22. Reva
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
REVA
The hotel hallway is quiet enough to hear my own bad decisions.
The carpet swallows most of my steps, but not all of them.
My boots make tiny sounds when I move too fast, so I slow down, place my feet the way Ever taught me, heel gentle, weight controlled, body close to the wall where cameras have the ugliest angles.
I keep my hood up and my head down. The key card is in my sleeve instead of my hand.
My phone is powered off and tucked beneath the mattress in the bedroom I left behind because phones are leashes with glass faces. I have learned at least that much.
I am not running blind. That should count for something.
Probably not enough.
The service corridor smells like lemon cleaner and warm dust. A cart full of folded towels sits outside a linen closet, and for half a second I consider stealing one because that’s what people always do when they’re trying to do sneaky shit in hotels.
I pause, then keep walking. Nash knows what I’m doing. He doesn’t like it, but he knows. And he knows he couldn’t keep me there.
I straighten my shoulders, mentally high-fiving myself. I didn’t even ask permission. I decided I was going, and at the end of the day—literally at the end of the day—I went. Because I am an adult, damn it. And adults make decisions for themselves.
At the end of the hall, the service elevator waits with a red light above the doors and a camera tucked into the ceiling corner.
Boom. How ya like them apples. I angle my face down and swipe the card, waiting as the doors open. I am woman, hear me—
Deacon is already inside. I stop with one foot over the threshold.
“Roar.”
He stands against the back wall in black jeans, a black hoodie, and the expression of a man who has been waiting on his girlfriend in a department store changing room.
His hair is damp like he showered and never finished drying.
One hand rests low at his side, near the gun I can’t see and know is there anyway.
My heart lurches hard enough to make me angry.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Do I look like I’m here for fun and games?”
“You scared the hell out of me.”
His gaze moves over my face, my hoodie, my boots, the empty place where my phone should be. “You dressed for it.”
“I am not going back upstairs.”
“I didn’t tell you to.”
The elevator hums around us.
I stare at him because I need him to be the obstacle. Obstacles are useful. Obstacles let me push. If he tells me to go back to Nash’s bed, if he reaches for my key card, if he says one careful thing about safety, I can turn the panic into anger and use it until I get through him.
Deacon only holds the door with one hand.
“Hospital?” he asks.
My throat tightens.
“Yes.”
He nods once. “Then move.”
Watching him warily, I step into the elevator. The doors close, sealing us inside a small mirrored box where I look pale, furious, and too young in the reflection. Deacon presses the button for the garage level.
“You’re not stopping me,” I say.
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because you stayed when Nash asked.”
I look at him.
His eyes stay on the numbers above the door. “You stayed at the cabin. You let us bring Delia back. You moved when Ever told you to during the drone test. You left with us when the cabin was blown. You have been choosing the hard thing for days. Weeks, really.”
“And now?”
“Now you are choosing another hard thing. It just doesn’t happen to be the hard thing Nash wants you to choose.”
The elevator drops in silence after his explanation. I don’t have words to reply to him.
Outside, a black SUV waits with its lights off near the end of the private parking level. One of Nash’s men sits behind the wheel and does not look surprised to see me, which means I did not fool as many people as I wanted to.
Wonderful. Espionage skill level: zero.
Deacon opens the back door.
I stop beside it. “Nash knows you’re taking me.”
It is not a question, and Deacon does not insult me by pretending otherwise. “Of course he does.”
My chest hurts in a complicated way. “He let me go.”
“He let you choose. There’s a difference.”
I climb into the SUV before I can think too long about that.
The city is wet and bright beyond the tinted glass, New Orleans sliding past in gold smears and dark storefronts, streetlamps reflecting off pavement, balconies dripping rain into quiet streets.
The hotel recedes behind us, full of room service trays and armed men and my sister sleeping or pretending to.
Maybe Delia knows I left. Maybe she knew before I did.
She understands cages better than anyone, even pretty ones with marble bathrooms and sheets that feel like sin.
I look down at my hands. They’re steady until I think of Cal. Then they’re not so steady.
Deacon sits beside me without touching. For once, I am grateful for the space. If he puts his hands on me, I might fold into them, and I cannot afford to fold before I see Cal breathing with my own eyes.
The hospital looks different at night after almost losing someone there.
Too much glass. Too many entrances. Too many places for people to pretend they belong.
Deacon gets us through a service door with a badge that probably isn’t his and a look that makes the sleepy security guard decide paperwork is less important than survival.
We use the staff elevator. We don’t pass the main desk.
We don’t go near the lobby where cameras and strangers collect faces.
I know he’s breaking rules for me.
I also know he’s broken worse ones.
The ICU floor is quieter than my memory of it.
Machines murmur behind closed doors. Nurses move through dimmed halls in soft shoes, carrying medications, adjusting lines, speaking in low voices that make fear sound polite.
Nash’s man stands near the stairwell and gives Deacon a nod.
Another sits near the nurses’ station with a newspaper open in front of him, though his eyes miss nothing.
Cal’s room is halfway down the hall. Deacon pauses at the nurses’ station, and I continue forward, eager to see him. Restless.
I slow before I reach it.
The door is partly closed, the blinds angled just enough that the room inside shows in pieces: monitor glow, bed rail, Cal’s pale hand on the blanket, the ventilator tube, the hard rise and fall of a chest being helped by machines.
And a woman.
She stands beside his bed with one hand wrapped around his.
I don’t recognize her.
At first, that is all she is. A stranger where I should be.
Dark hair threaded with a little silver, pulled low at the nape of her neck.
A beige coat damp at the hem. One shoulder curved inward like she has been holding herself upright for too long.
Her fingers cover Cal’s, and the touch is too familiar to belong to a nurse, too tender to belong to a friend I have never heard of.
I should open the door, demand to know who the hell she thinks she is…but something holds me in stall. I wait, watching, moving closer to hear the soft words spoken inside the room.
The woman bends over him, bringing his hand close to her mouth. Her voice is low, and the glass catches most of it, but one broken sentence reaches me.
“You promised me you would live long enough to bring her back to me.”
The hall disappears.
Her.
Not him. Not someone. Her.
My hand closes around the edge of the doorframe. There’s only one possible her she could be referring to.
Deacon comes up behind me.
I feel him there, but I cannot look away from the woman. She touches Cal like she knows where his skin is warm, like she has memorized the bones in his hand, like his being alive is personal to her in a way I do not understand and immediately resent.
Cal never told me about a woman. Not once.
There were no pictures tucked behind books, no names spoken too softly over coffee, no old heartbreak he let slip on bad nights.
Cal had me. Work. Routines. Pancakes when he didn’t know what to say and threats when I tried to leave the house in weather he didn’t like.
He had quietude. He had patience. He had secrets, apparently, because there’s a woman in his room touching him like grief gave her permission.
The machines keep breathing for him.
The woman lowers his hand back to the blanket and wipes beneath one eye with the heel of her palm. Then she leans close and presses her mouth to his knuckles, a soft, careful kiss that makes something hot and ugly open inside me.
I came here for Cal. Now I can’t move.
She turns toward the door.
I step back fast, pulling into the shadow near an empty supply alcove.
Deacon moves with me, silent as guilt. The woman leaves Cal’s room and walks down the hall without looking our way.
She carries herself carefully, every step measured, but her shoulders shake once before she gets control of them.
I follow.
Deacon stays behind me.
He could stop me. He does not.
The woman takes the hallway to the small chapel near the older wing, the one I passed earlier and ignored because I have never understood how people can pray in hospitals without feeling like they are bargaining with a locked door. She pushes inside, and the door whispers shut behind her.
I stand outside it with my pulse in my throat.
“What the hell was that?” I ask.
Deacon’s face is unreadable in the dim hall.
“Reva…”
“No. Don’t say my name like that. Who is that woman?”
His jaw tightens, and fear laced with suspicion arrives. Slow. Insidious. A dark bloom spreading through my chest.
“Who is she, Deacon?”
He does not answer fast enough.
I push through the chapel door.
The room is small, with rows of wooden pews, a few electric candles trembling near a simple cross, and stained glass gone black with night.
It smells faintly of wax, old hymnals, and lemon cleaner, because even holy rooms in hospitals have to be disinfected.
The woman kneels in the front pew with her head bowed and her hands clasped tightly.
I stay near the back.
Anger gives me a spine when the floor feels unreliable.
She is praying. Or trying to. Her mouth moves without sound.
Once, her hand lifts to press against her chest, and the motion pulls at something in me because I know it.
I do not know from where. A memory without a picture.
A gesture seen through a child’s eyes, filed away with a kitchen, a hallway, someone humming in another room.
I slide into the last pew, and the wood creaks. The woman stills.
I should speak first. I have earned that much. I should ask why she was in Cal’s room, why she touched him, why he never told me about her, why she said ‘her’ like I was a package he failed to deliver.
But my mouth will not work.
The woman rises slowly. One hand closes around the end of the pew as she steps into the aisle. She turns and sees me.
Everything in her stops.
One foot misses the next step. Her hand shoots out for the pew again, fingers closing hard around the wood. Her face loses all its careful neutrality.
I stand because my body knows something before my mind does. The anger falls away so abruptly I have nothing under it. No plan. No words. No air.
She looks at my hair first.
Then my eyes.
Then my mouth, like she is reading a face she has carried in the dark for longer than I have been alive enough to hate her.
Her own mouth trembles, and her fingertips brush her lips.
“Reva?”
My name does not sound like a question. It sounds like fifteen years of being locked behind her teeth.
I stare at her, the chapel tilting beneath me.
No.
My mind says it once, without sound.
No.
Because I have seen pictures. Haven’t I? Old ones. Burned edges in memory. A face behind smoke. A sheet on a floor. My mother was dead. My mother died in that house. My mother was one of the shapes beneath white fabric while a police officer carried me past and told me not to look.
The woman takes one step toward me.
I step back so fast my hip bangs painfully into the pew.
She stops at once.
“Don’t,” I say.
The word scrapes out of me, small and vicious. Her eyes fill, but she does not reach again.
She lifts one hand toward her mouth, then drops it, as if even covering her own grief feels like taking too much. “I’m sorry.”
No. Those words are worse. Sorry belongs to late bills and missed calls and stepping on someone’s foot in a grocery aisle. It does not belong in the space between a dead mother and a daughter standing in a hospital chapel with her heart trying to claw through her ribs.
“How do you know my name?”
She swallows, the fingers of one hand circling the wrist of the other absently, and that’s when the room truly starts coming apart.
“Wh-what…why are you doing that?” I point to her hand.
She jerks her hand away. “It’s just a habit.”
The same dark hair. The same shape around the eyes. Older, thinner, grief-carved, but there. There. In the angle of her cheek, in the soft curve of her mouth, in the way her left brow lifts higher than the right because mine does that too when I am trying not to cry.
I press both hands against the back of the pew to keep from reaching for my own wrist. Just a habit.
Stupid.
Stupid.
I ask her again. “How do you know my name?”
The woman’s voice shakes. “Because I gave it to you.”