by A. Zavarelli
“Get back upstairs to Ivy,” he suggests. “Go home and cool your jets.”
I glance at the sorry sack of shite curled up on the floor, his face a bloody mess and his hand so swollen he won’t be able to use it for a good month if he’s lucky. Satisfied that he’ll think of me every time he tries to spoon feed himself, I leave the room and head back upstairs to collect Ivy. Crow is at his desk in the office, fiddling with his phone while Mack and Ivy talk quietly on the couch.
“Get everything sorted?” Crow glances up at me.
I nod. “I’m taking Ivy home.”
“Aye, I think that’s a good idea.”
The return trip is quiet, and Ivy stares at me throughout, but I can’t look at her right now. I don’t want to unleash on her when I’m in a prick of a mood, but she needs to understand that when I ask her to do something, it just has to be that way.
When we get to the house and relieve Rory of his babysitting duties, he notices something isn’t right, but he isn’t the type to bother me about it. After giving us a quick report of the night, he makes himself scarce and disappears out the front door.
Ivy’s still in the parlor, standing there with her arms hanging awkwardly at her sides. I steal a quick glance at her and shake my head. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she answers flatly.
“Grand. Then you should get yourself cleaned up and get some sleep.”
She glares at me. “Is this because he touched me?”
I don’t want to have this conversation right now, and I let her know as much. “I have shite to do. I’ll be back after.”
“Just tell me.” She crosses her arms in the way that women do when they’re pissed. “Do you think I led him on or something?”
“Of course I don’t fecking think that,” I snap.
“Then why are you pissy with me?”
“Because ye can’t even follow a simple goddamn request.” I scrub a hand over my face. “If you had just done what I’d asked, everything would have been fine.”
“You can’t seriously believe that.” The vein in her neck pulses with repressed anger. “You brought me on a date to the same place I took my clothes off for the world to see. What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking that’s where I like to spend my free time and you could come along too.”
She mocks me with a caustic laugh. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I didn’t want to? That from the beginning, I haven’t had a say in any of this and I’m just along for the ride?”
If her intention was to wound me with those words, she’s done a bang-up job of it. This conversation is going nowhere fast, but I can’t let it die.
“I saved your arse when I could have just put a bullet in your head. Have you even thought about that? I gave ye a home. A safe place for Archer. I don’t know what more ye fecking want from me. Ye’re alive, and ye haven’t been captured by the Locos, so it seems to me ye have it pretty good.”
Her head dips, and all the fight leaches from her body. “You’re right. That should be enough.”
But what’s she’s saying is that it isn’t. And it only confirms what I’ve been thinking myself all along. She’s here because she has to be. She’ll never see me as anything else than the man who fucked up her life. I don’t know what the bleeding hell I’ve been doing, playing house with her like we’re a fucking family. Kissing her and fucking her and whispering bullshit words in her ear at night. If it wasn’t clear before, it’s perfectly clear now. Ivy despises me for what I did, and she always will.
I’m no hero.
And I guess it’s time I remembered that.
26
CONOR
“ARE YOU ALRIGHT, MATE?” Reaper’s voice breaks through the stillness of the basement, and I blink up at him.
His eyes are on my hands, still speckled with the blood of the two useless wastes of human life I extinguished tonight. It didn’t occur to me to wash it off, and it speaks volumes to how far I’ve come since I first began. But the fact that Reaper is even sitting here at all, asking me if I’m okay speaks volumes about him too.
The man was practically a robot when I met him, but his wife Sasha humanized him in ways I never thought possible. When I see them together, there is no denying the pure love in his eyes. They would die for each other. They will fight for each other. It’s the kind of love that starts wars, and I’ve always been a little envious of that.
We might be a crazy, murderous foul lot of muppets, but at the end of the day, we want to come home to a warm bed and a beautiful woman who loves us in spite of all that. I never fancied myself a bloke to want such things, but in my drunken state, I can admit that I do. But after what Ivy told me tonight, I don’t know that I’ll ever have it.
“She isn’t just a girlfriend,” I slur. “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”
Ronan acknowledges my drunken confession in his usual fashion. “If that wasn’t bleeding obvious, I don’t know what is.”
I take another swig of the half empty whiskey bottle in my hand. “She isn’t like your missus.”
“How do ye mean?” Ronan asks.
“She isn’t with me because she’s crazy about my dumb arse. She only married me because she had no choice.”
Ronan shrugs and snatches the bottle out of my hand. “They don’t have to like you in the beginning. Time will sort out her feelings.”
“Maybe.” But I have other ideas. An idea that only a drunk bloke would think was a good one. “Would ye mind giving me a lift home?”
The house is quiet, and after a little investigation, I find Ivy asleep in Archer’s bed. I expected as much, but it doesn’t make it feel any less like a slap in the face. She wants nothing to do with me, and if her words didn’t let me know it earlier, this definitely does. Still, I hesitate in the doorway, watching her sleep while I consider my intentions.
There’s no coming back from what I’m about to do. The truth will change things. It will open my eyes and probably fuck everything up, but I’m done playing make believe with her. I need to know how she really feels, and there’s only one way to do that. But it doesn’t make me any less apt to go to her. To get down on my knees and beg her for sweet words and false promises. Promises that she could feel something else for me like the way I feel for her right now.
Only, that would make me weak and I can’t ever be weak. Not with Ivy. There’s one solution to this clusterfuck, and it isn’t in this room. I pull the door shut, obscuring her from my view before I stumble down the hall to our room. My eyes dart over the space that smells like her. Warm and inviting and so sweet I can almost taste her.
Her things are mixed in with mine. Her clothes in the dresser, shoes in the closet. She has so little, but what she does have is here. I rifle through all of it before I find what I’m looking for, tucked away in a small compartment of her backpack. The tattered pages of her journal that hold the secrets I’ve often seen her scrawling when she doesn’t think I’m paying attention.
I flip through the first few pages, dated a year ago, and what I find turns the whiskey in my gut sour. It’s a detailed account of her life with Muerto. A no holds barred narrative of the sick things he would do to her and the threats he used to keep her compliant. There are so many specifics I can’t stomach to read through them all.
In the later entries, her writing changes. Hurried notes scrawled in haste about how much she misses her son. On other pages, there might only be one sentence, but that sentence says it all. She prays for death to come, the only thing she believes will set her free.
I retrieve the flask from my jacket and crack it open. It’s the only way I can see fit to get me through the rest. But there are so many pages of this shite. Too fucking many. Maybe it’s selfish, or maybe I’m weak, but I can’t finish them. A sinking feeling weighs me down as I flop onto the bed and skip ahead to the part where she meets me. Before I even get started, I know I’m not going to like what I find.
Our situation
is different, but in many ways it’s the same. Ivy was right that it doesn’t matter what I do or say. In the end, what it boils down to is that she’s here because she has no other choice. These same thoughts are reflected back at me in the pages of her journal.
I don’t know how I got myself into this mess, but I need to find a way out. I can’t be with a guy like Conor. I can’t be stuck with him for the rest of my life. I just need to get through this. I need to get as far away from him as I can. I hate him. I hate him so much it pains me to pretend otherwise for even a second.
I slam the pages of the notebook shut, tucking it away from my sight. If I had any notions that this would end differently, I’m over that now. The truth is right there in black and white. Ivy hates me and that’s all I need to know.
27
IVY
“WHEN IS Conor going to be home, mama?” Archer asks.
“I’m not sure, buddy.”
It’s been almost a week since our argument, and I’ve barely seen him at all. He leaves before we get up in the morning and comes home long after we’ve gone to bed every night.
“But we made him dinner,” Archer whines. “Do you think he’ll like it?”
“He will,” I assure him, even though I texted Conor over an hour ago and still haven’t received a reply.
I can’t bring myself to admit that I’ve lost all hope. Not when Archer is so desperate to see him. But when the front door opens and Conor appears, the ache in my gut mellows, if only a little.
“You’re here!” Archer squeals as he runs across the room and flings himself into Conor’s arms.
“Hey, squirt.” Conor ruffles his hair and offers him a smile, which is more than I’ve seen from him lately.
“We made you dinner,” Archer says proudly.
“Aye, that’s what I hear.” Conor rubs his belly. “Good thing too because I’m starving.”
Archer leads him to the table, and I remain rooted to the floor in the kitchen. Conor barely glances at me before he takes a seat, and the chill penetrates my skin from here. He hasn’t touched me. He hasn’t kissed me. He hasn’t said more than two words to me over the course of the week. And I don’t want to admit that this cavernous space cracking open inside my chest might be what I think it is.
Heartbreak.
I miss him. I miss him terribly, and I want to make things right, but I don’t know how. I don’t know if I’m capable of hurting Conor, but I know that he hurt me. His shame and reluctance to tell his friends that I’m his wife cuts me to the core, and he owes me an explanation for that. There are so many things I want to say, but the words won’t come. In the end, we are both too proud or stubborn to admit defeat. So instead, we sit down at the table together and eat our feelings.
“Do you like it?” Archer asks.
“Aye, it’s very good,” Conor says. “Thank you, little fella.”
“Mom did most of the work,” Archer supplies. “She’s a good cook.”
Conor meets my eyes, and for a split second, I want to believe it’s regret I see there before they turn to stone all over again. “Aye, she is.”
He concentrates on shoveling his dinner into his mouth, so he can get out of here. I know it before he says so, and I’m proven right when he pushes back his chair.
“Thanks for dinner. I have to get back to work.”
“Whyyyyy?” Archer pouts.
“Can we talk?” I blurt.
Conor checks his phone, still avoiding eye contact. “A quick one.”
I tell Archer to go play in his room for a couple minutes, and he reluctantly stomps down the hall. I wait until his door is shut before speaking. “Is there something going on?”
“Like what?” Conor taps out a message on his phone.
“You haven’t been home. You’ve barely spoken to me. I just—”
“Welcome to being a mafia wife.” His tone is so flat, I can’t stand it.
I hate that I’m getting emotional, or letting it get to me at all. I’m shaking, my hands itching to rip that phone out of his hands and throw it into the garbage. “I get that you’re still pissed at me, but we can’t make this work if—”
His eyes snap up to mine, and they are brimming with a darkness I haven’t seen in him before. “That’s exactly what we’re fecking doing here, Ivy. We’re making the best of a shitty situation. The only way to make this work is by ignoring the fact that we’re chained to one another for life.”
I feel my body crumpling in on itself. My stomach is full of lava, eyes burning with unshed tears. What a fool I’ve been to think that Conor could love me. Maybe for a second, it was possible. But now it’s painfully obvious he’s miserable, and he’d rather be anywhere else than here.
“Chrissakes.” He turns his back on me when he sees the vulnerability in my face. “I don’t know what else ye want from me.”
“Nothing.” My voice wavers. “I don’t want anything else from you.”
“Did you get everything out of your drawers?” I ask Archer.
He nods and clings to the teddy bear Conor bought him at the zoo. “Where are we going?”
I arrange a pile of our bags outside the front door. “On an adventure.”
Archer doesn’t look convinced, and I don’t blame him. I hate everything about this situation, but if there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that I can’t wait for things to get any worse. The only way to preserve both of our hearts is to get out now, while we still can.
It doesn’t matter if I only have a thousand dollars and the clothes that Conor bought us. We will figure it out. We will get on a bus and go far, far away, and we will stay in a shelter if we have to. As long as we’re safe and we’re together, that’s all that matters.
But even I’m still not convinced when I glance at Archer and see the questions in his eyes. He’s attached to Conor, and he’s not the only one. The idea of leaving this house behind feels like we’re leaving the only real home we’ve ever had. We’ll never see Conor walking through this door again. I’ll never feel his body curled against me in the middle of the night. And Archer will probably never stop blaming me for taking him away from the only man he’s ever loved.
I feel like a horrible mother for allowing it to happen in the first place. I believed Conor. I thought he wanted us. But his actions and his words have proved my worst fears to be true. Now, we’re all out of options and Archer and I have to move on.
“Leave the door cracked,” I choke out. “Wait here while I talk to the driver.”
I walk down to the sidewalk where the cab is waiting, ten minutes earlier than expected. The driver is engrossed in his phone when I open the back door and speak through the plate glass divider.
“You’re here for Misty?” I ask, giving him the fake name I provided when I ordered the cab.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he mumbles.
I ask him if he can open the trunk while I meet Archer at the top of the stairs, grabbing our bags along with his hand. By the time we get back down to the sidewalk, the driver is out of the car.
“Let me give you a hand with that,” he says.
I hesitate when he reaches for the bags. Maybe it’s just my paranoia, but something feels off. He’s wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, and his arm is in a sling. He couldn’t possibly work for the Locos, or at least that’s what I want to believe. But suddenly everything about this situation feels wrong, and it isn’t until I get a whiff of his cologne that I realize why.
Slick was wearing that same cologne. I couldn’t forget it if I tried. And even though I can’t see his eyes, I know in my gut it’s him. It can’t be a coincidence that he’s here now.
I try to stay calm as I let go of Archer’s hand. We’ve rehearsed this a thousand times. I just need to get him back in the house. That’s all that matters right now. “Archer, did you forget Mr. Potato Head?”
His eyes widen when he looks up at me, acknowledging our secret code, and then they slowly move to the guy.
“Go back in the house and grab him,” I instruct. “Better make it quick.”
Archer doesn’t let me down. He follows the protocol we have in place. The same one I’ve made him practice again and again. He darts back up the stairs and shuts the door behind him, and when the lock clicks into place, I spring into action.
I pull a wad of cash from my pocket and try to hand it to Slick. “You know what, we’re going to be a while. I think I’ll call a cab later once I’m sure we’ve got everything.”
He reaches out for the cash but grabs me by the wrist instead. “Do you think I’m stupid?” He yanks me against him, and that’s when I feel the end of a gun against my rib cage. “Get in the fucking car, and do it without making a scene, or I’ll make sure your son comes along for the ride too.”
I swallow every instinct that screams at me to revolt and run. Something in his eyes tells me I won’t make it a block down the street before he shoots me, and then Archer too.
“Please don’t do this,” I whisper.
He cocks the gun, and my breath dies in my chest. “Too late, bitch. Now get in the fucking car.”
28
CONOR
“CONOR,” Crow barks at me. “Get the feck out of here.”
I look up from the sofa in his office, scrubbing the sleep out of my eyes.
“Ye’re completely worthless to me right now.” He tosses my jacket at me. “What the bleeding hell is going on with you?”
“He’s got lady problems,” Reaper chimes in.
Crow huffs. “Ye told me this wasn’t going to be an issue. And yet here you are, moping around all week like someone stole your lollies.”
I sit up and crack my neck from side to side, trying to release the tension that’s accumulated since I took up napping on Crow’s sofa. “There isn’t an issue.”
He curses under his breath and Ronan butts in again. “He thinks his missus hates him. That’s why he’s all bent out of shape.”
“I never said that.” I glare.
“Aye, you did,” Reaper insists. “When ye were whining last night after ye got your mitts on the whiskey.”
