21. Ivy
TWENTY-ONE
IVY
When I open my eyes, panic punches my chest. For a second, I don’t remember where I am or how I got here.
Then it all floods in.
The messages.
The flowers.
Running to the clubhouse.
Riot’s admission that they killed Link.
My breakdown.
The pieces Riot was glueing back together feel loose again.
I’ve always been fragile, but this time, I’m weak.
He lied. The one person I thought was my sanctuary, my safety, my ride or die had lied . He saw me crumbling under the weight of my past and said nothing.
I kept that darkness away from you ‘cause you don’t deserve that filth to touch you.
I close my eyes, biting back the tears. Part of me understands why he didn’t tell me, but the other half doesn’t care.
My foundations are shaky, and my chest is ripped open and bleeding.
This is the kind of storm that levels whole cities.
I don’t know how we survive this.
I love him. My heart beats for him. But this is an immovable wall between us.
He didn’t run.
I cling to that thought with pathetic desperation. I shattered into a thousand fucked-up pieces, and Riot just held me.
He let me break.
My safe place.
It makes this barrier between us worse. Knowing Link is gone should lift the weight off my shoulders, but now, there’s a new wall in front of me.
“You okay?”
His voice from the doorway slides through my defences, just a fraction. Just enough to leave an ache in my chest.
I want to go back to that couch and be wrapped in bliss, not this cold uncertainty.
“I’m fine.”
He’s not the only liar.
“You want breakfast?”
The thought of food churns my gut. “I’m not hungry.” I don’t look at him. I can’t. If I do, I’ll break all over again. My body aches for him, craves his touch, but my heart won’t stop bleeding.
“Vee, you gotta eat.”
“I will… later.”
I push off the bed and open the balcony door. I need a moment, need air to breathe, and a room where he’s not filling the space.
There’s a bistro style table and chairs and a few plants clinging to life.
I lean on the rail, the city blurring beneath me. My life is in ruins, and yet the world keeps turning.
I sense him behind me, like static, but I don’t turn. I can’t handle the pain in his eyes, not when I’m already brittle.
“I got someone workin’ on your messages. We’ll find out who’s behind this.”
My lungs seize. “Okay.”
“Babe—”
“Don’t.” I cut him off. If I let him talk, he’ll become my undoing, and I can’t shatter again.
I don’t hear him leave, but when I glance over my shoulder, I’m alone.
Deep breaths, Ivy. You’re okay.
I step back into the room, shut the door, and check on Seren. He’ll go to her if she cries. He’ll never leave her.
Just like he’ll never leave me.
I shove that thought back into the box where I keep all the things that hurt too much to hold. This is too fresh, too raw, the barbs still in my skin.
Too much, yet not enough at the same time.
Stop it. Just… stop it.
On bare feet, I pad to the bathroom, quiet, quick. Yeah, I’m avoiding him, but I can’t face a confrontation. Not yet. Not while my walls are so weak.
Only when the door is locked do my shoulders drop.
Mechanically, I underdress and turn the shower on. I let the water run, trying to breathe. It softens the aches in my bones, but it can’t chase away the cold. This kind of pain that’s deep inside every cell, poisoning everything it touches.
Tears mix with the hot spray, and the urge to scrub every speck of dirt under my skin is hard to ignore. I don’t know how to exist in this new reality he’s painted. I don’t know how to grieve losing everything.
By the time I climb out, I’m trembling, my exhaustion bone-deep, soul-deep.
It’s not meant to be like this. This wasn’t how I saw our story ending.
Is it the end?
Do I want it to be?
Can I forgive him?
The nightmares had been unrelenting. For months, they stole into my sleep and snatched the remaining strength from me.
It didn’t have to be that way.
It shouldn’t have been.
As I step back into the room, clutching the towel around my body, my skin pebbles from a cold breeze.
The balcony door is open just a fraction, but it’s enough to stir the curtains.
Didn’t I close that?
Something prickles along my nape—an instinct, an awareness—and I glance into the cot.
It’s empty.
For some reason, the need to put eyes on my daughter has me turning.
My heart seizes in my chest, and the world forgets to breathe.
Standing behind the door, out of view, is a man I don’t recognise. His dark hair is too long, dripping into his eyes, which are as unhinged as the wild grin on his face.
My bones want to melt under my terror as I lock onto my daughter clutched against his chest. She’s quiet, settled in a way that sends shards of ice through my stomach. I didn’t even register the danger until it was too late.
I open my mouth, intending to scream for Riot, but he shakes his head. “That would be a mistake, Ivy.”
A glint of metal in his hand, too close to my baby, has my stomach dropping onto the ground. He has a knife, and he has my daughter.
That one move bought my silence. My submission too.
“Please.” The word chokes out from my constricted throat.
“You seem worried. How much of a monster do you think I am? Do you think I’d hurt a defenceless baby?” His grin is macabre. “Do you?”
I can’t swallow, and my tongue glues itself to the roof of my mouth. “Give me my daughter.”
His eyes scan my body up and down in a slow drag. The towel covers everything, but I may as well be naked. I wouldn’t care if I was. My safety, my life, means nothing right now.
“But I’m just getting to know her.” He peers down at her, and I lock my knees. “Aren’t genetics a funny thing? She has nothing of you in her, and everything of her father.”
My breath hitches. Link…
How is this man connected to my ex?
It doesn’t matter. I don’t care who he is. All I care about is getting my daughter in my arms.
“Please…” I shift forwards half an inch and reach for her. “I just want my baby back.”
The silence stretches, suffocating, choking, like a noose around my throat. Short, sharp, shallow gasps escape my tight chest as terror claws at me.
“I just wanted you to acknowledge me, but we don’t always get what we want, do we? I sent you such nice gifts, and you weren’t grateful for any of them. I found my flowers in the trash, and the beautiful bear I spent hours picking out for Seren was stuffed under your bed like it meant nothing.”
He spits the words through gritted teeth, sinister and veiled in threat.
My heart races as the implications of who he is sinks in.
The why remains elusive.
“I’m sorry.”
“If you had just shown gratitude, I wouldn’t have had to go to such desperate measures to get your attention.”
I slide my gaze to the door he’s blocking. The irony is that help is on the other side of it, but I have no way to alert Riot while my daughter is in his arms.
“You have my attention now.” I don’t take my attention off Seren. “What do you want?”
“The truth.” He says this as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
What truth?
I close my eyes for a brief second, anchoring myself. “Give me Seren, and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“It’s too late for that.” He ducks his head and inhales along my daughter’s crown. “She smells so good, just like her mother. I took a little souvenir while I was… poking around. You wear the naughtiest lacy items.”
That feeling of being covered in filth consumes me. I only have lace underwear. Did he… take those?
“I can see why he was so… obsessed with you. You are beautiful. You must have a magic cunt to wrap all these men around your finger so tightly. Maybe I should find out.”
The room shrinks, my vision tunnelling to a pinprick. Is he going to rape me while Riot is down the hallway? I won’t survive it this time.
“Give me my daughter,” I repeat, my voice sharp this time.
“I don’t think so. You see, you took the last of my family from me, so I’m gonna take the only part of him that’s left.” He rubs his finger under her chin. “ His child.”
There’s a lot unpack there, but I focus on the only part that matters. “You’re not taking her. I’ll kill you before I let you walk out of here with her.” I step forwards, ready to tear his throat out with my bare hands, but I stop dead.
He drags the flat of the blade over Seren’s onesie, and my stomach churns until acid burns my throat. Pure, undulating terror fills my veins, and the room spins, my knees almost buckling.
“It would be a shame if I was to get blood on this precious little girl’s clothes.”
“Don’t you fucking hurt her.”
“I don’t intend to touch this precious baby, Ivy, not unless you force my hand.” He kisses her head, and my lips curl into a snarl. “But there has to be a price for what was done. An eye for an eye.” He smiles at my daughter, the unsuspecting monster peeking out from behind the mask. “You see, I spent years looking for my brother, only to find he’d disappeared as if he never existed.”
His words sink into my frazzled brain. Brother. He was looking for Link.
I can see it now, the familiarity—the same face but in different font, the same colouring, the same darkness behind those cold eyes.
The man in the hospital… it was him. I wasn’t losing my mind. It was him.
“Link didn’t have a brother.”
He flinches as if my words slip through the cracks in his armour, then he lunges towards me, holding the back of my daughter’s head with the hand clutching the knife.
“He has a brother!” His grip tightens on Seren as he unravels in front of my eyes. “You should know that. He would’ve talked about me.”
My gut twists like a knot.
“Right. Of course, he mentioned you. I just forgot.” It’s a lie. Link never talked about his family, at least not that I can recall. Considering the madness dancing in this man’s eyes, I can understand.
Link was a monster, birthed in a family of monsters.
Seren whimpers, and my strength fractures a little more. Not yet. I can’t break yet.
I press a hand to my stomach, needing to wake up from this nightmare, searching for a way to get my daughter to safety and away from his weapon. “Please be careful with her.” The ragged rawness in my words is sharper than any blade.
But he ignores my plea, his eyes wide and wild, unhinged. “They tried to keep him from me, did you know that? They sent me away, said I was dangerous, but not to him. Never to him.”
I shift closer, just a minuscule movement but ready to grab Seren as soon as I can.
“Why did they send you away?”
He laughs under his breath. “Because they feared me, Ivy. They saw it in both of us, but it existed in Link. It flourished in me.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about, so I keep quiet. Waiting. Holding my breath.
“Where is he, Ivy?”
Dead…
He’s dead.
“I don’t know,” I whisper.
The eerie calm of his voice is more terrifying than his rage. “You see, I just don’t believe you. I found traces of you all over his life, and you want me to think you just… don’t know what happened to him? So, I’ll ask you again—where’s my brother?”
“I don’t?—”
He explodes like a bomb detonating. His nostrils flare and his eyes blaze as he takes a menacing step towards me. “Where is he?” The boom of his voice rips a flinch from me before I can stop myself, and Seren cries out, startled by the noise.
Her distress is enough to unhinge me.
“Give me my fucking daughter!” I’m done with this game. I want my child back now .
“Only when you give me my brother.”
The door behind him inches open, just a hint of movement, but it’s enough to make my legs go weak.
Help is here.