make them look twice before they remember to be cruel.
Sonny comes up behind me and adjusts one strap with gentle fingers.
“There,” she says quietly.
Our eyes meet in the mirror.
For one suspended second, I see both versions of myself layered there—the girl with motel fear still sitting in her lungs, and the woman standing upright over it.
I square my shoulders.
If Deacon is out there, I’m done waiting for him to find me.
Let him look.
Let them all look.