Page 47 of The Next Lie

He doesn’t move to touch me, but I can feel the heat radiating off him. It’s a physical weight, a pressure that keeps me from shattering. He’s standing close enough that if I leaned back an inch, I’d hit his chest.

I want to lean. I want to disappear into the broad, tattooed expanse of him and pretend that none of this is real.

“It’s just the cold,” I lie.

New Orleans in the afternoon is never cold. It’s a humid, suffocating oven, but inside this house, the temperature feels like it’s dropped twenty degrees. It’s the kind of chill that comes from the ground up, the kind that settles in your joints and makes you feel old.

“It isn’t the cold, firefly.”

His hand moves then, slow and careful, his fingers brushing against the back of my arm. He doesn’t wrap his hand around me. He just anchors me. His touch is rough, calloused from years of work I try not to think about, but it’s the steadiest thing in this rotting world.

I reach for the doorknob.

The brass is tarnished, turning a dull, sickly green. It’s cold—colder than the air, colder than the wood. I turn it, the mechanism grinding with a screech that echoes down the hallway like a dying animal.

The door swings open, and the smell hits me first.

It isn’t rot. It isn’t mildew.

It’s cedar.

Faint, ghostly, but unmistakable. Beneath it is the scent of my mother’s wool coats, a heavy, comforting smell that has no business being here after fifteen years of abandonment.

I step inside the small space, empty now of my dad's shoes, my mother's clothing. I snap my rubber bands on my wrist. Once. Twice.

It’s dark, the only light coming from the room where Ever stands like a monolith. I sink to the floor, my knees hitting the hardwood with a dull thud. My breath is coming in ragged, shallow gasps, the kind of respiration I’ve seen a hundred times in the back of the rig.

Panic.

Hypoxia of the soul.

I press my back against the rear wall, my hands opening and closing against the dusty floor.

“I thought it would be different,” I whisper, my voice breaking. “I thought I’d see something. Feel something. I don’t know.”

Ever is on the floor in an instant.

He’s too big for this space, his shoulders nearly brushing the sides of the closet, but he doesn’t seem to care. He drops down beside me, his presence taking up all the air in the small room. He doesn’t offer a platitude. He doesn’t tell me it’s going to be okay. He just reaches out and takes my hands in his, pinning them against my thighs before I can start raking my nails across my skin.

“Look at me,” he commands.

It isn’t a suggestion. It’s an order, delivered with the flat, unblinking intensity that makes Ever Rousseau the most terrifying of the three.

I look.

His eyes are dark, nearly black in the shadows of the closet, but they are focused. They are the only thing in this house that aren't decaying.

“Breathe, Reva. Four counts in. Four counts out. Do it now.”

I try to follow the rhythm, but my lungs feel like they’re full of broken glass. The memories are hitting me now—not as images, but as sensations. The phone pressed to my ear. The 911 operator’s voice, thin and far away, telling me to stay quiet. The ache in my knees from crouching too long. My hand clamped over my mouth so no sound could get out.

Stay quiet, sweet girl. Help is coming.

But before that⁠—

Before the closet⁠—

“He was here,” I choke out, my eyes fixed on the doorframe.