Ivy
Nobody asked me if I wanted this.
That’s the thought that keeps looping through my head as the limo rolls through miles of nothing.
Trees and more trees, broken up by the occasional gas station or rusted mailbox marking a turnoff to somewhere even more remote.
We left the highway a while ago, and now the road is narrower, winding through dense forest that blocks out most of the afternoon light.
It would be beautiful if I were in the mood to appreciate it.
Which is why it’s a shame I’m nowhere close to that mood.
Nick is sitting across from me, one ankle resting on the opposite knee, scrolling through his phone like we’re on a casual Sunday drive instead of whatever the hell this actually is. A kidnapping dressed up in ugly clothes and a private jet.
I stare out the window and list my resentments, because it’s better than feeling helpless.
Three days ago, I had a life. It wasn’t a warm, fuzzy life.
It wasn’t the kind of life you’d put on a greeting card.
But it was mine. I had an apartment in the city, one of many that were not necessarily homey but were private.
I had work. I had a routine that kept me alive and sharp, and I understood the rules of the world I moved through.
Now I’m in the backseat of a limo I didn’t choose, wearing clothes I didn’t pick, heading toward a place I’ve never been, to meet a man I had no idea existed but supposedly shares my blood.
And nobody—not once—asked me if any of this was what I wanted.
Nick would say he’s doing this for me. He’d say it with that steady, patient voice of his, the one that somehow never wavers no matter how many times I shoot him or spray chemicals in his eyes.
He’d tell me this is about bringing me home, reconnecting me with a family I lost, giving me back the life that was stolen from me.
What he can’t seem to understand is he can’t give back something I don’t remember having.
“How much longer?” I ask, without looking at him.
“Twenty minutes, maybe. The cabin is off the main road.”
“Of course it is.” Because why would anything about this situation be accessible or easy to escape from?
I’ve been mentally mapping the route since we left the airstrip.
Counting turns, estimating distances, noting landmarks.
Force of habit. It’s also practical, because when the opportunity to run comes, and it will come, I’ll need to know the terrain.
“The cabin belonged to your parents,” Nick says, pocketing his phone. “Your family used to come out here when you and Liam were kids. Summers, mostly. Holidays sometimes. It’s…” He pauses, choosing his words carefully. “It’s a place with a lot of memories.”
“For you, maybe.”
He doesn’t argue. That’s one of the more frustrating things about him. He doesn’t fight me when I push back. He just absorbs it and keeps going. It’s almost impossible to stay angry at someone who refuses to give you anything to push against.
The trees thin out after another ten minutes, and the road dips toward lower ground. I catch glimpses of water through the gaps—a lake, wide and flat, reflecting the blue sky like a mirror. Then the trees open up, and the cabin comes into view.
It’s not what I expected. When he said cabin, I pictured something rough.
Rustic. Log walls and a tin roof, and an outhouse around back.
This is something else entirely. It’s a real home, dark wood, with a wide porch that wraps around the front and a stone chimney climbing the side wall.
The porch overlooks the lake through a break in the pines, and there’s a dock stretching out over the water.
Across the lake, I can see other cabins dotted along the far shore, half-hidden in the trees.
It’s idyllic. The kind of place you’d see in a magazine article about escaping from the real world. I hate that it’s beautiful, because I don’t want to feel anything about it.
The limo pulls up to the front of the cabin and stops.
Nick gets out first, then holds the door for me like this is a date instead of a hostage delivery.
I ignore his hand and step out on my own, my sneakers crunching on the gravel drive.
The air hits me immediately—clean, cold, carrying the smell of pine and water and something earthy underneath.
It’s different from European air. Different from the cities I’ve lived in, the cramped apartments and rooftops, and alleyways that make up the geography of my life.
It smells like nothing I’ve ever known.
And yet.
Something tugs at the base of my skull. Not a memory. Nothing that clear or defined. More like the ghost of a feeling. A sense that this air has been in my lungs before, a long time ago, in a life I can’t access. I push it down and follow Nick up the porch steps.
The wooden boards creak under our feet. He unlocks the front door and pushes it open, stepping aside to let me enter first. I scan the interior automatically: exits, sight lines, potential weapons. It’s a reflex.
The entryway opens into a living area with the stone fireplace I noticed outside, worn leather furniture, and big windows looking out over the lake.
The kitchen is to the right, separated by a counter.
A hallway leads toward what I assume are bedrooms. It’s clean, warm, lived-in.
Someone has been here recently—there are fresh flowers on the kitchen counter and the fireplace has been laid with wood, ready to light.
And then I notice the photos.
They’re everywhere. On the mantel above the fireplace. On the walls. On a shelf by the hallway. The frames are mismatched—some wooden, some metal, all different sizes.
A family: parents and two children: a boy and a girl. The parents are young, smiling. They could afford to be happy. They didn’t know what was ahead of them. The boy is dark-haired, green-eyed, lanky in the way boys are before they grow into their bodies.
The girl is… me.
I know it instantly, the way you know your own face in a mirror, even though the face in these photos belongs to someone I don’t recognize.
A child, maybe eight or nine in the earliest ones, grinning with a gap in her front teeth.
In others, a preteen, awkward and leggy, squinting in the sunlight on the dock.
Then a teenager, fifteen or so, sitting on the porch railing with her hair blowing across her face, laughing at something beyond the camera’s frame.
That’s my face. My eyes. My jawline before it sharpened into what it is now. I’m looking at myself, and I have no memory of any of it.
My chest constricts. I’ve been trained to maintain composure under circumstances far worse than old photographs, but something is happening beneath the surface I can’t fully control. A pressure behind my eyes. A tightness in my throat that has nothing to do with exhaustion.
I don’t remember this girl. I don’t remember this place. I don’t remember the parents smiling in those frames, and I don’t remember the boy standing beside me in photo after photo, his arm sometimes thrown over my shoulders, both of us mugging for the camera like nothing bad could ever touch us.
“These are fake,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds strange. Distant. “You had them photoshopped.”
Nick is standing behind me. I can feel him there without turning around. “They’re not fake, Laura.”
“Don’t call me that,” I grit out.
“They’re real. Every one of them.” His voice is infuriatingly calm and patient. “That’s you, and that’s Liam, and those are your parents. They died in the explosion on the boat.”
I stare at the photo of the teenager on the porch railing.
She looks happy. Genuinely, unselfconsciously happy, the kind of happiness that comes from not knowing the world has teeth.
I’ve never looked like that. Not once in the life I remember.
Vincenzo didn’t raise me to be happy. He raised me to be a tool.
I have to turn away from the photos. I can’t look at them anymore.
Nick opens his mouth to say something, but before he can, the sound of tires on gravel draws both our attention to the window.
A car is pulling up the driveway. A black SUV, similar to the kind I’ve seen a hundred times in my line of work.
Armored, probably. The windows are tinted dark enough that I can’t see who’s inside.
“That’s your brother,” Nick offers behind me.
My pulse does something I don’t appreciate. It speeds up, hammering against my ribs with a force that has nothing to do with training or instinct and everything to do with a feeling I can’t name. I stand very still and watch through the window as the SUV comes to a stop behind the limo.
The driver’s door opens first. A man I don’t recognize steps out. Security, based on his build and the way his gaze sweeps the perimeter before he moves to open the rear passenger door.
And then the adult version of the boy in the photos steps out of the car.
He’s tall. That’s the first thing I register. Tall and broad, with the kind of build that comes from extreme discipline. Short black hair. He moves with a deliberate kind of authority, the way men move when they’re used to being in charge of every room they enter.
And his eyes are green. My shade of green, so close to what I see in the mirror every morning that it stops me cold.
He looks like me.
The thought pops up before I can stop it, and I crush it immediately. There are billions of people in the world. Resemblances happen. Two strangers can share a hair color, an eye color, a bone structure, and have absolutely nothing else in common. It doesn’t mean anything. Coincidence isn’t proof.
But my pulse won’t slow down, and that bothers me more than anything.
Nick goes to the front door and opens it. I hear them exchange a few quiet words in low voices on the porch. Then footsteps before Nick steps aside, and Liam Knight walks into the cabin.