9. Room 14
Ivy
I’d been sitting in my truck for forty minutes with the engine off and my hands on the steering wheel and absolutely no plan for what to do if this went wrong.
The Gruff Bear Motel sat on a two-lane road about a mile outside Forest Grove.
It had probably been charming in the seventies, not so much now.
Two stories of rooms with outdoor walkways, a seasonal pool with a chain-link fence around it, and a neon “rooms available by the hour” sign out front that flickered on and off.
Seth’s motorcycle was parked in front of room fourteen, first floor, end of the building. The black SUV I’d seen at the rally was in the lot too, which meant he had two vehicles and the resources to maintain them. The congressman’s money at work.
I had parked across the road, tucked behind some pines, hardly visible from the motel lot. I’d been watching and waiting, while my resolve wavered whether I really was going to do this reckless act or not.
The old Ivy would have done it without thinking, but I’d spent the past few years proving I wasn’t that person anymore. Breaking into a motel room. Searching through a dangerous man’s belongings. Alone, at dusk, with nobody knowing where I was.
My phone sat on the passenger seat. I picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up again.
I finally typed the text before I could talk myself out of it.
Ivy: I’m at the Gruff Bear Motel. Room 14. Waiting for Seth to leave so I can get inside. Before you say anything, I’m doing this. But I wanted someone to know where I was. In case.
I hit send, watched the message deliver to Colt’s number, and then powered the phone off completely. I couldn’t hear his protests right now. If I heard his voice, I might actually listen, and then I’d never know what Seth was up to.
When the door finally opened. Seth stepped out in his boots and jacket, helmet in one hand, phone in the other.
He was texting someone as he walked to the motorcycle, his face lit by the screen’s glow.
He swung a leg over, kicked the engine to life, and the bike roared out of the lot and onto the two-lane heading toward town.
I counted to sixty. Then sixty again. My hands shook as I got out of my car and moved.
The motel was quiet. Only three other cars in the lot, all clustered near the office on the far end. The deserted pool to my left was drained and covered with a tarp, and the pump house beside it was a cinder-block shed with a padlocked door.
I crouched behind the wall for a few more minutes. Then I crossed the lot fast, keeping to the shadows along the building’s edge. Room fourteen was at the end of the first-floor walkway, furthest from the office and the parking lot lights.
The door was a standard motel lock, not yet updated with a fancy keycard system. I pulled two bobby pins from my hair and bent one into an L-shape and straightened the other, and I went to work on the deadbolt underneath. Another trick Seth had taught me.
I recall laughing with him about it because it felt like a game, like we were in a movie. Nothing bad could come from a girl who could pick a lock. The irony of using his own lesson to break into his room tonight was not lost on me.
The deadbolt turned on the third try. I pushed the door open, stepped inside, and closed it behind me. With my back against it, I finally let out the breath I had been holding.
The stench hit me first: cigarettes, leather, and sweat.
He’d left the bedside lamp on, providing enough dim light to see by.
The standard cheap motel layout accosted me, with the typical bed, dresser, table by the window, bathroom, and small closet to the left.
Seth’s duffel bag was open on the bed, clothes spilling out.
I started with the dresser, searching for anything that would explain Seth’s intentions.
Top drawer: clothes, socks, a phone charger.
Second drawer: more clothes. I lifted the shirts and my hand hit something hard and cold.
I pulled the fabric back, and my stomach dropped.
A revolver, probably loaded. I didn’t dare check or touch it.
I covered it back up and moved on; the trembling returned to my hands.
I turned my attention to the table. There I found maps, spread out and overlapping, held down by a coffee mug and a set of car keys.
A county map had properties marked in red circles.
I recognized ranch names. The Hollis land, south of town.
Two other properties I knew by reputation included parcels that had been in the same hands for generations.
Each circle had a number beside it, like a code or a reference.
The second map was more detailed—focused on the Off-Duty Rescue Ranch and the Wylde property.
My heart sank at the ranch boundaries traced in blue.
The twenty acres Chris Magnus had preserved for my family were outlined too, with a notation I couldn’t quite read in the dim light.
The third map was downtown Forest Grove.
Main Street, the square, the shops. He’d circled two buildings in heavy red marker—The Bank of Forest Grove, and next to it, Wylde West Outfitters.
I swallowed hard. Seeing it there on Seth’s table, targeted alongside whatever he and the congressman were planning, made my blood go cold in a way the gun hadn’t.
What did all of this mean? What exactly was the Brewsters’ agenda here? I took my phone out and snapped away, photographing it all.
I picked up the county map to look closer at the Wylde property marking, when something slipped from between the folds onto the carpet. I crouched and felt for it. My fingers closed around something small and cold. I held it up in front of my eyes.
A bracelet. A very familiar one—with tiny leaves, each one shaped like an ivy vine, linked in a pattern my mother had picked out when I was twelve years old.
She’d given one to each of us girls that year.
Daisy’s bracelet had daisies. Sage’s had sage leaves.
Poppy’s had small round blooms. And mine had ivy, curling and golden and as much a part of me as my name.
I thought I’d lost this bracelet the night I’d called the police on Seth. I’d been hiding in the warehouse, filming him with shaking hands, and the clasp must have come undone. Never thought I’d see it again and assumed it was gone, swallowed by the worst night of my life.
Seth had it this entire time? He must have found it that night during the arrest, and he’d kept it throughout prison?
Which means… he might suspect I’d been the one to call the police.
I closed my fist around it and felt the tiny leaves press into my palm. This was mine. My mother gave it to me. Whatever Seth thought it meant, whatever power he thought it gave him, it was mine, and I was taking it back.
I slipped it into the pocket of my skirt.
The door flew open.
My heart lurched into my throat and I spun, my hand going to the table behind me like I could steady myself on a surface covered in evidence of some kind, and for one horrible, airless second I was caught in a place I shouldn’t be, about to face the consequences of another reckless decision.
But it wasn’t Seth. It was Colt.
He shut the door, breathing hard, his eyes sweeping the room and landing on me with an expression caught between fury and relief. In his dusty work clothes, boots muddy, like he’d come straight from the ranch, he must have gotten my text and driven here without stopping.
“He’s coming back,” Colt announced, and his voice was tight in a way I’d never heard. “I drove here to stop you, but I saw you go in. I kept watch just outside, but I heard his motorcycle return.”
As if to prove a point, the noise of the bike’s engine came from just outside the door.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. “There isn’t time to escape.”
“Hide. Now.” Colt was already moving, taking me by the wrist with him. He crossed to the closet in three strides, opened it and crammed us in there together, enveloped in complete, suffocating darkness.
The closet was barely big enough for one person, and we were two, Colt with his frame of solid muscle and me with my curves, pressed together with no room to adjust. My back was against his chest, his arms holding us both in place, and his breath coming fast near the top of my head.
We stood unmoving at the motorcycle engine cutting. Every sound hit like a heartbeat. Footsteps on the walkway. The scrape of a key. The door opened and closed. Seth’s boots scuffing across the carpet. The creak of the bedsprings as he dropped something heavy, and then his voice, loud and furious.
“Of course I’ll shake them down. You think I drove eight hundred miles to go to barbecues?
” He was on the phone, the volume up loud enough that we could hear the other person, but not the exact words.
Seth paced, his boots passing close enough to the closet door that I could see the shadow of movement through the crack at the bottom.
“Fuck you. I’m doing everything you want.
Because we both know your little Saint Trevor isn’t gonna do your dirty work.
He never has. That’s what you have me for, right, Dad? Your fucking attack dog.”
Silence. Then a sharp exhale, the sound of a phone hitting a surface, and a string of profanity directed at his father, and brother, and the room in general that confirmed everything I’d ever known about the Brewster family dynamic. Seth hated them.
A drawer opened in the dresser. Metal scraped against wood. The gun drawer! Then he slammed it shut. His boots crossed the room again, the door opened and closed, and the motorcycle roared back to life. It faded down the road until the motel was silent.
We didn’t move right away. For several seconds, I realized things in stages. The first was Colt’s heartbeat against my chest, heavy and fast, which meant he was human after all and not the unshakable wall of calm he often projected to the world.