44. Ivy
FORTY-FOUR
IVY
I woke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Yet, somehow, I was still hot despite the droplets clinging to my brow.
And strong arms were wrapped gently around me.
Coyote snored softly in his sleep, undisturbed by the warmth between us. I didn’t want to wake him as I wriggled free, but I shouldn’t have worried.
Man slept like the dead.
I wasn’t whole yet; sleep couldn’t fix the brokenness inside me. The only thing that could do that was answers. And those answers were buried with my father and the men he’d worked with that I killed in short order as I searched for the Neon Dogs. Men I thought had wronged a kind man.
Turned out, they’d just done what I’d been doing all along. They killed a man who didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as the rest of us.
But something in me refused to reconcile the man I’d known with the man I was beginning to suspect him to have been. Something in me still held out hope that they were wrong, that something was missing, that this wasn’t really him I was looking at.
I needed to know the truth, but to do that, I had to figure out who had ordered the hit.
And that was classified. Not even the Dogs knew who their client had been.
That information was between God and Lilly St. Clair. But could they convince her to divulge that information?
I slinked over to his bathroom and pilfered a robe from the hook by the door, covering myself so I didn’t freeze as I slipped out of his room and into the commons. I didn’t expect to find Dingo passed out on the couch, his arms slung over the back like he’d been waiting for someone.
Maybe me.
I stopped behind him and brushed a stray lock of his hair from his face, studying the lines at the edges of his eyes where life had etched memories into his skin.
The corner of his lips twitched subtly as I caressed the side of his jaw, revealing he wasn’t as asleep as I first thought.
“You finally get away from Coyote?”
The silence between us dragged on until I coughed, deciding I couldn’t stay quiet forever. “Yeah. It got a little hot. He’s like a personal furnace sometimes.”
“We’ve shared a few watch shifts for targets before. He runs hotter than a furnace in winter.” His hands grazed my shoulders as he stretched his arms upward, that playful smile he always wore strangely absent. “You, ah, want the couch?”
I tried for a soft smile but missed the mark entirely. “I don’t think I can sleep right now.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
There was no need to dignify that question with an answer. Instead, I just shot him a pointed glare and marched into the kitchen, divesting the fridge of a bottled water.
“How long are you going to stay mad at us?”
I wasn’t going to give him my attention, but that assumption hooked me and reeled me in like an unsuspecting fish. I turned back to the living room and leaned against the counter, the robe gaping a little. “Who said I’m mad at you?”
“The behavior implies you’d be upset. And if not at us, then who?”
“You were just a catalyst. The people behind the hit are who I should be upset with, no?”
Technically, that was only partially true. Who I should really be upset with was a man who was long dead and buried. These men had made sure he’d gotten his just desserts.
“That’s confidential,” a voice said snarkily from the doorway, stepping into the room with all the swagger of a man who didn’t just force a woman to her knees in the pouring rain in a dingy alley with brain matter still clinging to her dress. “And if you think you’ll get St. Clair to give up anything, you’re smoking better rocks than Bonnie and Clyde were.”
“Nobody asked you, Jackal,” Dingo huffed from the cough, the leather creaking beneath his bulky frame as he stood and crossed his arms.
“What, can I not speak in my own home now, Dingo?” His eyes drifted to me, assessing me up and down. “She must not be too broken, considering she’s wearing one of Coyote’s bathrobes.”
There was no conscious decision to snap. The act itself was more of a final culmination of all the things he’d said from the moment I first laid eyes on him. Jackal was, for all intents and purposes, comedic relief in the body of an asshole. And he seemed determined to piss me off until there was no other choice but to gut him for the sake of my sanity.
So, of course, I couldn’t validate his need for attention by giving it to him. Instead, I just walked past him into his bedroom, shoved him out, and closed and locked the door, grinning to myself as he pounded on the barrier between us, shouting for me to let him in.
He could get fucked. And not by me this time.
I ignored his increasingly arrogant, sarcastic, and mean remarks from the other side of the door as I moved easily to the bathroom and turned on the hot water, pleased that it’d returned to a scalding temperature while I slept. His bathtub filled slowly, and while I waited, I took in my reflection in his floor-length mirror.
My cheeks were a bit gaunt, my eyes sunken in and red from the crying. I had scrapes and scratches here and there from the rough treatment in the alley, as well as a neat little bruise forming under my ribcage from where I’d fallen over the back of the couch as I wrestled Jackal for the TV remote.
I’d looked better. But there had been a few weeks, months, even, where I’d looked much worse. So I’d take it .
I soaked in the hot bath until the water turned cold, and was in the middle of drying off my hair at the edge of Jackal’s bed when the door swung open and he marched in with a determined look on his face, threw me over his shoulder, and carried me out into the living room.
My ass hit the couch with a thud, and I protested until Coyote’s arm moved around to rest along the couch behind my head. On my other side, Dingo sat there watching me like he half expected me to start laughing again.
I wasn’t entirely sure I wouldn’t.
Jackal cleared his throat and drew all our attention to him. Legs splayed, he held a manilla folder in his hand that looked vaguely familiar. When he slapped it down on the coffee table in front of me, I knew why.
It was my father’s hit file.
Their contract.
“How?” I whispered, reaching out almost far enough to touch it before I instinctively curled back in on myself. “Why?”
He was wordless as he tugged my backpack off the floor and dumped it on the coffee table next to the file. Out fell the notebook, as well as a few odds and ends I’d packed for a just-in-case moment. As we gaped at those finds, he tossed the stupid infinity pin at me, and as I caught it, he set down a single, final item to join the rest.
The flash drive.
It must’ve fallen out of my dress when I was getting ready for the shower with Coyote. Or maybe I’d lost it on my way into the apartment.
Either way, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what was on it anymore.
“Why are you dragging these things out?” I set the infinity pendant down with trembling fingers, recoiling from the whole lot of items like they might bite me. “Aren’t you scared I’ll still kill you? ”
He crossed his arms and grinned. “If you were gonna kill us, kitten, you would’ve done it ages ago. You’re just stalling to avoid the truth: a couple of wild dogs have started to grow on you.” His eyes challenged mine, but he dropped them to the floor almost out of nowhere in a show of submission. “You’re not the only one around here who can break into Lilly’s office and get away with it. Might be the ballsiest, but I’ve got experience.”
I blinked stupidly down at the file. “You knew I’d go after it eventually.”
“We did,” Dingo murmured, “but we hoped to shield you from it for as long as possible.”
My brows creased as I continued to stare daggers in the direction of the file. “Why would you do that?”
Coyote inched forward, his free hand settling on my chin as he tugged me away from the folder to look at him. “Because I asked them to.” Those eyes darkened as he flitted that gaze from one side of my face to the other, something hiding in their depths. “Because I knew you’d come for us one day.”
Suddenly, Mr. Silence was all words all the time. “So you do know how to put more than two words together in a sentence, huh?”
I was deflecting. He knew it. I knew it. Everyone in this room with ears and eyeballs fucking knew it.
What I didn’t know, though, was that he’d lean over and pull me into his lap like I was a rag doll, his broad chest warm against my palms as I braced myself from falling head-first.
His hands moved to cup the curve of my elbows, holding me in place as he pinned me with a glare. Coyote had always been so unassuming, so calm, I’d never expected him to lose control like this, let alone in front of the others. He moved with a purpose, watching my reactions as he cleared his throat and his lips parted.
“I could start fires with what I feel for you, Ivy. And I didn’t want to see you hurt. We’ve already?— ”
“Shut up, Coyote,” Jackal growled, his eyes cutting to his friend over my head. “Don’t say another word.”
Like a firecracker touched by a match, I went off, launching myself off Coyote’s lap to throw a fist square at the side of Jackal’s nose. “You mind your damn business for once,” I spat, shaking out my now-throbbing knuckles as I settled back on my Coyote-shaped chair.
“You’re hurt,” he swore softly, reaching for my injured fist.
“Shouldn’t you be more concerned about me?” Jackal spat, cupping his nose as red gushed down the front of his mouth. The effect it had on his mouthful of sharp fangs was interesting, to say the least. “She punched me, not the other way around.”
It shouldn’t have turned me on as much as it did.
“What are you so afraid of, Jackal?” Coyote said as he leaned over my shoulder and ran his fingertips over my red fingers, checking them for breaks or other damage. Fortunately for me, most of the damage was done to the other party. I escaped rather much unharmed.
Jackal, on the other hand, was beginning to drip all over the floor, and Dingo’s inner neat freak started to twitch at the sight of it staining the rug.
He didn’t even bother to hold his hand over it now, or under it, either. He just stood there, letting blood stream from his nose like he didn’t even notice it, staring at me with hatred in his eyes.
Good. If you hate me, then I don’t have to worry when ? —
When I what?
He was right, damn him; I wasn’t going to kill them. I don’t know when the change happened, when the shift fell in place, when I stopped hating him long enough to see the good bits in him. In all of them, really. I’d listened to Dingo as he told me about his siblings in Covenant Hollow, who went to Catholic School while he sent his mother money from his earnings to keep their tuition paid. When Jackal told me about how they found Coyote in the woods like some Jungle Book, Tarzan kind of shit, and how he ran with him on the streets and they banded together, I filed that information away, knowing it was important to them. They knew plenty about me already, but occasionally, they’d ask about my life after the incident, and I’d tell them. Dingo got a kick out of the story about me stabbing a guy in the hand with a fork for grabbing my ass over the bar. Coyote listened like he hung on every boring ass word. And Jackal seemed to open up and let his curiosity out to play when we drank to celebrate a hit.
I’d learned how to work with them, learned how to compliment their patterns and habits, and subconsciously, I’d morphed into a new version of myself.
The problem with that was she wasn’t the Ivy I was used to being. She was a more vulnerable, trusting Ivy. And I knew what happened to people like her. They got hurt.
Over and over again. By the same people she extended her trust to.
She was the part of me who kept feeding that stray even when he clawed me as I pushed a can of food out the window. The part that had extended a deal to the guys when I could have just killed them then and there with no regret, and now I wouldn’t be sitting here with a broken heart and a wounded soul, confused, scared, and sad.
She was the part of me that kept me from carrying out the biggest mistake of my life.
But tough Ivy was the part of me I needed now. She was the part who kept me from getting hurt when I walked away. She kept my back straight and my head held high when I retreated to lick my wounds.
And she was the part of me that would help me close this chapter of my life.
Jackal spit a gob of blood on the floor at his feet, his eyes still cutting to mine as he turned his head slightly. I watched the movement of his brows as he wiped the corner of his mouth and under his nose with the back of his hand, only succeeding in smearing the bits that hadn’t dried yet.
“You need to come to terms with this shit, Ivy, and fast. I don't want you going batshit every time something makes you doubt yourself.”
He turned his back to the room and stalked off, slamming his bedroom door in his wake as he went to clean himself up, I assumed.
Dingo cleared his throat and ran a hand through his curls, the sigh escaping him so deep and soulful it conjured images of a bottomless pit in my mind. The meaning sat between us, heavy and still, a hurdle I wasn’t sure I could clear.
Could I step across that chasm and venture into the unknown? Was I strong enough to confront their feelings about me? Was I honest enough with myself to admit how I’d begun to feel?
Was I ready to rebuild myself as something new?
Did I even want to?
I curled up on the couch and refused any sort of comfort as I stared at the folder, asking to be left alone for a while. The other two obliged, their doors closing like some ominous ending being declared louder than the winner of a boxing match.
The color manilla burned into my retinas. By the time the sun rose in the kitchen window, I was beginning to nod off, but I had an idea forming in my head.
Staring holes into a file that held the darkest, nastiest secrets you could imagine, about someone who’d been so close to you that you couldn’t imagine them hurting others those ways, twisted you sometimes. But it also gave me a thing to focus on. Something to distract me when I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts and feelings.
Only one person left alive could tell me who hated my father so much, who knew him well enough, intimately enough, to have the kind of evidence the Guild did. Who wouldn’t have thought twice about hiring someone to take him out. Whoever it was, they had to be so close to him that he would trust them implicitly.
The only person I knew who was that close with my father was . . . my mother.
And I hadn’t spoken to her in years.
I couldn’t wait for them to wake up. I had to go now, while I knew I was still brave enough to ask the questions I needed to close this door. If I didn’t walk out that door right now with the intention of confronting my mother for what she knew, I’d never have the gumption or the will to go to her again.
It needed to be now.
I threw Coyote’s leather coat over my shoulder as I lifted Jackal’s bat off the floor and grabbed Dingo’s bike key from the hook on the wall, stealing a part of each of them before stuffing the notebook, the contract file, and the pin and USB drive into the backpack and zipped it shut. And then, I opened the door, snuck out like a thief in the daylight, and rushed down the stairs, not daring to look back until I was safely in the parking garage, kick-starting Dingo’s dirtbike with a roar of protest.
I could have even sworn I heard someone yelling after me as I peeled out of the drive and sped down the street, one destination in mind?—
Home.