12. Ivy
IVY
There’s a girl sitting on a dock with her feet in the water.
She’s young. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. Her hair is dark, her shoulders are bare, sunburned across the tops.
The lake stretches out in front of her, flat and golden in the late afternoon light.
Behind her, someone is calling from the porch of a cabin.
A woman’s voice, warm and familiar. She’s saying something about dinner.
The girl doesn’t turn around. She’s waiting for someone.
I feel it. Anticipation sits in her chest, like she’s holding her breath.
She’s watching the tree line on the far side of the lake.
When a figure appears on the path, she smiles.
A real smile. The kind that starts deep inside a girl who has been looking for one person and one person only, and he’s finally shown up.
The figure gets closer. It’s a boy with dark hair and pale eyes. He has a grin on his face as he jogs down to the dock and drops into place beside her, close enough that their shoulders touch. She leans into him. He puts an arm around her.
When the woman calls from the porch again, neither of them moves.
The light changes. The lake goes from gold to silver, and the girl’s face blurs. No, not yet. I’m still watching. But it’s all starting to dissolve—the shape of the boy’s jaw, the sound of the woman’s voice, the smell of the water. It all slips through my fingers the harder I try to hold on.
When I wake up, my face is pressed against Nick’s chest.
I don’t move at first. His arm is around me, heavy and warm.
My hand rests against his ribs, and I can feel his heartbeat under my palm.
Slow, steady. Our legs are tangled under the sheets.
My body slid across the bed at some point during the night and found his.
He didn’t push me away, but then why would he?
I’m the one who should pull away. Untangle myself, put distance between us, and pretend none of this happened. That’s what I would normally do. It’s what my training demands. Never show vulnerability. Never let your guard down. Never wake up in someone’s arms, because arms can become restraints.
But I don’t move. Not yet. Because it feels nice, and I don’t know what to do about it.
No, it’s more than nice. It’s familiar. The weight of his arm.
The warmth of his skin. None of it feels new.
It feels like something I’ve done before, a long time ago, in a life I can’t reach.
The way those French fries tasted right with mayonnaise.
The way the cabin smelled like something I’d forgotten I knew.
This is another one of those times when my body remembers what my mind won’t give me.
The dream is already fading, lingering at the edges of my consciousness.
I can’t shake the residue from it. Was it a memory?
Was it my brain stitching together details from those photos back at the cabin, or from the things Nick has told me?
Building a scene from borrowed information, presenting it as something real?
Is what Nick has been saying true, or am I imagining things because I want this to be true?
I don’t know. Not knowing is its own kind of torture.
Lying here, with his arm around me and his heartbeat under my hand, something else surfaces.
Something older. A feeling I haven’t thought about in years, because I trained myself not to.
Back in Italy, in the early days. Everything was cloudy and fragmented as I was recovering from my injuries.
The bandages, the pain. Long stretches of medicated sleep.
I used to dream about a boy. I could never see his face clearly—it was always blurred, like looking through frosted glass. Still, I knew the feeling he carried with him.
Safety. Warmth. The sense that nothing bad could happen as long as he was close.
I told Vincenzo about the dreams once, in the early days. He dismissed them, of course. Meaningless noise resulting from trauma. The brain’s way of processing pain. He told me to focus on what was real, on what was in front of me, so I did. I buried those dreams so deep, I forgot they existed.
Now I’m lying in the arms of a man with dark hair and pale blue eyes, and the dreams are clawing their way back to the surface.
His breathing changes. He’s waking up. I close my eyes and slow my own breathing, pretending to still be asleep, because I’m not ready for this conversation. Not yet.
He doesn’t move either. His arm stays where it is.
His heartbeat remains steady. If he’s surprised to find us wrapped around each other, he doesn’t show it.
He just lies there, holding me, and the silence—the lack of explanation, the lack of apology or anything else—might be the most complicated thing I’ve ever experienced.
At least, in this lifetime. Maybe not in the one that came before.
Eventually, I need to stop pretending. When I open my eyes, I pull back slowly, untangling my legs from his before sitting up on the edge of the bed. The hotel room is filled with pale, early morning light. According to the clock on the nightstand, it’s seven fifteen.
“Morning,” he mumbles behind me.
“Good morning.” I don’t look at him. I’m not ready for those eyes. Not yet.
We get dressed in silence and pack what little we have.
He makes coffee with the sad machine on the dresser, and I drink it without complaining, even though it tastes like hot water that once heard a rumor there was such a thing as a coffee bean.
Within thirty minutes, we’re on the road, heading south on a highway that looks like every other stretch of highway.
We’ve been driving for half an hour, maybe, before I say it. “I want to talk to Vincenzo.”
His hands tighten on the steering wheel. “No.”
“I want to talk to him. I want to hear what he has to say.”
“You know what he’ll say. He’ll lie.”
“Maybe, but I want to hear it from him.” I turn in my seat to face Nick’s profile.
His eyes are fixed on the road, but his jaw is tight.
“I spent twelve years with that man. He trained me. He looked me in the eye every day and called me family. I need to hear him tell me it was all bullshit. I need to hear it in his voice.”
“You won’t hear it,” he counters through gritted teeth.
“You know him. You know how he operates. He’ll tell you whatever version of the truth keeps you close to him.
He’ll say it was a mistake, something he didn’t authorize.
And he’ll sound convincing, because that’s what he does.
It’s the only reason he’s still alive. By the end of the call, you’ll be doubting yourself all over again. ”
Dammit. He’s right. I hate that he’s right.
I hate it with a ferocity that burns all the way down to my stomach, because Vincenzo is exactly that good.
I’ve watched him lie to powerful men with a smile on his face and sincerity in his eyes.
I’ve witnessed him shaking hands with people he intended to destroy.
Deception isn’t a skill for him. It’s his native tongue.
He continues in a slightly quieter voice.
Almost like he feels sorry for being so blunt now that the words are out.
“You’re a liability now. You know too much.
You’ve done too much. And now you’re in the hands of people he considers enemies.
He is never going to stop unless he’s forced to stop.
A phone call isn’t going to change that.
It’s only going to give him information he can use against us. ”
I turn back to the windshield and stare at the road. It rolls past, indifferent. Trees, fields. A grimy little gas station. A billboard advertising a church. Since when do churches need advertising?
He’s right, damn him. Knowing it changes nothing about the crater inside me. Like a bomb exploded and hollowed me out.
Everything I thought I knew is gone. Doesn’t he understand that?
It’s not just misplaced or rearranged. It’s flat-out gone.
The foundation I built my life on was never real.
Vincenzo, the handlers, the network of people I trusted enough to take orders from without question…
it was all constructed. Designed to use me, maintained only as long as I was useful, then dismantled the moment I became an inconvenience.
The man called me family. He sat across from me at dinner tables in Rome and asked about my training, my progress. How I was doing, how I was feeling. He remembered my birthday, which he always counted as the date he found me and brought me to the place he referred to as home.
He bought me my first real weapon, too. A custom Beretta, engraved with my initials. I.R. Ivy Russo. The man gave me his name.
And then he sent eight men to pump me full of bullets and leave me the way you leave a crumpled candy wrapper on the side of the road.
How do you survive that? How can you build anything on ground that was never solid to begin with?
The answer is, you don’t. You stand in the wreckage, and you look around until you realize there is no one you can trust. No one whose words mean anything.
Not Vincenzo, who lied about everything.
Not Liam, the stranger who claims to be my brother.
Not Nick, either, who says he loves a girl who doesn’t exist anymore.
I’m alone. The way I’ve always been, underneath the illusion I chose to believe.
“Hey.”
It’s Nick’s voice that finally pulls me out of my spiral. I didn’t realize how far down I’d gone until his hand lands on mine, warm and solid, and the contact is enough to jolt me back to the surface.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he tells me.
“Somehow, I doubt that.”
“You’re thinking you’re alone. That there’s nobody left you can trust. You’re thinking everything you believed in was fake, so why would anything else be real.”
Slowly, I turn my head to look at him. His accuracy is unnerving. “How do you know that?”
“Because I know what betrayal feels like. And I know what it does to a person.” He squeezes my hand, then lets go, returning both hands to the wheel.
“But I’m real. This is real. Whatever you decide about your past, whatever you believe or don’t believe about who you were—what’s happening right now, between us, in this car, is real.
You can make new memories, starting now. Starting with the ones you choose.”
For a long time, all I can do is stare at him. “That’s easy to say,” I finally murmur.
“I know.”
“I mean, look who I trusted for twelve years.” I can’t say his name out loud. Not right now, maybe not ever again. At least, not as long as I feel the way I do. “I would’ve died for him. I killed for him. He threw me away like I was nothing.”
My voice doesn’t crack, but it’s close. “Obviously, I’m a shit judge of character,” I conclude. “I never saw it coming. How am I supposed to trust anyone now? How am I supposed to trust you? What if I’m wrong again?”
He doesn’t answer right away. The car hums along the highway, and the silence is heavy, filled with a question that has no good answer.
“You might be,” he finally concedes. “Wrong again. I can’t guarantee you won’t be. Nobody can.”
He glances at me, then turns back to the road. “There’s a difference between Vincenzo and me.”
“What’s that?”
“He gave you a purpose. I’m trying to give you a choice.”
I can’t respond to that. I can’t find the words, and I’m not sure I could form them in my mouth, anyway. I turn back to the window and watch the trees blur past, and I let those words sit in me. They hurt. Not because they’re cruel, but because they might be true.
A choice. The concept is almost foreign. Vincenzo never offered choices. He offered instructions and framed them as opportunities. Obedience disguised as loyalty. Every door he opened led exactly where he wanted me to go.
Nick is offering something different. The freedom to decide. The terrifying possibility of deciding wrong.
I close my eyes and lean my head against the window. The glass is cool against my temple. The car moves forward, carrying me toward a future I can’t see and away from a past I can’t trust.