Chapter 30 Shiloh
CHAPTER THIRTY
SHILOH
The moon has the power to turn everything honest.
That’s what I decide as I sit in the bed of my truck with a thick, puffy blanket thrown over the ridged metal, a bottle of wine breathing between us, cheese and fruit and crackers arranged on a wooden board I absolutely did not steal from Nash’s kitchen.
Moonlight is cruel that way. It strips the edge off a thing while somehow making it clearer. Softer, but truer.
Reva sits cross-legged across from me, her dark hair silvered at the edges, one bare shoulder slipping out of the oversized sweater she stole from somebody in the house.
Probably me. The back yard behind Blackwood House slopes toward the trees and the marsh beyond, all dark grass and breathing night and the occasional chorus of frogs too stupid to know they’re singing into a world full of teeth.
She’s back in Blackwood House. Back in our orbit. Back where I can see her, touch her, hear her muttering under her breath when she’s annoyed and watch the way her mouth twitches when she’s trying not to smile.
And she’s ours now.
I don’t mean that in the easy way. Not in the way of sex or heat or one filthy night below Noir that changed everything and left no room to pretend otherwise.
I mean she came back. That’s the part that matters.
She didn’t get Deacon. She didn’t get her revenge. Not yet. I know that. I know it’s still in her, simmering low and mean and patient. Reva is not the forgiving type. She is not the sort of woman who simply lays down an old wound because a man asks nicely.
I believe I’d think less of her if she were.
But she came back anyway, and for now that’s enough.
I hand her a glass of wine and watch her take it.
“So romantic,” she says, eyeing the spread between us.
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain cheese cubes.”
I grin. “And what are cheese cubes if not edible poetry?”
She snorts softly into her glass, and the sound goes straight under my ribs.
Christ. I’m gone for her. Absolutely gone.
Which is embarrassing, honestly. Not because she isn’t worth it—she is.
More because if anyone had told me six months ago that I’d be arranging a moonlight picnic in the bed of my truck for a woman with a vengeance complex and a tendency to stab first and ask questions never, I’d have had them committed.
Now look at me.
I pop a grape into my mouth and lean back on one hand, studying her over the rim of my own glass—me, who drinks beer over wine any day.
“You know,” I say lightly, “I haven’t decided whether to be touched by your triumphant return or deeply insulted by the fact that you made me track you to a motel first.”
Her mouth flattens. “You didn’t have to track me.”
“At least I didn’t steal your panties.”
She nearly chokes on her wine.
I laugh as she glares at me, cheeks warming. “There she is.”
“Ever stole my panties?”
I’m not even surprised that she knew immediately it was Ever.
“Of course he did.”
“And he put cameras in my room.”
“He did a great many things in that room, love. Installing cameras was among the least intimate.”
She reaches for a cracker and throws it at me.
I catch it against my chest and look wounded. “Violence. On date night.”
“This is not a date.”
“It has wine, moonlight, and a beautiful woman who looks seconds away from climbing into my lap to murder me. If that’s not romance, what is?”
She shakes her head, but there’s no real heat in it. That’s the difference now. She still fights. Still bristles. Still flashes that sharp little edge at me like she’s daring me to grab hold of it and bleed.
But she’s softer now, too.
Not broken. Never that. I don’t think I’d know what to do with Reva if she were broken. She’d be some pale imitation of herself, and I’m not interested in pale things.
She hasn’t been humbled, either. She’s just…softer.
More willing to lean against one of us instead of stand there trembling under the weight of every damn thing by herself.
I let the silence settle a beat before I set my glass down.
“Now,” I say, and put enough steel in my voice that her gaze lifts to mine, “we need to discuss your appalling behavior.”
Her eyes narrow immediately. “My behavior.”
“Yes. Atrocious. Deeply offensive. Very disappointing.”
She folds one knee up and hooks an arm around it. “I was under the impression you enjoyed my bad behavior.”
“In bed? Certainly.” I point at her with my glass. “In general? Mixed results.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “You’re impossible.”
“And you,” I say, more quietly, “failed to trust us.”
That stills her. The humor doesn’t vanish entirely, but it retreats. Her fingers tighten around the stem of the glass.
I don’t let up.
“You ran,” I say. “You went tearing off on your own because Nash said he would not kill Deacon, and instead of understanding what we were trying to tell you, you decided none of us were worth trusting at all.”
Her chin tips. Defensive. “He said no.”
“He said he wouldn’t kill him.”
“That is a no, Shiloh.”
“No,” I say, sharper than before, “it’s a boundary. There’s a difference.”
Something flickers across her face at that.
I sit forward, forearms on my knees, and keep my voice level because this part matters. “All we ever asked for was your trust. That’s it. We told you we would protect you. We told you we would take care of your problem.”
Her laugh is soft and bitter. “You were awfully vague.”
“Deliberately.” I don’t apologize for it. “Because how we take care of it is up to us. Not you.”
Her brows rise. “That sounds controlling.”
“It is controlling,” I say. “And then you went trying to throw yourself at a monster with half a plan and a motel key, leaving our new kitten to potential danger. We were not going to let you do that. So we brought Homer home, just like we brought you back.”
“Maybe I wanted to do it myself.”
“Maybe doing it yourself and being so goddamn strong isn’t always the point.”
She looks away, out over the dark grass and the low glimmer of marshwater beyond. The moon catches in her lashes.
“You don’t understand,” she says after a moment, quieter now. “If I hand it over—if I let somebody else do it—then what was all of this for? What was all the anger for? What was surviving for?”
That lands. It lands and it sticks hard enough that I have to take a second before I answer. When I do, my tone has lost the last of its mock severity.
“Maybe it was for this,” I say.
Her eyes lift back to mine.
“Maybe surviving wasn’t so you could die on a vengeance kick in a swamp somewhere. Maybe it was so somebody could finally help you carry the damn thing.”
She goes still. A breeze skates across the truck bed, lifting a strand of her hair. I reach out on instinct and tuck it behind her ear. She lets me.
That, too, feels like a miracle.
“I’m not asking you to forget him,” I say.
“Or forgive any of it. I know better than that. I know you’ve got too much spine for easy absolution.
” My fingers slide down to the curve of her jaw.
“But you have to trust us, Reva. If we say we’ll protect you, we mean it.
If we say we’ll handle him, then we will. ”
She searches my face in that blunt, unsettling way she has. As if she’s looking for the seam where the lie might be stitched in.
She won’t find one. Because under all the charm and humor and ease, I’m not that different from her. I was in foster care—with Ever, who didn’t fucking talk until he was twelve—until Nash and Deacon decided I might be worth something and took me in.
I know what it means to need justice. I know what it is to be patient.
“What if I don’t like how you handle it?” she asks, bringing me back.
I smile faintly. “Then I suppose you’ll glare at me about it for the next forty years.”
That gets a little laugh out of her. Wet around the edges, but real. “Forty years, huh?”
I turn my hand and lace my fingers with hers. Her skin is cool from the night air.
“There’s not much,” I tell her, “Not much at all that I wouldn’t do for you by this point.”
The words come out simple. Too simple, maybe, for the size of what they mean.
But she hears them.
I can tell by the way her face shifts—by the sudden brightness in her eyes she’ll hate me for noticing. She swallows and looks down at our joined hands like she doesn’t quite know what to do with them.
Then, because she is Reva and can never let a thing remain tender for more than five consecutive seconds without trying to bite it, she glances up through her lashes and says, semi-joking, “Does that mean you love me?”
I expect my usual impulse—to laugh, to deflect, to turn it into something filthy and easy and harmless.
It doesn’t come. Instead I just look at her.
Really look.
This difficult, beautiful girl who arrived in our lives carrying blood and ghosts and fury like holy relics. This girl who ran and came back. This girl who makes me feel thirteen things before breakfast, none of which are particularly dignified.
My thumb strokes over her knuckles.
“I’ve never loved a woman,” I say.
Her expression shifts, the teasing draining out of it.
“I’m not sure,” I go on, “that I know how to do it properly. I’m not sure I know what it’s supposed to look like when it isn’t a mess or a weakness or something to be used against you.”
The honesty of it scrapes my throat on the way out.
I’m not a man who places his heart on blocks. I deal in charm, in sleight of hand, in a careful redirection that keeps everyone looking where I want them to look and never too closely at what’s under the surface.
But with her, none of that works for long. So I twine my fingers more firmly through hers and offer her the truth instead. Sharp edge first.
“All I know,” I say, “is I’ve never felt what I feel for you. Not once. Not with anyone.”
She doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe, I don’t think.
I tip my head back toward the sky. “Before you, I had never spent a single damn moment just looking at the stars.”
Her gaze follows mine automatically. Above us, the sky stretches, black and endless, needled with light.
I huff a laugh. “I know. Horrifying. Very unlike me.”
Her fingers tighten around mine.
“I’d never wondered,” I say slowly, “what making love felt like from another person’s point of view.
Never wondered if I was making her feel good, what my body felt like inside of hers, what it did for her if I moved just like that.
” My voice roughens despite myself. “Never woken up in the morning with my first thought being I need to say good morning to Reva and find out if she slept all right.”
Reva makes the smallest sound. A broken little inhale.
I look back at her. Moonlight lays itself across her face so softly it almost undoes me.
“So,” I say, “if your name being the first thing on my lips when I wake up, and the last thing on my mind before I go to sleep means I’m in love…”
I squeeze her hand.
“…then yeah. I guess I fucking love you, Reva Leigh.”
The silence afterward feels enormous. Not an empty, echoing kind of vastness, though.
Full.
Full enough that I can hear the blood moving in my ears.
Her eyes go glassy. God help me, she looks like she might cry but she’s trying to restrain herself, and that alone is enough to make me want to find whoever taught her tears were a thing to be hidden and break both his hands.
“You can’t,” she whispers, and smiles shakily like she’s making fun of herself even now. “You can’t just say things like that all…all casually.”
“I thought I was being devastatingly intense.”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Inconceivable.”
A tear slips free anyway. She wipes at it with the heel of her hand like she’s offended by its existence.
Then she laughs once, breath hitching, and says, “I’m pretty sure I love you too, and I’m so fucking mad about it!”
Everything inside me stops. I have nothing…no cleverness. No quip. No polished seduction.
Nothing. Just a clean, lethal stillness as the words hit and keep hitting.
“You what?”
She leans toward me then, one hand braced on the blanket, her hair falling forward as she bends over me with that look in her eyes—the one that always feels like an attack and a prayer at once.
“I love you too,” she says again, quieter now, like it’s for me alone, like we’re keeping this a secret from the heavens above us.
Then she kisses me. I go willingly, because this is Reva, and I’d follow her to Hell.
Her mouth is warm from the wine, a little salty from the tears she pretends she didn’t shed. I slide a hand into her hair and taste her slowly, greedily, with all the care I don’t usually bother with because suddenly I want to savor this exact second. Bottle it. Put it somewhere no one can touch.
She shifts closer on the blanket, one knee sliding against my thigh.
I deepen the kiss.
And the first bullet pings off the truck bed.
The sound is so sharp, so violently wrong, that for one insane half-second my mind refuses to name it.
Metal screams. Reva jerks against me. A second shot cracks through the night, punching through the rear window in a glittering explosion of glass.
“Down!” I roar.
I hit her hard, taking her with me as I twist and throw us both flat against the bed of the truck. Wine goes flying. The bottle shatters. The board overturns, cheese and grapes skidding through broken glass as another round sparks off the side rail inches from my head.
Gunfire. Not random. Targeted.
My pulse becomes a detonation.
I cover Reva’s body with mine, one arm hooked around the back of her neck to keep her face down while I reach blindly for the pistol at my back.
“Shiloh—”
“I’ve got you.” My voice comes out as a snarl. “Don’t move.”
Another shot. Too close. From the tree line, I think. Or the far side of the drive. Hard to tell with the echo bouncing off the house and the marsh and the truck itself.
The blanket jerks as a bullet tears through the corner of it.
Reva gasps under me. I get the gun free.
“Stay down,” I snap again, then lift just enough to sight over the side of the truck bed.
Movement, a dark figure near the edge of the yard.
I fire.
Once. Twice.
The muzzle flash lights up the grass in hard white bursts. Somewhere beyond the truck, a man curses. The house lights blaze on behind us. A door slams.
Voices—Nash, maybe Ever—shouting from the back porch, but they sound miles away over the blood pounding in my ears.
Another shot slams into the tailgate. Reva flinches violently under me. Rage hits so hot I almost lose clarity.
They shot at her.
Not the truck. Not the house. Her.
I rise onto one knee for a better angle and fire again toward the movement in the dark. A figure breaks from cover, running for the trees.
Run, motherfucker. Run.