40. Ivy
FORTY
IVY
I was on autopilot as I entered the bank my father had frequented all his life. Hell, the only reason I still held a box here when I cleaned out my accounts and fled my old life was because he’d paid for it. Just in case you ever have a secret to hide or something to protect, he’d told me when he handed me the key on my sixteenth birthday.
I didn’t understand back then. But I’d come to understand it the day my mother cleaned out every possession he’d ever touched and discarded his memory like a plague-infected corpse.
There were three things in this box that I couldn’t afford to part with. And until now, I hadn’t been back since I put them in there and walked away.
The teller at the front desk gave me a strange look when I walked up to her window, but she remembered her training at the last minute and smiled pleasantly, offering me a generic greeting as she silently judged me.
“Welcome to Dreadwater Bank. Can I help you with something, Miss?”
I watched her nails tap against the keyboard of her computer as she pretended to pay attention to me, her fake, plastered smile never wavering. I tugged my key from the bag I’d slung over my shoulder as I fled the Guild and slid it across the desk to her, my eyes as indifferent as the wind outside.
“I need to access my safe deposit box, thank you.”
My voice was icy, rigid, and not at all myself. I felt the mask of humanity slipping from my face as the lost girl rose back to the surface, afraid?—
Afraid of what? I had nothing to fear. I would pull the notebook from the box, and I’d see there were no pages missing. Or that the cursive didn’t match up. And then things would be clear again. I would confirm the contract information was faked and kill the person behind it before I killed the Neon Dogs.
Simple. Efficient. Guaranteed.
So why was I so afraid that I’d find something else?
“I’ll need to see some identification, ma’am,” the receptionist said like she was repeating it for someone stupid. I realized she must’ve already said this, and I was too far gone to hear her.
I fought to get the mask back in place and tried for a smile that didn’t feel stiff or threatening.
“Of course,” I said in my most pleasant tone. “Right here.”
I handed over the ID card and birth certificate, watching nervously as she examined them like they might’ve been forgeries. Like she expected them to be.
Bitch.
I danced from foot to foot, nervous and growing cold thanks to the rain that had settled into my clothes as I fled the South End. I could tell my hair was dripping on the floor, but I didn’t care. Let some unfortunate janitor clean it up later. I had bigger fish to fry.
Like getting to the bottom of this shit.
“Follow me, Miss Cullough,” she said as she handed me back the documents, my ID, and the key I’d given her.
Wordlessly, I moved my feet, shuffling along behind her as she led me across the room and motioned for a guard and a floor manager. After they exchanged a few words, I was led into the vault in the back hall and left alone, standing in front of the box he’d pulled from the wall of identical metal tombs.
The Wall of Secrets, my father had called it once. Each one of those boxes held something secret, someone’s whole life, their future, their escape, or perhaps their doom. You never knew what was in the box; not even the bank itself knew what was in them. The list of items they contained was submitted directly to an insurance company in case of structure damage or loss, and the insurance company submitted that to the bank with the items redacted.
Only I and the insurance company knew the contents of this room—and in the case of my box, not even the insurance company knew. I signed a waiver recusing the bank of any fault or reparations should my box ever be destroyed, lost, or stolen.
After all, the things inside were only important to me and me alone.
With a deep breath expanding my lungs, I glanced over my shoulder one more time and slipped the key into the lock, turning it slowly. A sense of foreboding, of destiny, permeated the air, and I winced as I wondered if it might smother me before I was able to learn the truth.
Would it kill me? Would it take over me and remove my ability to breathe? Would it suffocate me?
The lid popped open with a little click and I held my breath, lifting the lid carefully, like I was afraid a snake had magically appeared inside this locked box and was about to snap out and bite me. Poison me.
But that was just silly.
I almost hallucinated a fucking cobra the second I flipped the lid completely open, but I blinked, and it was gone, like it had never been there in the first place.
Which it hadn’t.
Great. Just what I needed tonight: a mental breakdown. I hadn’t had one of these in years.
There was no telling what form it might take if I completely snapped.
Last time I snapped, I woke up weeks later in a mental ward, strapped to a bed and doped up to keep me from hurting myself.
It’d taken a week and a half to leech the drugs from my system, and a month after that to prove I was still in one piece to the shrink so he’d let me leave.
I’d immediately gone home and slept on the floor of my father’s study, the bookshelf shoved in front of the door so my mother couldn’t have one of the guards drag me out later.
And I bawled until there was no water left in my body, til I felt like a salt block in the winds of the salt flats. I cried until there were no tears left and the only sounds in the whole house were my heart-wrenching sobs as I struggled with the fact that I was now short a parent, my favorite parent, my fucken hero.
I never told anyone that I witnessed him being turned to shavings of flesh on the pavement of our driveway. I never told a soul what I witnessed that day. And I never would.
Never.
My hands shook as I lifted the notebook from the metal box it had sat in since my father’s murder, opening it like one would a book they’d forgotten about ages ago.
The handwriting was eerily similar to the page I’d seen in the office, but without a side-by-side comparison or a handwriting specialist, I couldn’t rule out forgery.
Deny.
I turned page after page, recognizing the familiar shorthand from the notes taken on the missing page.
Line after line, row after row, page after page, the names of flowers appeared on each listing, along with dollar amounts, dates, initials, and other notes at the end. Lilly, Dahlia, Peony, Tulip, and more and more, one after the other in that neat, compact scrawl.
And then I reached the end, and nothing was missing. No pages that had seemed to be ripped out, torn away in haste.
I flipped backward through the pages, feeling relief washing over me. I knew my father wasn’t guilty. Knew he hadn’t done the things they claimed he had. If that paper were real, there would be a page ripped out of this notebook, a sheet with remnants left behind in its wake?—
And then, as if hearing my celebration and deciding it was unworthy, a page flipped and caught on the wind, revealing a torn sheet’s shadow behind. Just a thin line of ripped paper, yellowed from age and missing the majority of its substance, lingering against the spine of the inside of the book. Mocking me, mocking my happiness, my relief .
Look again, bitch, it seemed to say, like it knew that it was single-handedly dashing all my hopes and confirming all my deepest fears. Like it was aware of itself, sentient, a ghost of my father and I’s past that had come back to haunt me for sport.
Did it know it was shattering me?
Did it know it was breaking my heart?
I shivered and reached into the box again, pulling the pin from my seventeenth birthday out next.
My mother insisted the thing was evil, a sign of allegiance to something I didn’t understand, but when my father handed me the pretty gem-encrusted infinity symbol, telling me one day I could wear it, too, she’d been silenced by his stern glare and the presence of his guards nearby. At the time, I hadn’t understood why she hated this little thing so much. Why it unnerved her to see her daughter pin it to her chest, wearing it proudly as if to say she was her father’s daughter, showing the world who she adored the most, who she belonged to.
Now, the malice, the real, true meaning behind it sank in as I remembered his henchmen wearing a similar one on their own jackets. I remembered the day he gave one to Benni, his assistant, and his business partner, Tode. I remembered the glee in their eyes, the greed and unfiltered lust as they leered over the gems and preened when he slipped it on them. Like a king bestowing knighthood on his most trusted men.
Like a leader rewarding his lackeys for their unwavering loyalty.
I clutched the pin so hard in my hand, my fingers tighter with every second, that blood dropped onto the floor from my knuckles. Slipped between my fingers, ran down my palm like a river of betrayal.
I paid it no mind as I lifted my hands and pinned that fucking symbol to my dress strap, hating it and relishing the things it would witness in the same breath. I knew that from here on out, anything that happened could only be blamed on the men who’d broken me.
My father, for living a lie, and putting me dead center of it. His partners, his accomplices, for keeping his silence and allowing a man like that to raise a daughter when he was stealing someone else’s and killing them. Drugging them.
Raping them.
And the Neon Dogs, for allowing me to believe a lie for so long, and then ripping the bandage off, only to slap it back on when their lives were on the line, and let me live in denial. For hiding the truth from me when it would have been so easy just to shatter the lies I’d built up around me as the truth.
And for destroying my peace in the first place.
How dare they take my life from me?
Even if that life was a lie.
It was my lie.
But . . .
I cackled and reached back into the box one last time, removing the final item with a low chuckle.
How ironic that the last thing I’d locked away was now destined to be the beginning of my new future.
With an unhinged cackle, I tucked the notebook into my bag, zipped it up, and strode out of the room, tossing the key to the waiting bank manager.
“Keep that,” I shot at him over my shoulder, dripping blood in my wake as I strode across the lobby. “I have no more secrets I need to hide.”
There was nothing left to protect. Not my life before this, not the lies I’d lived, not even my own sanity.
Let the world burn. Mine was over, anyhow.