“Yeah, that’s a good answer, Shaggy,” I told him. “But you should also know that we consider that an oath. And we will hold you to that oath. Should you ever break your word or hurt our girl we will castrate you in the middle of the town square and leave you to bleed to death.”
Phoenix gulped. “I don’t think we have a town square.”
“You get the message,” Sloane growled.
“Geez,yeah, okay, I get the message.” Phoenix glanced up on stage longingly. “Did Ryder have to go through this?”
Exie rolled her eyes. “Obviously.”
“He did?” I found that oddly sweet of them.
“Do you really think we’re just going to let some random guy crush on you? No, we needed the details.” Exie smiled at me.
“What did he say?” I whispered.
Sloane and Exie shared a look before Sloane pulled me into a side hug and laid her head on my shoulder. “He said he wanted your soul to be free.”
My heart swelled so rapidly it actually hurt. I rubbed my palm against the overly full organ and ignored the tears that flooded my eyes.
“He’s good,” I groaned.
“He really is,” Sloane smiled.
Just then all three of our cell phones started to vibrate and ring. We shared a concerned look and pulled them from our various pockets or purses.
My mom had been the one to text me so I assumed Exie and Sloane had a similar message.
Come home. The text said. Nix is here. They found the girls. Send Exie and Sloane home, too.
From bliss to panic in point three seconds. I glanced up at Exie and Sloane’s unreadable expressions as they stared at the screens of their phone.
I rapidly tapped out my response and started moving toward Ryder. Are they okay? Where are they? What is Nix going to do to them?
Her reply took a minute but when it came back, I felt my equilibrium disappear and my happy heart shatter into a billion broken pieces.
Nix isn’t going to do anything to them. They’re dead. Both of them.
Another minute went by when I just stared at my phone hoping the words glaring back at me would suddenly mean something else, hoping that I misunderstood English all of a sudden and that these words did not mean what I read them to mean.
Come home, Ivy. Or he’s going to come looking for you. Please.
“Is everything alright?” Ryder asked from just inches in front of me.
All at once I realized he was holding onto my shoulders, holding me in place and keeping me from swaying precariously.
Which was good because I was seconds away from passing out. “No,” I whispered.
“What’s wrong?” His voice was a grumbly demand. Any humor and happiness that still lingered from earlier vanished with those words.
“It’s… it’s Anaxandra and Evaleen… they’re dead.”
And then I collapsed onto the filthy, bar floor and began to uncontrollably sob into my hands.
Sloane stood over me. Just stood there. I could feel her sucking every bit of happiness from the room. The creativity, the inspiration, the good vibes from such a fantastic musical experience… all of it stripped away and swallowed in the vortex of her grief.
“No,” she hissed defiantly. “I won’t believe it.”
I held up my phone for her to have. Ryder pulled me up from the floor and wrapped his arms around me. He tucked my head under his chin and crushed me to him. I hadn’t even had a chance to catch him up to the story but now it was over before it ever began.
Sloane looked at my phone with stoic cynicism. Exie’s head snapped back and forth between us, her expression wide-eyed and fearful. They hadn’t gotten the news in their texts. Probably it said something like “come home” and nothing else.
After a few agonizing moments of silence, Sloane finally handed my phone to Exie with trembling hands.
“No,” she cried in an agonized voice. “No, it’s not true!”
Exie’s scream of grief resounded not seconds later. She would have collapsed like I had if Phoenix hadn’t caught her. He dragged her into a hug and caught my phone before that too dropped to the floor.
Sloane had no one to hold her and I thought maybe that was a good thing. She turned around and attacked the bar in a mixture of rage and anguish. She threw barstools out of the way and swept her hand over the back of the bar crashing bottles of liquor to the floor. She picked up a barstool that hadn’t toppled and chucked it into a high-top table. She kicked and screamed and broke whatever she could get in her hands until I pushed Ryder at her.
“Stop her!” I begged him.
He didn’t need to be asked. He imprisoned her with his strong arms, trapping her forcefully against his body. She kicked at him and punched him. She even tried to head-butt him, but he saw it coming and stopped her with a firm hand to her forehead.
When she couldn’t attack him physically, she turned her words against him. “This is your fault! This is all because of you! You convinced Ivy that we could do this! You lied to her! You lied to all of us! We can’t get away! Not ever! You made her believe that we can, but we can’t! This is all because of you and I hate you! I hate you! You are poison to her! You killed my sister! My sister is dead because of your lies and your poison!” She spit in his face and scratched his arms.
I cried harder at every accusation and every moment of violence my sweet, studious friend struck out with. She was angry that her sister had been through what she had, and that she had to make a choice to live or die, and then that Evaleen had died despite her effort to live. Sloane was completely consumed with grief and pain. I didn’t know if she would even remember this later, or if this episode could be temporary insanity.
I would remember though. I would remember all of her words and how deeply they sliced through me.
Ryder didn’t understand most of what she was accusing him of. He had never even met Anaxandra or Evaleen; but he took it in stride and held her until all of the fight left her. She finally leaned against him sobbing and wailing with every bit of heartbreak that a human being could feel.
I stood there with my arms wrapped around my torso, shaking and weeping. This wasn’t supposed to be how it ended. This wasn’t supposed to be what happened.
“We need to go home,” I announced through hiccupping sobs. “They’re waiting for us.”
Ryder turned around, still holding Sloane. “Ivy, please tell me what’s going on.” He sounded desperate, frantic and wounded with grief.
“Their sisters,” I whispered in a harsh voice. “Exie and Sloane’s sisters died tonight.”
A shudder of shocked silence rippled over us and the small crowd we’d attracted with our crazed behavior. I felt Ryder go absolutely still even though I wasn’t touching him. Phoenix hugged Exie tighter and looked at me in utter confusion.
My tone must have conveyed some kind of meaning I hadn’t realized I’d delivered, because Phoenix clarified, “What do you mean? In some sort of accident or…”
I shook my head and my friends started to cry harder. “They were killed.”
“In an accident?” Phoenix asked in a harsher tone.
“No!” I shouted at him, unable to hold back my misery. “Not in an accident! They were killed! Murdered! Destroyed by an evil bastard that deserves to rot in hell for all of eternity!”
Ryder pulled me into a hug in the next second. He didn’t even let go of Sloane, he just grabbed me and put his arms around both of us. I turned into his body and released the emotion I had been trying to keep at bay.
Our phones kept ringing, but we kept crying unable to leave this place and face the horror waiting for us at home.
Or Nix.
The idea of facing Nix and knowing that he was the reason for all of this… I didn’t think I’d be able to do it. I didn’t think I was strong enough. Had he gone with the intention to kill them? Was that their punishment for running? Or had things escalated out of control before he could calm the situation?
Did it mat
ter?
One way or another he was responsible for their deaths. Either he pulled the proverbial-trigger himself or necessitated their need to run in the first place.
He was at fault.
He was the killer.
And suddenly I didn’t need to be strong enough to face him, because I wasn’t strong; I was angry. I was definitely angry enough to confront him.
“We need to go.” I pulled myself together somewhat by letting the fury fill me. My eyes dried and I wandered off to get some tissues from the bathroom.
When I came back, Sloane and Exie were not any better. I handed them some Kleenex and hugged each of them for a long time in turn.
“Are you supposed to go home?” I asked while patting Sloane’s back. There was a good chance Nix wanted us to gather somewhere together.
“Yes,” Sloane sniffled. “My mom wants me to come straight home.”
“Mine, too,” Exie echoed.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Ryder and Phoenix walked us to our car. Outside the night breeze blew sweet and soft across my sweaty skin. The heat had cooled considerably and the moon sat high in the sky, full and creamy white. Sloane announced she would drive so Exie wouldn’t have to and she climbed into the driver’s seat. Phoenix helped Exie get settled next to her and I took the moment to say goodbye to Ryder.
“Ivy, what happened?” he asked with gentle pleading eyes.
“I helped them,” I whispered as the tears started to fall again. “I told them to run. And then I created a distraction so they could get away. I’m the reason they’re dead. I’m the reason Nix found them.”
Ryder tucked my hair behind my ear and let his fingers trace the line of my jaw. “Why? I thought they were coming in a couple weeks. Why last night?”
“Nix held his auction last night. They were going to be sold to these two… two unspeakable men. They wouldn’t have made it through the night. They would have been in hell as soon as they were in their possession.” A soul-deep sob shuddered through me. “I should have come up with a better plan. I should have thought of something else to keep them safe. I killed them Ryder. Or maybe I didn’t, but I was an accomplice. I set them up to fail.” I threw my arms around his neck again and buried my face in his chest.
“Hey,” he soothed. “Hey now, come on. You can’t blame yourself, Ivy. You can’t have this guilt. You don’t deserve it.”
“They didn’t deserve this!” I wailed against him. “They deserved to live! I just wanted to help them live!”
“But you did!” He was suddenly stern and demanding. He held me by the waist and pulled me back so I would have to watch him. “You did help them live, Ivy. You gave them life.”
“For maybe a few hours! Maybe not even that. Ryder, I did this. I tried to help someone escape and I did this.”
“Stop!” His voice was a harsh growl and his fingers bit into my waist. “Listen to me. The choice for them was never escape and be free or stay and die. It was always die or die. They knew that when they left and you knew that when you gave them the opportunity. They would have died if they stayed. You just told me that. But instead of being sold into someone else’s possession and dying at their hands, those girls ended things on their terms. They died free. They died as free women. That’s what they wanted. They knew the risk in leaving. They knew the greater risk in staying. They wanted freedom and they got it. And maybe it was only for a few hours but it was the first and only few hours of freedom they had ever had in their lives. You gave them the most precious gift you could have. They lived free for hours, not just hours, but hours, Ivy. Change the way you think about that. What would you do for those minutes? What would you do to choose the end of your life? They died free women with a choice.”
“I love you,” I blurted at the end of his speech. Even though we had said it before, even though he knew how I felt and I knew how he felt, those were the only words I could give him after the peace had had just given me. They were a confession as much as they were a promise. Those words were everything I could give him in the moment when I felt like I had nothing else. I felt stripped except for that promise, like there was nothing left of me except that love. With the news that Evaleen and Anaxandra hadn’t made it, I felt like nothing more than a hollow vessel, breakable, empty and useless. Except for that love, the connection between us. That was the only thing left to me. The only thing that kept me breathing and alive.
“I love you,” he echoed and gave me the sanctuary of his arms again. “I love you more than anything. I love you enough to not want you to go home. Come home with me. We’ll worry about your trust later. We can run for a little bit while we wait for it. We can stay out of Nix’s reach until we get it.”
“If you would have asked me yesterday, I would have said yes. But, I need to stay for my friends. I need to stay through the funeral.”
“Ivy.” Ryder’s voice was a frustrated snarl. “Let’s just go. Let’s go tonight.” The more he said the words, the more he believed in his idea. I could feel him spark to life with it. “Please, Red, let’s go. Let’s leave and never look back.” His palms skated down my waist and wrapped around my hips.
“You have to say goodbye to your dad,” I lectured. “And I have to stay through the funerals. I have to grieve these girls properly. Then we’ll go. We’ll leave. I promise.”
“What if-”
I shook my head and looked up at him. With every ounce of conviction I could muster, I swore to him, “I’ll be fine. Nix won’t hurt me. For a few more days, I’ll be fine.”
“Ivy!” Sloane shouted from the driver’s seat. “I need to get home now!”
Ryder wanted to argue with me, but I couldn’t keep my friends waiting. They needed to get to their mothers. They needed to get to some place private so they could grieve their sisters. I needed to respect them.
“I’ll call you later.”
“You have your phone?” he asked. He was disappointed and I realized I was surprised by his commitment to leaving. I thought it would be harder for him than it was going to be. He really did just want to be with me.
“I got it back today. Don’t text me and we probably shouldn’t talk for long, but I can call you.”
He kissed me slowly, savoring me and my lips. I tasted the salt of my tears and the sticky residue from my lip gloss. When he pulled away, he rested his forehead against mine for several seconds. His eyes stayed tightly shut and his hands still clutched me desperately.
Eventually we let go and I left him on the sidewalk staring after me. Sloane drove me home in silence. Not one of us spoke a word. We cried as quietly as we could, but nobody could find the strength to speak.
Not until Sloane pulled up into my drive. “Is Nix there?” she rasped with a shaking voice.
“I guess.” I looked up at the towering condo complex. “He just got back.”
She turned in her seat to pin me with a glare. “If you get a chance tonight, kill him. Poison him. Push him off the balcony. Do whatever it takes. Get rid of that son of a bitch.”
I closed my eyes in an effort to hold back the fresh tears. They burned my eyelids and leaked out anyway. “I can’t kill him. We can’t kill him. You know that.”
That is the moment that Sloane truly broke. She stopped being angry. She stopped feeling the need for vengeance and retribution. She just… fragmented into thousands of tiny little pieces. She lost her fight. She lost her spunk. I watched the despair and hopelessness fill her body and spread out through her like ink in water.
I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have let her keep thinking we could fix this. We could change our situation. The tears streamed from her eyes again but this was a different more consuming grief. These were the tears of someone destroyed.
Of someone who died tonight with her sister.
“Are you okay to drive home?” I asked her. She nodded weakly. I put my hand on Exie’s shoulder and squeezed. “Call me later?”
They both managed a nod.
&n
bsp; Damn it.
I would fix this. I would fix them. We just had two more weeks and then we’d be gone. We’d leave all this behind us and make a new life for ourselves. We wouldn’t get caught. We wouldn’t ever see Nix again.
I didn’t know what the difference would be between us and Ana and Eva, but I knew that there was a difference. There had to be.
There had to be.
Chapter Twenty-One
I climbed the steps slowly and curled into myself in the corner of the elevator. The doors pinged open on my floor and my apartment door swung open. Nix filled the doorframe seething with fury; his anger reached beyond him, seeming to infect the entire hallway, every particle and molecule from me to him filled to bursting with his rage.
I should have been afraid, but I couldn’t muster that kind of extra emotion right now. My soul was tapped. I was the empty shell again, the lost girl.
Bereavement and agony consumed me. Acute pain stabbed at my heart and twisted my gut.
I trudged through the front door and beyond the man that could take my life if he wanted. He had that power over me tonight. If he wanted to throw me in the mass grave with the other girls, he would.
And I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
Despite my bravado with Ryder earlier, I knew that losing my life tonight was a very real possibility.
I found my mother in the living room. There was a blanket around her shoulders and a cup of tea in her trembling hands. Her entire body shook while she wept. She didn’t even bother to look at me when I walked in the room. Her eyes stayed firmly fixed on the ceramic mug in her hands.
Somehow I realized that this was for my protection. I didn’t understand it, or why I felt that way, but I knew that she was deflecting some of Nix’s ire by ignoring me.
I reached down and slipped off my heeled boots and then I curled my toes into the super soft rug. It was a small comfort, but the luxurious squishy feeling on my feet helped relax me some.
“I should throw you on an airplane tonight,” Nix grated from behind me. I felt his body heat cover my back. His breath coasted over my head. He was close. I could feel him hovering just an inch away, using all of his self-control to keep from touching me. “I should take you back to Greece and lock you away until you learn some goddamn common sense.”
The Fall (The Siren Series) Page 23