Recovering Ivy

by Riley Edwards

  “You’ve never complained before. Didn’t seem to matter when I was sucking your dick.”

  God, I wished Zane was here. He wouldn’t let Sarah sell me. He would never let Lance put his hands on me. I wondered if he even knew Sarah had taken me.

  “Yeah, well, I never said you didn’t give a great blowjob. I said you’re an underhanded cunt.”

  The hair that had been covering the side of my face was brushed aside and I opened my eyes. Sarah was so close I could smell her foul breath even before she spoke.

  “I warned you to mind your own business. I tried telling you you were no better than me. But did you listen? No. You always looked down your nose at me and caused trouble. Now, Lance is gonna teach you all the lessons I failed to teach.”

  “Why?” I croaked out.

  “Why not?”

  What kind of mother did this to her child? This was low, even for Sarah.

  “I tried to help you,” I cried. “I loved you.”

  “I never wanted your help. Since the day you were born, you’ve been more trouble than you’re worth. I should’ve gotten rid of you while you were still in my stomach. Better late than never.”

  Sarah backed away, and as grateful as I was for the fresh air, I didn’t want her to leave me alone with Lance. Not that she’d protect me from him, but the minute she left, I knew Lance would hurt me.

  “You wanna hit before you leave? Something to take the edge off?” Lance offered.

  I didn’t bother trying to move to look to see what they were doing. I heard the flick of a Zippo lighter and the smell of my childhood floated in the air. A few minutes later, the door opened, and I watched my mother walk out the door, black duffle bag in hand.

  She’d done it. She sold me to her ex-husband. He was a pimp and dealer, a man I remembered well from my childhood.

  “Ivy, Ivy, Ivy. It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” Lance started. “You were such a pretty little girl. And when you finally grew a pair of tits, my mouth would water thinking about how those mile-long legs would feel wrapped around my waist. Such a shame I had to wait so long to get my taste.”

  My stomach churned again, and I thought I was going to throw up again.

  “If I didn’t like my women feisty and able to fight back, I take what’s mine now. As soon as the benzo your mama gave you wears off, I’m gonna fuck you until you’re begging me to stop. I’m gonna take your ass first. I bet a good girl like you has never taken dick up your ass before. You’re mama’s a stupid bitch. I would’ve paid twenty for you. I have clients lining up to get a piece of clean pussy.”

  My eyes drifted closed and I knew this was the end of my life. I’d never recover. I almost welcomed more of what Sarah had given me. I needed to be numb.

  As I laid in a dirty hotel room, my impending rape looming over me, I thought about Zane. All the things I wished I had told him. All the things I wished I had done differently. Even if he found me, I would be dirty - ruined. I hated this for me more than I hated it for myself. He didn’t deserve this.

  29

  Zane

  “You’re gonna wear a hole in the floor. Sit down.” My head snapped to Linc, and I leveled him with a stare.

  “Don’t fucking talk to me,” I growled.

  The whole team, minus Colin and Jasmin, were around the conference room table. Each man had their tablets in front of them. A map of the area Ivy’s phone last pinged a tower was rolled out in the middle of the table, and Garrett and Tex were on the phone.

  Goldsborough had been contacted and he confirmed Forester was locked in his cell and had no contact with anyone other than his attorney. Unfortunately, those meetings were not allowed to be recorded; however, Garrett had crawled up the attorney’s ass and he was clean. Squeaky clean. Word was he was unhappy he had to represent Forester in the first place. The man had three college-aged daughters and a son that had OD’d when he was a teenager. I was confident he wasn’t passing information in or out of lockup for Forester.

  “Got something,” Garrett said. The seventy-two-inch monitor on the wall came to life and Garrett continued to click away on his keyboard. “You in?” he asked when he laid his cell phone on the table.

  “Yep.” Tex’s voice came over the line. “Traffic cam at the Woodrow Wilson bridge caught this.” A grainy image of Sarah Long in her car appeared on the screen.

  “Try to enhance that. I want eyes on Ivy,” I told Linc.

  “Already on it.”

  “Then again here at the 95-south interchange,” Tex said before the image changed. This was a slightly different angle but still no Ivy. “Last one is here, right before the North Carolina border.”

  Still no visual on Ivy.

  “Fuck.”

  “I got nothin’,” Linc told the room. “There’s no angle where I have a clear view of the back seat.”

  “Get a map up of the area,” I asked no one in particular.

  “Got it,” Leo answered, pulling up Google Earth on the big screen, zooming in on the Virginia – North Carolina border.

  “Nothing but farmland,” I noted. “Tex, where’s the next traffic cam?”

  “Ten miles south,” he answered.

  I studied the map. There was only two possible exits. One was for a truck stop.

  “Pull the footage from the truck stop.”

  “Copy.” Declan went to work on his tablet.

  “Garrett, do any side streets in the area have feeds?”

  “Negative,” Tex answered for him, obviously tracking my thoughts.

  “Truck stop is clean,” Declan answered.

  Come on, Ivy, where are you?

  “Pull up motels in a ten-mile radius from the off-ramp.”

  It had been five hours. Five hours my woman had been in the hands of a crazy woman. I had no doubt Sarah had taken her. My palms itched to wrap my hands around the bitch’s throat and watch the light dim from her eyes. A bullet to her head was too easy, too fast. I wanted Sarah Long to suffer, knowing I was the man who was dispatching her evil ass to hell. My face would be the last thing she saw before her world went dark.

  “Zane!”

  “What?” I barked.

  “I know that look, brother. You’re plotting murder. Not yet. Keep your shit together and talk through this with us,” Linc said.

  “Keep my shit together? That motherfucker has my woman. She ran her off the road, pulled her out of my car, and took her. Under the circumstances, I’d say I’m locking my shit down pretty tight.”

  Leo and Jaxon both faced me, and I braced.

  “We’re gonna find her, LT,” Leo said. “Nothing we wouldn’t do to bring her home.’

  Jaxon contemplated his words before he spoke. “I remember the feeling of helplessness. Total devastation when Violet was taken. Whatever you need, I have your six. We all do. Keep your head in the game a while longer. Once we have her, the team will take care of Ivy for you.”

  I understood what Jaxon was saying without needing him to explain further. After we found Violet with the help of one of Tex’s friends, Cutter, she was taken back to the US ahead of the rest of the team. Jaxon had been clear he wanted Violet protected while he took care of the man who had kidnapped her.

  I lifted my chin to the unspoken offer. The last thing I wanted was Ivy having to watch me kill her mother.

  “I have a hit. Traffic camera twenty miles south of the border.” Tex’s voice cut through the room.

  “An hour between traffic cams is too long for a bathroom break and a gas stop,” Leo surmised.

  “What do the motels in the area look like?”

  “Why? Sarah’s on the move. Even if they stopped so she could catch a fix, they’re moving,” Linc argued.

  “Something’s not right. My gut is screaming at me. There are no restaurants in the area, no fast food, one gas station. If she gassed up, took a piss, and caught a fix, she’d get on at the same spot she exited, and we’d have her on the next traffic cam ten miles down the highway. But instead
she got off, traveled somewhere, passed the ten-mile cam, and got on before the cam twenty miles down. What is there to do in that area for an hour or more?”

  “Is it possible she doesn’t have Ivy? There’s been no visual confirmation,” Declan started. “What if…”

  “She has her,” I cut him off.

  “But…”

  “I feel it. You didn’t see the hate in that bitch’s eyes. She despises Ivy and threatened her if we didn’t back off Forester. This is payback.”

  “For what? Forester being locked up?” he continued.

  “For Ivy being Ivy. For her escaping her shit childhood. Sarah Long is a bitter, jealous cunt that would love nothing more than to bring Ivy low. She’s told Ivy her whole life she was a worthless piece of shit. Sarah Long hates that Ivy proved her wrong.”

  I stopped and thought about everything Sarah had said in the parking lot of the grocery store.

  “Sarah sold Joey to Forester.” I began to pace. “She told Ivy she wished she would’ve given him both of the girls.” Four angry men grunted and Tex’s muttered bitch hadn’t gone unheard. “You think she could set up another pimp in such short notice and unload Ivy?” I asked the room.

  No one spoke, but the way their eyes shifted away from me and their bodies locked, I didn’t need them to. I had my answer.

  “Motherfucker!” I roared, and in a moment of weakness I lost control. I did something I hadn’t done since I was an unruly, undisciplined young man and put my fist through the wall.

  “I have two possible motels in the area. Both shitbag pay by the hour. Neither have anything resembling a security system I can get into. Both have wifi and a sorry ass excuse of a firewall. I’m in both of their occupant databases. Nothing under Sarah Long but that doesn’t mean shit because the first motel only has five rooms booked according to their records, but seven rooms occupied. The second motel is thirty dollars a day more expensive and has twenty reservations, but thirty-five rooms occupied.” Garrett ignored my outburst and continued to do what I should’ve been doing, gathering intel. “Tex, can you think of anything else?”

  “Negative,” he answered. “But I do have a helo coming your way. ETA ten minutes. I have two vehicles waiting for you at the LZ.”

  “I owe you big time, brother,” I told Tex.

  “No, you don’t. This is what we do.”

  Tex disconnected and, not for the first time, I thought about how grateful I was to have Tex on standby. His skills were scary as fuck. Every time Garrett got to work with the legendary man, he beamed for a week and wouldn’t shut up about all the new stuff he learned. Not that Garrett was beaming at the moment. He was deep in concentration and, like always, his fingers were flying over his keyboard.

  Ten minutes later, the team was fully kitted out and ready to go.

  When Tex said he had a helicopter inbound, I wasn’t expecting an Eurocopter C7. It was an experimental high-speed composite helicopter with a top speed in the neighborhood of 265mph, making the 240-mile trip down to North Carolina in a little under an hour.

  Once the team was loaded and our headsets secure, the pilot came over the line.

  “Viper? All Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  The whine of the engine revved and the beast of a machine lifted off the roof of my building.

  Hang on, baby, I’m coming for you.

  I spent the next forty-five minutes in silence going over all the intel we’d gathered. The closer we got to North Carolina, the harder it was to breathe.

  I looked to my right and Linc pinned me with his eyes. Fuck, what was I getting my men into?

  “What if I’m wrong?”

  “You’re not.”

  “How do you know? Maybe Sarah didn’t take her.”

  “Because you’re never wrong.”

  “I was wrong about you being dead,” I reminded him. I had argued with Jasmin when she refused to believe Lincoln had died in Mexico when a tunnel he was in exploded. I’d flat out told her she was wrong and had to accept the fact her husband, my brother, was dead. I had never been so happy to be wrong in all my life when she found intel that Linc was still alive. Because of my stubbornness, my brother was beaten and tortured. We barely got there in time to save him. I still couldn’t understand how he’d forgiven me. Hell, maybe he hadn’t. He refused to talk to me about it.

  “Don’t go there. Trust your gut. It's kept you alive this long.”

  I went back to staring out the window and prayed I was right and we were close to finding Ivy. There was no way God could be so cruel to give me the woman I was meant to love to only rip her from my life. I wouldn’t survive if Ivy was taken from me permanently. I was hanging on by hope alone. I needed her to be alright.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket and I hurried to pull it out, hoping it was Tex with more information.

  Ivy.

  My finger shook as I answered.

  “Ivy.”

  It was so loud in the cabin I could hardly hear her. It didn’t help she was crying and speaking in a hushed voice.

  Linc had pulled his phone out and his fingers were moving faster than I’d ever seen him try to text. Dec had pulled his phone out as well and had removed his headphones, placing his phone to his ear so I couldn’t hear what he was saying as I tried to concentrate on Ivy’s voice.

  “Zane. Please. Drugs.”

  The helicopter banked hard right and descended at a high rate of speed, making my already clenched stomach drop.

  “Baby, don’t hang up. I’m coming for you, but you can’t hang up.”

  The pilot put the helicopter down and Linc threw the side door open, allowing me to exit and run from the loud engines so I could hear what Ivy was telling me.

  “Please hurry. He’s gonna. He said he’s gonna hurt me.”

  “No one’s gonna hurt you, Ivy. Do you know where you are?”

  “No. I woke up in a room. I don’t know. He’s gonna give me drugs, Zane. He said he wants me to be his whore.”

  My blood boiled, but instead of trying to control my rage I allowed it to grow into a ball of fury and hate.

  “Where is he?”

  “He thought I was still asleep. He left the room. I don’t know when he’s gonna be back. I need you. Please. Lance is serious, he’s gonna rape me when he gets back. I’m so sorry, Zane. I’m so sorry. I’ll try to fight him. I promise.”

  “Ivy. Listen to me. I am coming for you. All you need to do is stay alive. Everything else we’ll deal with. Nothing is your fault. Nothing, baby.”

  “The door.”

  “Put your phone face down so he can’t see the screen but keep it on. I’m coming. I love you.”

  I waited for her to talk again, but she went silent. I strained to hear voices, anything that would tell me where she was. The rest of the team ran toward me and I quickly put my phone on mute.

  “Garrett got a lock. The first motel he told us about,” Declan called out. Not waiting for an answer, he jogged to the SUVs Tex had arranged and hopped in the driver’s seat. Once Linc and I piled in, he took off. Jaxon and Leo followed in the second vehicle.

  I put my phone on speaker and continued to listen to mostly silence.

  Please hold on, baby.

  “Two minutes out,” Declan announced.

  “Oh, good, sleeping beauty is awake,” a man’s voice came over the line. “I was beginning to think I was gonna have to fuck you while you slept.”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “I told you, I like feisty bitches. The more you fight, the better it will feel when I’m balls deep in your sweet virgin ass.”

  “Please,” Ivy begged.

  “Motherfucker!” I shouted.

  “Lock it down. Almost there.”

  With a clarity I’d never possessed, I planned Lance’s execution.

  “You all should stay in the car,” I informed them.

  Fuck that echoed in the truck.

  “’Preciate you all having my back, but we are on US soil
. I’m going to kill him in cold blood. If I face a murder charge, I don’t want any of you near it. Drop me off and go.”

  “Not gonna happen,” my brother said as Declan pulled into the parking lot of the motel.

  “I need you clean…”

  “That’s going to be my sister-in-law. She’s all of ours.”

  “I’m going to kill him.”

  “Roger that.”

  30

  Ivy

  “Please,” I begged.

  “Begging already? We haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet.”

  Before I could say another word, Lance was on the bed and had ripped my shirt open with such violence my head whipped back and my teeth gnashed together.

  “Stop!” I screamed and tried to kick him off.

  He was too strong, too heavy. I couldn’t stop him when he pulled my shorts down my legs. I kicked out and made contact somewhere on his chest before he caught my ankle and pulled me down the bed.

  “Oh, yeah, fight me, Ivy.”

  I was on my stomach, my legs dangling off the bed. Lance’s forearm was on the back of my neck and he had a fist full of hair.

  “This is gonna hurt.” He laughed, and I felt his bare legs touch the inside of my thighs.

  “Please don’t, Lance. Please stop.” I tried to close my legs and wiggle away from him.

  “Wanna feel how hard you make me?”

  My stomach lurched and I could taste the bile in my mouth.

  This was it, there was nothing I could do to stop him. I wrenched my eyes closed and tried to summon up anything about Zane. Something I could get lost in, anything to take me far away from the here and now. I wouldn’t survive this. I couldn’t. My mother had sealed my fate. She won.

  My panties were being torn off and I screamed.

  “Zane!”

  “No one’s gonna come for you…”

  Within seconds, the world around me exploded. Glass shattered, wood splintered, and light poured into the room. Five men dressed in black barged into the room like dark avenging angels. Zane didn’t wait, he lunged at Lance, taking him to the floor. I tried to scramble up the bed to get away from the two men fighting on the floor.