Screw them.
Screw all of them.
I was worth more than that. I was worth more than any amount of money!
I went about the rest of my day pretending my earlier conversation with Ana never happened. I had band practice with Ryder later tonight, so that was something to look forward to. He had offered to pick me up before it started, but I didn’t want him near the apartment in case my mom was here. I would take the Metro downtown. It wouldn’t take that long and the bus dropped me off close to his loft.
I dressed casually for the summer heat, in a pair of white shorts and a black racerback tank top. My hair hung loose around my shoulders, and I played with some bronzes for my makeup. I felt flirty and laidback in this outfit and those weren’t qualities I normally attributed with myself.
My mom called me out for supper an hour before I was supposed to leave for Ryder’s. She had a weird affinity with monitoring my eating habits. She didn’t go as far as to stand over my shoulder and watch me eat but I wasn’t ruling that out as a future activity.
There was this fine line between overeating and making sure I could still walk straight without passing out from hunger.
She seemed to have the balance perfectly worked out for her own diet. And I supposed after maintaining the same regimen for nearly forty years, she had it down to a science.
I walked out of my room, where I had been hiding all day, and greeted my mom for the first time in two days. She had been gone or I had been in my room. This was our usual routine.
It worked for us.
She was already seated at the table waiting for me.
But she wasn’t alone.
I should have known that small fact since the table was set with more than just dry lettuce and hummus.
“Ivy, how nice of you to join us,” Nix greeted me from his usual place.
I shot my mother a suspicious glance and violently wished I’d gotten more details from Ana before I hung up on her. I slid into my seat across from him and reached the first thing I saw- a dish made of couscous and raisins.
“My pleasure,” I mumbled and passed the dish on to my mother.
We fell into silence as the serving dishes moved around the table. I could feel both sets of eyes watching me closely, but I refused to play this game.
Finally, Ava broke our charged silence. “Honor and Smith are back from their vacation, Ivy. He’s invited us over for Sunday afternoon.”
“He called you as soon as he got back into town?” I didn’t buy that for one second. Smith hated my mother. He went on summer vacations for the sole purpose of skipping her Sunday visits, which were the only thing the courts had granted her in their custody battle. And even those had to be supervised.
But she did win a smaller victory. She was owed a Sunday visit no matter the day or time, or she could reopen the case. Smith was never allowed to deprive her of the one day a week she got to see her other daughter.
Unless he went on vacation and circumstances made it impossible for my mother to come over. Or if he had recently gone on a trip and hadn’t yet gotten around to ringing Ava to let her know he was back.
I had a hunch that was what had happened this summer. Just like last summer, and the summer before that.
Ava definitely didn’t appreciate my sarcasm. “He called me as soon as he could.”
“Sure, he did.”
My mother’s eyes cut to mine with a fierce warning and I decided she was probably right. I didn’t want Nix stepping in and intervening in any way.
“Is that what you’re wearing tonight?” Nix asked with a skeptical raise of his eyebrows.
“Obviously,” I replied snottily.
“Didn’t Anaxandra explain where we would be going?”
“I didn’t give her the chance to explain,” I told him. “I hung up on her.”
Nix stared at me with his fork halfway to his mouth. Slowly he set the utensil back on his plate with an ungraceful clatter and leaned back in his chair.
The mood in the room shifted from awkward tension to choked rage. I was walking on the very brink of a cliff. If I looked down I couldn’t see the bottom. If I jumped off, the way down would be rocky and painful, possibly deadly.
But I would be free.
And so I’d rather hug the edge of this precipice than walk on safe ground and give up my soul to a man that would destroy it in every single way.
Nix leveled me with a glare and spoke his words carefully. “I will not ask you any more questions, Ivy, for I’m positive those will only increase my ire. When this meal is finished, you will get up from this table, change into something appropriate and be ready to leave by seven. I will not repeat myself.”
I ticked through my options and glanced at my mother for help. Unsurprisingly she stared at her food and chose to ignore my distress and me completely. Slowly I dragged my attention back to Nix’s black eyes and scavenged for courage to match his intensity.
“You will not put me into a situation like before,” I told him with the smallest tremble in my voice. “I will not go into another room with someone like Taylor.”
He huffed a short breath out his nose and pushed his plate forward. “Don’t be ridiculous. I told you I would never put you in a situation like that again.”
“But you’re the one that put me there to begin with!” I raised my voice and pushed my own plate across the table.
Nix stood up, pushing his chair back as he went. The padded legs made a swooshing sound as they slid against the hardwood floor. It was a soft sound, but carried a stabbing poignancy that ground against my insides. He pressed flat palms onto the table and rested his weight there so that the table creaked beneath him and I worried he would flip it.
“All these opinions are starting to concern me, Ivy.” His voice was cold, hard metal, like the barrel of a gun, a gun that he pressed against my throat until I was choking from suffocation and fear. In my imagination his finger slid over the trigger and he steeled himself to fire the kill shot- the shot that would insert his dominance over my life completely. A sinister smile twisted his full lips and his tanned skin flushed with anger. He tilted his head so that my mother filled his focus. “Ava, your daughter believes she is able to do as she pleases.”
My mother glanced up at me looking a little panicked. Nix was scary, but my mother had never shown fear like she did in that moment. Unease erupted into terror and I gripped the underside of my chair so tightly the sharp edges of the wood cut into my palms until my fingertips went numb.
“She’s young, Nix. She hasn’t seen our world yet. I’ve protected her from those things.” My mother’s voice fell flat with little conviction and she started to tremble in her seat.
“What have you protected her from?” Nix asked with a calculating tone.
“You,” she whispered. “The truth.”
Nix’s shoulders relaxed and he lifted some of his weight from the table. “Why?”
My mother tipped her chin and stared into the living area. She wasn’t going to answer him and I was more shocked by her willful defiance in this moment than any other thing that had ever happened to me.
My mother never disobeyed Nix and never with something that I could figure out on my own. I didn’t need her to spell the truth out for me. I knew the truth. I saw it every single day.
Nix’s smirk stretched into a malicious grin. “Fine, Ava. We will keep your secrets another day. You can keep your demons locked away for one more night. But I allow you to stay silent. Do we agree? It is because of my generosity that you can hold your tongue, not because you decide how your tongue may behave. Do you agree?”
My mother’s beautiful face dropped, her chin went straight to her chest and her arms hugged her torso while she shook helplessly. I had the strongest urge to comfort her. I wanted to wrap my arms around her and promise that she would be alright.
There were so many things wrong with those emotions, starting with the fact that she had never done that for me.
Not once.
She nodded, sniffling pathetically while tears began to drip onto her Chanel lace. She was ruining it and she didn’t seem to care. Her bright auburn hair curtained her emotion from my full view but I gaped at her. I had no idea how to respond or what to say.
Nix moved to squat in front of her. They were eye level in this new position and he used his pointer finger to tilt her chin so she was forced to look him in the eye.
“I want to hear you say it out loud, Ava. Do you agree? Do you agree that it is my benevolence that allows your silence?”
On a stuttering breath she nodded. “Yes, Nix.”
“Why, Ava? Why do you obey me?” His tone, his words, his demeanor… everything about him made my skin crawl and my stomach revolt. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to crawl under my bed and hide from the monster of a man that he was. I wanted to walk out the door this moment and never look back.
“Because you own me,” she whispered sounding impossibly broken.
I mean, this was my mother. She was a cyborg. She was half-mythical-creature, half-sex-robot. She didn’t have emotions.
She didn’t break apart like I did.
She wasn’t weaker than me.
She couldn’t be.
“What was that?” he prodded her with cruel amusement. “Say it louder.”
Finding whatever inner strength still burned dimly in her black soul, she said, “You own me, Nix. I obey you because you own me.”
His attention returned to me with cataclysmic potency. I stared in horror at the woman I had called mother for seventeen years but had never truly seen. I had been so wrapped up in my own pain, in my own fear that I had never once looked around to see if she felt the way I did.
I had always known if I didn’t get out from Nix’s control that I would turn into her. But in those horrific premonitions in a future where I had no free will, I had always seen myself like her, as the willing participant; as the woman who was blinded by a wealthy future and material possessions. I had seen my future self as a woman who sold herself to the devil for a good time and an impressive bank account.
But the picture in front of my eyes now surpassed my worst fear. This was a woman who shielded herself with expensive clothes and a client list. This was a woman so utterly broken that her shattered pieces had fissures splicing them down the middle. This was a shadow of a person, an echo of a life that never was. This was nothing but a wavering projection where a body used to be, where a soul used to breathe.
She was my pain, my fear, my insecurity times infinity.
“Do you see now, my darling?” Nix took in my horror and smiled gently. “Do you understand? Your opinions come from me. Your decisions from my orders. You belong to me as much as your mother does. You are my possession and my will is your life. Fight me, Ivy, because I like it. Push me so that I can push back. Struggle against me so that my grasp can tighten and I can bend your body to mold to my hands.” He brushed the backs of his fingers along my mother’s cheek and she flinched from his touch. He chuckled as if she were just adorable. “You’re mine, Child. Whatever you do, however you act out, know that at the end of every single day, you are mine.”
I felt my head shake desperately in refusal to agree to his words. My vision flickered with images of myself sitting in that chair, of my own arms wrapped so tightly around my upper body that my fingernails were ripping the fabric of some delicate blouse and cutting into my own flesh. I saw my hair tumbling over my shoulders while my tears soaked the silky, perfect strand. I saw my own hope crucified in front of me, my spirit crushed beneath the bloody boots of a god that no longer belonged in this world.
My mom. Me. Ava. Me. Ava. Me. Ava. Me.
The images flickered and flashed so quickly I couldn’t decide what was real. I couldn’t figure out if I was hallucinating or seeing the future.
“Ivy,” Nix snapped his fingers to grab my attention. “Pay close attention, this is important.” He stood up and loomed over my mother who had never looked more breakable or small. “Who do you belong to?”
His words were a growl that cut through flesh and bone, that cut me so deeply I started to hemorrhage internally. His eyes held me with paralyzing intensity. His fingers curled to fists at his sides.
“No,” the word was a whisper on my lips.
Without warning one of his lethal fists broke through my mother’s physical barricade and clutched her around the throat. He lifted her up as if she weighed nothing, as if she were nothing more than a ragdoll. He shook her roughly, her hair whipped wildly around her face, her skin paled so that it was almost see-through. But she didn’t fight him. She didn’t even struggle.
A hysterical, frightened sob hiccupped in my throat and I shook my head fiercely. “No,” I said more confident.
“Who do you belong to, Ivy?” He rattled my mother so she cried out. Her elegant hands landed on his muscled forearm and she started to choke on her wheezing breaths.
A protective instinct bubbled up inside me. And I was shocked to note that it was for my mother and not me. Every intelligent part of me should be screaming to protect myself, but all I could see was my mother bent at an awkward angle, her life held so fragilely in Nix’s punishing grip.
He tightened his hold and her eyes bugged out. She wasn’t the perfect picture of all things feminine beauty and poise hiding a dirty secret. This was the ugliness of her life, this was everything sinister and evil she had built her world around and it was manifesting itself for everyone, or at least for me, to finally see.
And I hated it with every last ounce of my body and soul.
“Who do you belong to, Ivy?” he repeated.
“You.” The strangled word was not mine but I would give it to him. I would let him win this small thing. I would lie to save someone else.
Even if I wasn’t sure she deserved my forgiveness, she did not deserve this. Nobody did.
There were evil people in this world that we liked to judge. When one is an innocent bystander to someone else’s cruelty, it is easy to say that the persecutor deserved some kind of punishment or horrible death. But to watch it unfold in front of oneself… to know that even though they are evil, they are still a human being, they still have the gift of life and a soul that carries eternal consequences. I knew that some people are horrid enough to deserve death, but that isn’t my place to judge.
I hated my mother. She had been neglectful my entire life, and that was the least of her crimes. She had groomed me for a life in which my innocence would be sold and I would lose myself completely to the darkness of this world. She was mentally and emotionally abusive. She destroyed my happiness and my future.
But her suffering wasn’t something to celebrate and it wasn’t my place to assign it to her. She was still a creature of value that should be treated with respect, even in death.
And above all, I didn’t want her pain on my conscience.
I had enough going on up there.
“I didn’t hear you,” Nix grinned at me.
“You,” I said louder while my mother’s eyelids fluttered. “You own me, Nix.”
“That’s right.” He dropped my mother into her chair, where she immediately slumped to the side, just barely catching herself with both hands on the same side of the chair. I took a step forward but Nix held up a finger. Squatting down again, he helped my mother right herself and rubbed her knee while she gasped for ragged breaths. She stared into his eyes while oxygen slowly filled her shriveling lungs and he gazed right back, a strange expression of pride and possession marking his face. He stood up and placed both hands gently on her shoulders. “We will all do better if you choose to remember that.” His words were for me but his focus stayed on my mother. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to the top of her head before walking from the room. “Be ready at seven, Ivy.”
The front door slammed behind him.
My mother slid from her chair to the ground and collapsed in a mess of tears and hysterical sobs. She covered her face with her han
ds but her misery shook her entire body. She was utterly pitiful.
“You don’t understand,” she wailed at me. “You don’t understand!”
Some of my earlier sympathy disappeared with her excuses. “Then explain it to me,” I snapped. I walked over to her and stared down at her state of disarray; a sight I had never seen before. She looked almost human in her pain and my heart ached in my chest but I ignored the pain. I had my own broken soul to protect.
She looked up at me, with mascara streaked across her alabaster cheeks. Her pupils were dilated in the center of blood-shot eyes. Her nose dripped snot and her lipstick had smeared all around her botoxed lips.
“I can’t,” she whimpered. “There are things that I cannot share with you.”
I couldn’t stomach this anymore. I was going to be sick. My mouth started to over-salivate and my stomach churned. I moved past the table, leaving the meal forgotten and abandoned.
Ava reached out for me, clutching at my hand. “Ivy, please listen to him. Please just do what he says.”
“Why?” I asked against my better judgment. “I’m not afraid of him. I’m not afraid of what he can do to me.”
“Because there are worse things than what he can do to you.” Her ominous words rang out in the apartment with a clanging bash of imaginary cymbals.
God, this day was making me crazy.
“Is that what he did to you?” I looked down at the top of her bowed head and started to wonder if my mother had ever had the desire to get away, if she’d ever planned her escape to the minutest detail only to be foiled by the man that even now enslaved her.
In a distant voice, she said, “I can’t even begin to tell you.”
“Then I can’t even begin to trust you,” I retorted callously.
I started to pull away when she held my hand tighter and pleaded, “Ivy, wait!”
I ripped my hand from her and ignored the heart spasm that came from seeing her like this. “I can’t,” I told her. “I have to go get ready for Nix.”
But I didn’t. At least not right away. On the other side of my door I collapsed into a heap on the floor and burst into an upheaval of emotion and fear. In fact, I thought, sitting on my floor with my knees bent and my face buried in my hands, I was probably the perfect mirror-image of her.
The Fall (The Siren Series) Page 7
