29. Ivy
CHAPTER 29
Ivy
I quickly push away from him as quickly as I can, as if I’ve just been doused in ice-cold water, ready to be electrocuted by the man who I witnessed murder the asshole who tried to rape me last night.
Jackson didn’t do anything personal against Emmett and he died a brutal death… but me, my brother… we’ve been working to take Emmett and his family down. And he found out.
I’m not going to survive this day.
“Have I not been clear with you, Angel?” Emmett’s voice is still carrying that gentle cadence but the deceptive calmness it usually carries is absent this time. I can hear the impatience and the biting anger now.
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re talking about,” I stutter.
“Answer that.”
“What?”
Emmett glances at the buzzing phone dancing on the bedside table that I hadn’t noticed. When did I dump that there?
I grab my phone and see a blocked number. As a rule of thumb, I never answer private or blocked numbers. Hell, I created and updated a code that automatically blocks them…but somehow this one managed to go through.
I’m about to hit the decline option when Emmett’s commanding voice reaches my ears.
“Answer that damn call.”
Shocked by his biting words, confused by the tension in the room and still feeling strangely numb and upset over what just happened, I swipe across and answer the call, while holding Emmett’s frosty gaze.
“Who’s this?” I ask immediately. There’s no need to be pleasant.
“Ivy… Ivy…can you hear me?”
That nagging feeling of doom I’ve had for days now comes back with a vengeance
The line is unstable and static, but I don’t need the best technology in the world to recognize my own brother’s voice.
“Samuel?”
“Ivy… listen, I don’t have long. They’re listening and watching. He knows! Do you hear me, Ivy? He knows!”
“What?” I shout. “Who knows? Who’s listening?”
“Ivy, I’m so sorry! I’m really sorry, sis. Remember, you never wanted this. You know nothing! Delete everything and deny! I… I might never see you again…I’m sorry and I love you! You know nothing! It’s all on me!”
“What do you mean I won’t see you again?” I shout.
A wave of fear drenches down on me. I grip the phone tight to my ear, but I can’t hear anything but static now.
“Samuel!” I cry. “Where are you?”
Static greets me.
I immediately pull my phone back and open the navigation program I created to sync Samuel’s movements… but as soon as I open it, it crashes… and as I watch, the app I FUCKING CREATED deletes itself.
WHAT THE FUCK??
In a panic, I pull the phone back to my ear…since the call is still connected.
“Samuel!! Talk to me… say something! Where are you?”
The static goes on for a second and then the line goes dead.
“No, no, no…Samuel!”
Frantic, I scroll through my phone to find my brother’s secure, in-case-of-emergencies number and dial it…but it says the number I just dialed doesn’t exist.
What’s going on?
His voice didn’t sound right.
Something has happened to my brother.
He mentioned something about someone—a certain he— knows.
Which means the only person that knows and is coming after me is…
A ripple of suddenly heightened awareness hits me square in my chest as everything falls into place and clicks like a once difficult puzzle now unraveled into nothing.
Slowly, with the weight of guilt, fear, panic, and anxiety on my shoulders and in my veins, I look up at the man sitting leisurely on the bed across from me in the spacious bedroom.
The alarms that had been sounding at the back of my head start raging.
The phone in my hand slips and drops to the floor.
My body is covered in a sheen of sweat…
And I’m now paralyzed, frozen, with my lips quivering as I finally identify the look Emmett has been giving me from the moment I woke up.
Vengeance.
“Emmett…” I start.
Suddenly, there’s a clap of lightning that strokes so fast and so hard, I jump.
It’s immediately followed by a loud, eerie rumble of thunder as the storm clouds roll in over the city.
Car horns start blaring. Darkness has fallen over the city in a matter of seconds, and yet nothing is as dark, as cold, and as dangerous, as this moment right now with me, a sinner, facing the devil that I wronged, several times.
“Why, Angel?” Emmett finally speaks … and suddenly I can’t take the softness of his voice.
“I…” Fat, hot tears start falling down my cheeks.
It’s clear that Emmett found out something my brother was doing… most definitely an act of war against the Eastons.
Even though Samuel has lied to me that he had since dropped his revenge plans against Emmett because of me, I still pretended like I didn’t know he was lying.
And now…
“After everything you’ve done, I decided to let you go because you are useless to me, but you of all people connived and conspired with the man I always thought of as a brother to take me down?”
His words cut to the bone… not because I can hear any hurt or the pain of betrayal in them, but because of the pure, raw honesty in them.
Samuel has always been regarded as a big brother to all the Blue Boys.
He’s the one they always go to when they need help or advise with anything.
But… all this time, even behind my back, Samuel still went ahead and…
“No, he’s still loyal to you!” I rush to say, blindly scooting forward to sit at the edge of the bed. “Something must’ve gotten messed up! I don’t know what’s going on, but I know whatever it is, Samuel would never conspire to take you down or harm you in any way!”
Emmett merely glances at me, but I can see that nothing I’m saying is getting through to him.
“Even now, you have the audacity to lie to me…about something you did?”
“What?”
“You act na?ve and lost, as if you weren’t the Grand Poobah, the sole architect of the superb coding that created that site.”
Superb coding…
A site…
“What are you talking about?”
“With the history between us, Angel, you should know better than to act dumb. You know exactly what I’m talking about,” he says calmly.
With the history Emmett and I share…yes, I do know better than to lie to him.
“Okay, okay, I…” I’m literally panicking now. My mind is racing like hell.
My entire body is trembling, and I think this time, I’m about to have both an asthma attack and an anxiety attack. “Let’s talk properly, Emmett. For the sake of the history between us…”
“Wrong choice of words. Because of the history between us, you deserve to be six feet under!” he roars.
I gasp.
“Of all the people that have gotten in my way, attempted to fuck me up, derailed my shit, you and only you, are the one who has sinned the most and you’re still breathing!” Emmett snaps. “I kept you alive when they came for you. I eliminated assholes who dared to breathe in your direction wrong. I even told you I’m letting you go. I warned you…but what were you doing all this time? Attempting to really screw me over?”
“No, no… Emmett, that’s not it!”
“Then what is?” he calmly asks, but he’s anything but. It’s like we’re in a pressure cooker and one wrong move will end in ways I don’t even want to think about.
“It’s…” I stutter, trying to find the words but I’m lost. My only focus right now is… “Emmett, where is my brother? You at least have to tell me that. Is he alive?”
“That’s up to you.”
“What?”
“All of this was started by you. Your lies, your secrets, the way you easily fool people.”
“I don’t?—”
“Those eyes look at me with faux innocence, but when you sit alone in your room, you’re creating destruction, thinking up ways to slander my name… Tell me, is it because I won’t ever love you back?”
My world literally halts to a stop. Did I just hear that right?
“What?” I gasp.
“Did you do all this to get my attention on you? To make me pay for not sharing those pathetic, sickly emotions you have for me?”
Pain unlike anything I’ve ever felt pierces through me like I’ve just been shot by a thousand lightning arrows, ripping my organs apart.
He didn’t just say that.
In that moment, something in me snaps.
“How dare you?” I seethe.
I know I should be approaching this very dangerous, blade-balancing situation with extreme caution—after all, Emmett is a hidden villain. No one alive truly knows the depths of his cunning but him, but I just can’t stand what he just said.
“You’ve always been an asshole but how dare you hurl those words in my face like that? Do you think having feelings for you is what I wanted for myself?” I cry, my heart racing painfully in my chest.
In fact, there’s a tightness in my chest that I want to get rid of, so I start beating at my chest.
“I never chose you and by God you’re nothing to me now! I don’t need you to feel anything for me, let alone love me back, and guess what, Emmett Easton, you’re not worth the energy of thought, let alone action to conspire to do anything to you!”
Emmett sits there and just watches me. I think a faint smirk just crossed his face, but I can’t be sure as impassiveness is firmly back in place.
“And yet you were begging me to take you.”
Heat flushes in my veins.
“I was drugged!”
“I had those drugs flushed out of your system.”
Out of my element.
I always feel like I’m severely out of my element whenever I’m around Emmett Easton, but this moment is so much different.
It’s like everything has come to a head.
The secrets, the past, the lies, the deception… us.
“Let’s get back on track here,” I say, forcefully shaking my head to clear it. “Whatever you think my brother and I did, it’s not true.”
Emmett watches me, then he grabs an iPad from somewhere, taps on it, and then he throws it to the edge of the bed closest to me.
“So, that’s not you?”
Immediately, I spot a very familiar code matrix.
A code I’m pretty sure I’ve spent years building, molding, knocking down… That code is staring right back at me.
And it’s on Emmett’s iPad…
My stomach drops.
“No, this is…” The very code Samuel asked me to create and each time he ran tests on it, he came back with notes on what needed to be perfected, fixed, and worked upon.
The very code I asked him about and he just waved me off.
He was weirdly secretive about where he ended up using the make-up of the code, and I had a sinking feeling…
“Emmett…”
“Is that not you?” he demands, his voice brooking no argument.
The certainty in his eyes is clear, piercing me like a sharp, hard icicle.
“Where did you find that?”
“Pandora,” Emmett says gently as he rises from the bed, repeating the signature I always add to my work.
A chain reaction that starts in shock and ends in utter fear slams through me.
I scramble to get away from him, my heart now pounding in my throat.
Fear unlike anything I’ve ever felt freezes the blood in my veins but Emmett isn’t even chasing me.
With stilted breaths, I face him.
As silently as before, like a beast, a monster, or exactly what he is, a god, he’s standing upright, tall, well-built, shirtless, muscles flexing involuntarily.
Someone with congenital heart defects shouldn’t look the way he looks… like a primal, hard machine, and yet he does look every inch the only man that shatters me.
His facial features are schooled perfectly into an impassive, indifferent mask, regarding me like an insect that he’ll swat to death when he decides to move.
I take several steps away from the bed.
I glance around the room, trying to find the exit.
I spot three doors from where I stand and the real kicker is, I don’t know which one of those leads out of the room.
Fuck.
“Didn’t you just say you’re not scared of me?” Emmett questions sarcastically, obviously mocking me. “Why are you backing away?”
This time, the shudder that goes through me is powerful enough to almost knock me to my ass, but by some miracle I manage to hold still.
But see, as I back away, I’m facing him, so I don’t see where I’m going until my feet step into something sticky, thick, and cold.
Not daring to look away from Emmett, I keep going, but then I watch as something flashes in Emmett’s eyes.
Mirth.
Pure, unadulterated evil mirth as if he’s amused by what I’m doing.
Or rather, he’s amused by where I’m standing right now, close to where he was just painting on his canvas hanging on the easel.
Slowly, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I look down to what I just stepped into.
In the back of my mind, I think it’s paint when I spot the dark red.
But then I look closely at the red.
I’ve seen this kind of red before.
This texture of red.
This slippery kind of red.
It’s blood. And I’m pretty sure it’s human blood.
It’s broad daylight. There’s a million-dollar view from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the master bedroom. I can see the entire gorgeous view of Central Park from here…but the beautiful backdrop falls into nothingness as I turn around, following the sea of red that’s now coating my feet.
My heart constricts in my chest, shrinking with fear because somehow, with Emmett’s piercing gaze on me and the red at my feet, I think I already know what I will find.
And I’m right.
The sea of red is indeed human blood.
A human being that’s now in the past tense. A scumbag of a human being that was, just hours ago, whispering and laughing, pretending like nothing happened.
Jackson lies dead on his back, with his mutilated and maimed body on full display.
His head is cracked in several places, as if his skull was bashed and flattened, that’s where most of the blood is.
But the eeriest thing about it all is that his eyes are wide open, looking up at me.
And at his sides are the chopped-off hands and right in the palm of one hand is something, a piece of flesh.
I have no idea what it is, but the longer I stare at it, the longer I notice what it is.
Jackson’s severed penis.