45. Ivy
FORTY-FIVE
IVY
Lies. That was what came to mind when I pulled into the familiar driveway of the house where I’d grown up. Where I’d been groomed as Daddy’s Little Angel. Where I’d lived a lie, never knowing the sinister things that went on behind closed doors.
When I walked out years ago, I swore to my mother that I would never come back. Told her she was dead to me.
Now, I just hoped I didn’t have to kill anyone to get on the grounds and into her presence.
Guards at the front gate had stopped me, then waved me on when I said I was the young mistress Cullough.
I hated that title.
Growing up, it was always young miss this and young miss that. Never my fucking name. But now, the title helped accomplish what my mere presence couldn’t.
Access.
I was stopped by a second set of guards at the front door, and without preamble, they demanded I disarm myself. I refused, knowing to walk in that house unarmed would be the death of me.
And that’s when all hell broke loose.
The first one charged me, so I took him out with a well-placed swing to the temple. Guard number two was a bit more reluctant to give in, so I gave him a little help and tagged him in the back of the head, feeling very much like a comic book villain come to life.
The third guard got the jump on me, but I was faster, and when I recovered from the hit to the back he’d delivered, I rolled and came up too close for him to swing, then slammed the end of the bat’s handle into the base of his skull.
Three guards out cold, and who knew how many more to go. Things were going swimmingly so far.
“Stop right there!”
A man holding a pistol in shaky hands stood in the front entryway, staring me down like he thought he could bluff his way into getting me to back down. I could tell by the way he hesitated, how his hands shook around that gun, that even if he did grow the balls to fire it, the damn shot would go wildly askew.
Something about him looked strangely familiar. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I’d seen that face before.
And then I heard the voice I never thought I’d hear again.
“Ivy?”
Even after years, after all the things I’d done to change my appearance, the ways I’d altered who I was as a person, my mother could still pick me out like?—
Well, like she’d birthed me.
Which she had.
“Surprise, Ma, I’m home.” My laugh was hollow and brittle, icy, with just a hint of the desperation I clung tightly to. “Bet you didn’t expect to see me again.”
My mother looked every day of her fifty-six years of age as she stepped forward beside the man with the gun, putting her hand on his arm to force the barrel pointed at me to the floor. “It’s okay, Roscoe. It’s my daughter. She’s come home.”
She sounded . . . surprised. And maybe a little pleased? It was hard to tell. I didn’t remember my mother ever being pleased growing up. She always looked so sour, so pissed, so . . . hopeless.
Until my father died. Then, the bitch in her emerged. She was suddenly more outspoken, ruthless, and hateful. It was like everything that reminded her of my father had to go.
Now, knowing what I knew, if she’d had any inkling of his illicit businesses, I couldn’t blame her. But I had to know.
“Got time for a little chat?”
We sat in the parlor, me with a bat propped against my boots, Mom with a cup of tea in her hand, provided by the ever-dutiful Roscoe.
I knew where I’d seen his face before. He had been my mother’s driver for years when I was growing up. And now, as he hovered beside my mother, I could see what I’d never noticed before today: the attention he paid her was more than just a devoted driver. He was in love.
And judging from the way her eyes always flitted to him when she wasn’t focused on something else, he wasn’t the only one.
Ew.
My mother’s head tilted as she set her teacup on the stand beside her, her long legs crossed, elegant and poised as she’d always been, even at her worst. “What brings you back to a place you swore you’d never return?”
I cringed as I realized I wasn’t the only one here who could hold a grudge. There was so much malice, so much anger, lacing the words that fell from her mouth; it was like I was a child again, trying desperately to come up with a good enough reason why I failed at something she considered beneath me.
My fingers found the handle of Jackal’s bat, and I caressed it, the warm wood like an anchor. “I have questions. And you’re the only one I know who can answer them.”
Her eyes flashed with— fear. “I’m not sure I can give you what you’re looking for.”
I shook my head, remembering how saddened she’d been when I screamed in her face the day she tried to clear my father’s presence out of the house.
You can’t take him away from me! He’s my father! I love him, and I always will!
Oh, how na?ve I’d been.
“I know, Mom,” I said quietly, the words steady and yet somehow still hesitant. “Enough to know I was wrong.”
I felt like a fucking worm on a hook as she stared at me, her eyes widening, the gaze within them softening to something akin to pity.
I didn’t want her pity.
I wanted the truth.
I lifted the backpack from the floor and pulled out the notebook, slapping it noisily on the coffee table between us. “I’ve had this for a long time, and until now, I stupidly believed it was an order tracker for his flower garden.” My hands shook as I pulled out the flash drive and plugged it into an adapter, sliding that into the port on my phone as I placed it on the table and waited for the data to load.
“Your father was your hero,” she started slowly, but I held up a hand to cut her off.
“He shouldn’t have been.” I set the pin on the table next. “Do you remember the day he gave this to me?”
Her eyes drifted shut as she nodded, a hitch in her next breath. “I begged him not to, but he wouldn’t listen. He was so convinced he could raise you to be his successor.”
“He gave it to me and said I could be the next leader of our family.” I casually lifted the marble statue on the table, twisting it as I tested its weight. “Now that I know what the leader of our house was up to, I want nothing to do with it.”
I brought the marble figurine down on the damned thing, shattering the bejeweled pin into a dozen pieces. Shards of metal and gemstone scattered as Roscoe flinched away from my blatant display of aggression, his eyes drifting to the gun my mother had set on the table in the entryway to her parlor.
“I found a page of this notebook, a single page that someone ripped from it a long, long time ago.” I pulled the folder out next from the backpack of secrets, setting it down facing my mother. “ Someone took notes on it, explaining what it all meant.” I quickly flipped through the photos, watching as she spotted them and looked away. When I came to the page with the actual hit request on it, I shoved it at her, leaning back to cross my arms over my chest.
“I want to know who put the hit on him.”
“Why?”
Her single-word answer sounded miles away, drowned in a sea of desperation, sadness, and sand. I wanted to know so badly why she’d buried his memory so deep. Why she still didn’t even like looking at the horrors, at the atrocities he’d committed. Why she wasn’t interested in finding out what they’d given to the Guild to kill him.
Hell, she didn’t even seem surprised that I’d obtained that file, nor was she curious as to the how.
My eyes narrowed. “It was you.”
It wasn’t a question. No, something deep inside me screamed that I’d known, that I had suspected all along that it might have been her. But no matter how I tried to bury that stupid thought, it reared its head time and time again, the tiny fragment of suspicion lingering in the air like a mist.
She didn’t confirm or deny my accusation, which only cemented my belief that I was right. I watched those long fingers wrap around her teacup’s handle again as she brought it to her lips, calmly sipping that chamomile she used to calm her nerves.
The tiny slurp sound grated against my bones.
“I was his first domestic girl, you know.”
Her eyes were far away, looking past me, through me, to another time and place. A small, very long-dead part of me stirred, feeling shame that I had forced her to tell a story that no doubt would leave her emotionally raw and wounded. But a selfish part of me screamed that I shouldn’t be the only one to hurt. That I couldn’t be the only one who had to face shattered memories and lies .
“He was fresh off a flight from Dublin, Ireland, and looking for some fun. I was up to no good, looking for something to piss off my parents after I got off work. It was a complete coincidence we both picked the same bar for our purposes.”
A tear trickled down her cheek, landing in that half-glass of chamomile tea. Still, she lifted it, oblivious to the added saltiness of the flavor as she sipped and sipped until it was empty, perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to the thoughts in her head.
Or perhaps she longed for something a little stronger.
“When I went to leave the morning after, he promised me I’d be back. And the next day, I was. It went on for weeks, until I’d grown comfortable with him. And then he let down the curtain he’d hung between the him I saw and the true him. By then, it was too late to leave.”
She took a shuddering breath, shaking her head to steel her nerves. Roscoe inched toward her, but she shook her head, clearly not wanting to taint him with the memories she dragged from the depths of hell where she’d buried them.
“He promised me riches if I stayed with him, and, idiot that I was, I believed him. I was shallow, craving the one thing my family had always grown up without: money. So when he started to morph before my very eyes, I stayed, convinced that things would change. That it was only temporary. A side effect of the stress, maybe.”
“You were young,” Roscoe started, but she held a hand in the air and stopped him mid-sentence.
“I was a fool in love with an idea of a better life. And soon enough, he’d trained me into the perfect girl. And when he knew I’d be obedient to him, when he had me believing I owed him everything, he started to whore me out.”
She shivered, tugging the edges of her robe tighter across her torso. Even in this thick leather coat of Coyote’s I shivered alongside her.
He sold my mother to his friends. To his partners. To random strangers rich enough to pay the price he asked to fuck his woman.
“When he started importing girls, he stopped selling me on the side, determined to breed me so he would have a legacy. When you were born a girl, he threatened to kill you and try again.” Her eyes lifted to mine briefly, filled with a burning hatred for a man who could never touch her again, yet still tainted every aspect of her life. “I begged him to let me keep you, and I’d give him a boy on the next try. I sold myself, essentially, any chance of escape, for your life.”
I was floored. The same man who acted as if he were the only person in the world to see me as something special, the man who was my greatest champion, the man who gave the world to me every time I asked for it, had wanted to kill me because I was nothing more than a pawn in his sick game.
“Why am I an only child, then?”
“Because when you were born, I asked them to make it so I could never have another child again.”
So she’d known. She knew that she would never have another child of his.
“You made him a promise you never intended to keep.”
Her nod was solemn. “As long as I kept trying, I could feign ignorance, or take the blame, should he ever find out. Thankfully, he seemed to lose interest after a few years of failure.” She pinched the bridge of her nose and inhaled deeply. “He put me back to work when you turned five.”
And there it was. The reason my mother had drank so much when I was little. The reason she never seemed to go anywhere without a wine goblet in her hands and an afflicted look of disinterest on her face.
Her husband had been selling her body. My father had only seen a single use for her: a sex slave. And when she wasn’t actively producing his heir, she was a toy for others to play with.
My heart broke for her .
She extended a long finger in the direction of my phone, another tear escaping the corner of her eye. “I know you want answers, but I’m begging you not to listen to what’s on that flash drive. It’ll only hurt you more, and it’s not going to give you any answers you’re looking for.”
Which, of course, only made me more curious about what was on that damn drive. But I pulled it from the phone and stuffed it back in my bag, vowing at least to never let her know I still intended to listen.
“Why did you wait until I turned eighteen to put a hit out on him?”
“I thought I could protect you. Things changed. We ran into Lilly St. Clair at a party one night, and after she got me alone, she told me she knew all about his little side gig, and that she’d take care of everything. All she needed was some solid proof.”
There it was. The missing piece of the puzzle. How she’d even known how to have something like that taken care of was beyond me, but it was unsurprising that they might’ve rubbed elbows at fancy dinners and special city events. My father was an influential man in Port Wylde; those circles of the elite and the illegal often overlapped.
But Lilly St. Clair pretended she had no idea who I was when I showed up on her doorstep. She acted like she had no clue she was rubber-stamping my joining the very men who’d been tasked with taking out my father.
She’d known all along. Perhaps even facilitated it, in her own way.
Had she left her room door unlocked intentionally?
So many new questions I’d likely never know the answers to.
Just then, a guard rushed in—one of the assholes who’d tried to keep me from getting inside—and made a beeline for me, a taser in one hand, a set of cuffs in the other. His mouth twisted in a mockery of glee, and then, when he launched himself for my upper half, I leaned down in my seat, letting him fly headfirst over the back of the couch as I brought up the bat to land square in his ballsack as he went.
He lay on the floor, howling in pain as more guards filed in, not all of them sporting injuries from me, but enough of them to make me smile.
Behold, mother, what I’ve turned into.
“Who wants some?” I asked with a grin, turning in place with the bat thrown over one shoulder, begging for someone, anyone, to do something.
For once in my life, I welcomed the physical pain. It meant I could do something other than focus on this bullshit.
“That’ll be enough,” my mother said instead, motioning for them to lower their weapons. “She’s not a threat to me. She’s my daughter.”
There was a mixture of relief, rage, and confusion roiling inside me as I listened to my mother claim me as her own. Even with the bad terms we’d parted on, even with the bullshit I’d put her through, that, even now, knowing what I knew, I couldn’t bring myself to apologize for, she was willing to let bygones be bygones and claim me, welcome me home.
“I’m not staying,” I spat at her, shoving the remainder of the things I’d brought with me back into the backpack in haste. “This doesn’t just undo everything that happened.”
Her soft smile was infuriating. “You can come and go as you please. I can have a room made up for you if you’d like?—”
“I watched him die, you know,” I threw over my shoulder at him in an accusatory tone. “I was in his office when they showed up to murder him. Watched as they took their bats to him and beat him to a pulp. And then I stood in the window and memorized their faces as they put his face to the tire and ripped it to shreds in his own driveway. No matter what kind of scum he was, the truth can’t erase that kind of trauma.”
Her eyes widened in shock.
Yeah. Didn’t know that, did you, Mother ?
“And then I left home and sought out his killers, thinking he’d been wronged.” I let that sink in, let her realize what I must’ve done to find them. “I planned to kill them in revenge. I practiced on other pieces of scum. Captured them. Tortured them. Told them their lives were forfeit. And now I live with them. I work with them. I fuck them, Mom. I gave up any chance at a normal life when I became one of them. And that’s not the sort of thing you walk away from.”
“You joined the Guild?” she asked, her voice climbing an octave. “How?”
“I walked right in, and your friend Lilly St. Clair opened the doors wide with a smile on her face. She even let me shack up with my father’s killers under her own roof.”
If my goal was to hurt her, I’d succeeded. I didn’t know what I expected when I came here. I hadn’t planned to hurt her for what I subconsciously knew she did. I knew now why she did it, and it made sense. But why was there some part of me that yearned to see her as wounded as I was?
I threw the backpack over my shoulder, gave her a two-finger salute at my temple, and flipped the guards the bird. “If you ever need some other scumbag killed, you know where to find us. Just ask for your daughter. I think I’ll call myself the Hyena.”
As if to punctuate my point, I cackled much like I had in the apartment with the guys, and marched right out the doors I’d come in through.
In the driveway, though, there were two guards standing beside Dingo’s dirtbike, and they didn’t seem interested in letting me go without a fight.
Until I swung the bat in their direction menacingly.
I don’t know what direction I even went in when I left the estate. I drove and drove until I ran out of road.
And just like that, I was at the edge of the Dread River. Just like my life, this street was a dead end. And now I had a choice to make .
Do I give up everything I’d been living for, give up the vendetta I held for a man who didn’t deserve my loyalty, and become the very thing that was his downfall?
Was my true calling in life to be a stone-cold killer? Was this all I would ever be? Was there nothing else in life for me but to snuff out the existence of other men like him? Men who crawled in the underbelly of the city and harmed others, climbing to the tops of their ladders no matter who they had to fuck, kill, or ruin along the way?
I lifted the backpack and took out the phone, clicking the fucking flash drive back into place in the port. And when the data had loaded, I clicked play.
The voice clip started to play almost immediately.
“I thought I told you to get rid of her?”
Another voice joined the first—it was my mother, and father, I realized with a start.
“I can’t get rid of her. It’s too late. And even if I could ? —”
“I could shove you down a flight of stairs. That’d fix you right up.”
“Please! I’ll do better next time, I promise. Just don’t hurt her.”
A pause. Then ? —
“You’d better make sure the next one is a boy, or I’ll be killing more than just that baby inside you.”
The voice clip ended, and a video played. I recognized the setting well—it was my father’s study, and from the looks of it, the person taking the video was sitting on the couch, right next to?—
Me.
I was in this video.
As I watched, someone with perfectly pressed pants entered the room, and my father called me over to his side for a moment. I hugged him tightly, and he hugged me back, just like he’d done every day, thousands of times.
And then I left the room, and the person sitting next to the camera shifted on the couch, obviously nervous as their shaking hands came into view.
“You know, that daughter of yours would make a pretty penny at the auctions, Cullough. What is she, eighteen now? Nineteen? Almost past her prime. Still, she’d be a good sell. Men would pay well for her.”
“More than her mother ever earned me, probably.” His eyes lifted, and he stared at the space where I’d been standing a moment ago. “She’s too wild, though. Eighteen whole years, and I still can’t breed the fire out of her.” His gaze moved to the couch. “Doesn’t get that from her mother, that’s for sure. A more obedient bitch, I’ve never met.”
“She safe to talk in front of?”
My father nodded, beckoning my mother to his side. “She’s aware of everything I do, and she ain’t talking to nobody. Ain’t that right, sweetheart?”
He left imprints of his fingers on my mother’s arm as he grabbed her and pushed her to her knees in front of the other man.
I watched, tasting bile in the back of my throat, as the stranger pulled his cock out and shoved it down her throat, choking her on it, forcing her to blow him as her husband watched. When he was finished, he filthied her, coating her in his mess as she sobbed and collapsed into a ball on the floor.
He wiped his hands off on the side of his pants, staring at the floor in disgust. “Think that one’s outlived her usefulness. Maybe you feel like selling her, I could use a good slut to warm my bed.”
“Not for sale,” my father muttered, his hands steepled on his desk, his eyes ever watchful as my mother picked herself up off the floor and moved slowly toward the couch. She picked up what must’ve been her phone, and the camera shook as she moved for the exit.
“Junipers are blooming nicely, by the way. Gonna need a whole garden at this rate. They're really at their peak in early spring. Not like that girl we picked up in Khula City last week.”
“She was from my daughter’s college. You’re sniffing around too close to home.”
“I’ll remind you that you’re not the only one in charge here. This is just as much my business as it is yours. And I’ll take girls from however far or near I want to.” A pause gave his words weight. “Procurement is my department; money is yours. Unless you’d like to put that daughter of yours up at auction. Now, that might convince me to move my hunting grounds a little further away from your backyard.”
“She’s not irreplaceable to me,” he muttered, leaning back in his chair. “Start her bids at a million and a half.”
“You got it.”
The video cut out suddenly, and I started to close the phone, disgusted beyond measure, when the last file popped up. A single, five-second voice clip.
Curious, and eager to wash the aftertaste of the last bit from my mouth, I hit play.
The voice was raspy, dry, and weak, but there was an urgency to it that screamed desperation and importance. It was a girl, a teenager, maybe younger, from the sound of it. And it was very, very scared, though there didn’t seem to be much life left in her for that emotion.
“Gotta find Juniper. Have to find junipers. If they kill me, please . . . find Juniper.”
The clip played over and over as I stared out over the river’s calm surface, the raw emotion making me sick to my stomach.
Was this someone’s daughter? Someone’s wife? Someone’s sister? Did she ever make it out of this hell my father put her in? Was she out there somewhere, still looking for this Juniper ?
Or had they done to her what they did to so many others?
Furious, I pulled the flash drive from my phone and threw it into the river, needing to erase the things I’d heard, the things I’d seen. I needed to know that no other pair of eyes would ever see what I’d seen on that tape. That no other soul on this earth would know my own father had intended to sell me at auction.
I gagged, and then retched into the sand at my feet when I realized three other people knew, and always would.
Jackal, Dingo, and Coyote.
Even before they knew me, they’d been helping in some way to protect me.
That video was taken two nights before he was killed. And had they not come when they did, that night might’ve been my last as a free woman.
I shuddered to think how close I came to being just another trafficking victim.
If not for the Neon Dogs, their futures would have been mine. My mother’s life would have been mine. Or worse.
But something in my brain was inherently broken still. I wanted to go to them, wanted to get up off the cold ground and go home, where I knew they’d be waiting, perhaps not even awake yet. But another part of me, a stronger part, perhaps, tugged sharply in a different direction—pain.
I wanted to feel it. Wanted to cause it. Wanted to inflict it on any man who looked at me.
And the Neon Dogs were men, too.
They might not escape my wild desires.
The sane part of me took a backseat as something animalistic rose from the depths of my soul, taking over, turning me into a beast as I stood on my feet, hurled the rest of the backpack into the Dread River, my phone included, and disappeared into the night.
What goes around comes around. And tonight, I was karma. And I was a bitch.