Page 27 of The Next Lie

I counted because I am the kind of man who monitors the collapse of his own empire.

Seven minutes of focus before she tore a piece of notebook paper from the corner of a page, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it toward the trash can across the room.

It missed by a foot. She stared at it. Then at the trash can.

Then she whispered something I could not hear, though the shape of her mouth looked a lot like, “Pathetic.”

She made another ball. Missed again.

“Girllll,” she said to herself, louder this time, “that one’s dead, but sure, let’s see how many we can kill.”

I smiled. That was my first mistake. The second was staying for the show.

Reva tried four more shots. Missed three. Landed one by pure accident and threw both arms in the air like she had won a championship, acted like it was on life support, and proceeded to give it mouth to mouth.

Then she went back to studying.

For approximately five minutes.

After that, she picked up her phone.

TikTok, because apparently all roads to hell are paved with short-form video. She scrolled with the grim commitment of a woman doing research and not at all avoiding responsibility. A video made her laugh. Not a delicate laugh. Not pretty. A full, loud, ridiculous burst that turned into a snort and then into something dangerously close to a hyena.

Someone upstairs pounded on the floor. Reva looked at the ceiling. Then she barked.

Actually barked. Sharp. Loud. Completely unrepentant.

I stared at the screen. Then I laughed too.

That was the moment the line moved.

No ceremony. No grand temptation. No wicked voice in my head telling me to cross it. Just a young woman in ghost socks, barking at her upstairs neighbor, and me realizing I had stopped seeing the child who survived.

She was alive.

Not an assignment. Not a secret tucked away between Cal’s reports and my old sins. Not a ward, though I had used that word in my head for years because it sounded clean enough to stand near.

Reva Leigh Hart was a woman.

Messy. Sharp. Funny in a way that made no sense. Studying to save lives with one hand while throwing paper balls like an enemy combatant with the other.

I shut the feed off.

Fast. Too fast, as if speed could somehow change my epiphany.

For weeks afterward, I did not look again unless I had a reason I could defend under torture. Building alarms. A stranger near her door. Cal asking me to check a license plate. I kept distance because distance was the only form of morality left to me. I told myself concern had limits.

It did. I simply did not like where mine had ended.

Because concern was no longer the thing I had to fear.

CHAPTER SIX

DEACON

I finish the bourbon and set the glass down on Nash’s desk before the memory can drag me any further.

Too late.