Page 116 of Start With A Slap

“Couples is a hundred,” she continued, scratching at a scab on her neck. “You got that much? You like to watch, Richie? I could eat your girlfriend’s ass for forty.”

“Ay nako,” Ernesto blithely griped, “I can’t take her anywhere.”

As Roxie backtalked Ernesto, Sever turned to Ivy with a steely expression. “Satisfied?”

She looked down in shame, and he brushed past her.

“Sever!” Roxie hissed, suddenly lucid.

He stopped in his tracks, but didn’t turn.

“I remember everything aboutyou. You mother. Fucker. Ha! I saw it happen. Isawit.”

“Enough.” Rattled, he took Ivy by the arm and marched to the door.

“Oh, is it? Is it enough?Shenever got enough of you, did she, ‘Darling Husband?’ Who’s the new fuckalike, Sever? Does she know all your pervy little secrets? Hey! Blondie! Lookatme!”

Ivy looked over her shoulder to see a frenzied Roxie, held back by her nurse, meeting her gaze for the first time.

“I know who you fucking are,” she accused Ivy with a growing sneer. “Barbie fucking Pay-a-Ton! How’s my son, you rank whore? He still suckin’ on your fake plastic tits in your shiny pink bed, you sick fuckingcunt?! I should have killedyou, not her! I should have killedyou!”

Ivy stared on in shock until Sever pulled her out the door.

Outside, they could still hear her screaming. “I’ll put that whore in the goddamned ground! Just like me. Ha, just like...”

And suddenly, there was quiet. Zero minutes to morphine paradise.

In an impotent fury, Sever flailed and cursed and folded in on himself, but Ivy couldn’t think about his pain. Her shock bubble had just burst, and the information had started to sink in.

Roxiemurdered someone.Severhelped her get away with it. Likethis. Like this! And Jason...

Brow furrowed, Ivy touched her parted lips. “Was all of that true?”

Sever answered with a tired, rueful glare.

“Who did she...?”

Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head, nodded solemnly toward the car, and in a daze, she followed him into it.

This wasn’t how her night was supposed to go. This wasn’t how herlifewas supposed to go. Crime, deception, traumatic encounters with the walking dead? Ivy wasn’t cut out for this. She was too sunny a person, even in her darkest hours; this level of melodrama was completely alien to her. She’d always assumed Jason’s cynical streak was just for show, but now that she knew what he’d grown up in...

Attempting to hold herself together, Ivy sat with her limbs tightly crossed on one end of the back seat, flashing furtive sidelong glances at the other end.

Sever pulled off his gloves and opened the moonroof a crack, unconcerned that it let the rain mist the seat between them.

Watching tiny droplets vibrate on the black leather, she heard him light a cigarette, heard the ember burn. The smell reminded her of Paris.

“This girl we knew,” he said, breaking the silence. “From England.”

Great. The dead woman was someone heknew. Exactly why that was worse than offing a stranger, Ivy wasn’t quite sure, but covering up the murder of a friend seemed so much more... heartless.

“She’d moved out here. Roxie would stay with her sometimes. A little hovel on Venice Beach.” He leaned back on the seat, head tilted toward the sky. “She came over that night. We drank, we reminisced, we shagged...”

Ivy frowned at the merging droplets on the seat. “Roxie was okay with that?”

“She...” He started over. “We had an odd connection, Dez and I.” A nostalgic chuckle. “She was a right nutter. Used to say we were homicidal twins in a previous life.Marriedhomicidal twins.” He sighed. “She’d gone blonde that summer, and Roxie got it in her head that she wanted to see us together. I should have known...” His adam’s apple bobbed. “She never handled her jealousy very well.”

“But she was herfriend. You don’t just murder your friends.”

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