Page 26 of The Next Lie

“When she asks you what happened that night, you better think real hard before you decide what kind of lie sounds kindest.”

I say nothing. He opens the door.

“And if you hurt her because you’re too much of a coward to tell the truth,” he adds, looking back at me, “I’ll make whatever Mother Superior did to you look tender.”

Then he leaves, the door closing behind him with a quiet click. For a few seconds, I stand in the middle of his room and listen to the club breathe around me.

Mother Superior.

The name still has power in this city. They use it in whispers. In warnings. In prayers they don’t call prayers because criminals like to think they are too big for religion.

They are not.

They worship all the time. Money. Blood. Power. Fear. Themselves.

Mother Superior understood that better than anyone. She knew faith was just loyalty dressed in ritual. She knew pain could be made holy if you dressed it in candles and rules.

My back aches.

It has no reason to. The scars are old. The flesh healed years ago. Still, some wounds hear her name and remember the heat.

I cross to the liquor cabinet, key in the code to open it, and pour two fingers of Nash’s best bourbon into a glass.

I don’t ask permission. Fuck his permission.

The first swallow burns clean.

Nineteen.

The first time I allowed myself to lay eyes on Reva after that night, she was sitting at her cheap kitchen table in her Chicago apartment, her hair piled on top of her head and a pen caught between her teeth.

I had told myself it was a check-in.

That was all.

One of Cal’s usual security sweeps had bothered me. A camera near the building entrance had gone down for thirty-three minutes. Brief enough to be nothing. Long enough to be everything. Cal handled it before I could even send word, but the itch stayed under my skin. So I did what I had not allowed myself to do a single time over the years.

I looked.

The apartment feed, installed by Cal when she moved in, was somehow crystal clear and illegal, which described half my life at that point. I expected an empty room. Maybe a glimpse of Cal’s latest rotation through the hallway. Maybe Reva passing through with groceries, still a shape I filed away under childish duty and moved on from before the thought could become anything else.

Instead, she sat in front of a laptop wearing an oversized sweatshirt with the sleeves shoved to her elbows, her dark hair in a messy bun that looked one pencil away from collapse. Papers spread across the table. Flash cards. A textbook open beside a mug of coffee gone cold. She chewed the end of a pen and glared at the screen as if the information had personally offended her.

I remember the stupid details.

The chipped blue polish on one thumbnail.

The fuzzy socks with little ghosts on them.

The way she mouthed words to herself while reading, then caught herself doing it and scowled like she had lost an argument with her own face.

The course was for EMT training. I knew that because the page title sat in the corner of the screen and because Cal had mentioned it in one of his clipped messages. She wanted to help people. He had sounded equal parts proud and terrified.

I should have closed the feed after confirming she was safe.

Instead, I watched.

She studied for seven minutes.