Page 107 of Start With A Slap

“I don’t know,” he said with a sigh. “None of it was legally obtained, I can’t do shit until it’s above board. Kara’s working on it, but with his resources, he could keep it in limbo forever...”

She closed her hand over his. “I’ll help you.”

He looked down at their joined hands, squeezed hers. “Yeah?”

Ivy nodded.

CHAPTER 31

Evidence

Jouer le jeu du Diable.

Play the Devil’s game.

Three cartoonish devils watched her from the wall, presiding in high-backed chairs, puffing on cigars. As the seconds ticked by, the metronomic noise echoing in her ears, Ivy crawled naked across the Persian rug, the whip’s handle between her teeth. Its length trailed behind her and tangled on her limbs, creeping up her body like glistening black ivy. Yellow crystals sprouted out of the rug beneath her. She broke one off and it crumbled to dust. A woman’s hand grew out from under the dust like a timelapsing flower, palm opening, waiting for something. Ivy looked at it, curious to know what it wanted.

The desk chair swiveled before her eyes, revealing scuffed combat boots and black jeans. It was Sever from the Christmas party video: young, sullen, dangerous, with jet-black hair and kohl-rimmed eyes.

Rising out of his chair, Sever said in two voices, one English, one French: “Open wide, vermin.”

She opened her mouth and the whip handle fell to the rug. He unzipped his jeans. The ticking got faster, louder, chaotic.

“This isn’t me,” he told her, choking her on his cock. “We’re someone else tonight.”

The whip crept up her torso and constricted around her throat.

Ivy woke with a frantic gasp.

The dream hauntedher all day. Every detail was so vivid: the citrine sprouting on the floor, the woman’s hand, the creeping whip, his despondent tone when he said, “This isn’t me.”

She knew it had no merit; that he said that in her dream because her brain was trying to justify her affair with him. It grasped for rationale, excusing him from his crimes. She knew this. But it still made her think:What if it wasn’t him?

While she was halfway through summarizing a deposition, her office phone rang. The caller ID showed Private Number, but there were a lot of those calling her office. It could have been anyone.

It wasn’t anyone. It was Sever. His first words were plaintive.

“Why won’t you talk to me?”

She should have hung up, but the sound of his desperation stopped her.

“Can’t we just—?” A hard breath, and he began again. “Look, I’m not proud of the things I?—”

Ivy depressed the switch on the handset cradle and held it down.

SEVER MARK AND PEYTON HEIRESS SUDDEN SPLIT

Jason had come homethat night with a briefcase full of Sever’s past. After staring at the two folders on the coffee table before her, all deep breaths and rationalization, Ivy had gone with the less evocative option — or so she’d thought. A dossier of every documented move Sever made the year Roxie died, it compiled phone bills, paparazzi snapshots, confidential contracts that Kara had shadily procured, and newspaper clippings, so far with business-related headlines... until this.

Ivy was transfixed. She’d never actually seen his second wife — or thought of her as anything other than the wicked stepmother. Melody was younger than she’d imagined and resembled a doe-eyed Bratz doll... but there was something about their matching expressions in the photo, taken in happier times, that caused an irrational bout of envy.

She forced her attention to the article.

Multibrand mogul Sever Mark, 37, and hotel heiress Melody Peyton, 26, filed for divorce yesterday, citing irreconcilable differences. This comes just two weeks after Mark’s company acquired Peyton Hotels in an unprecedented

“Behold the stepmonster,” Jason said, sitting beside her and handing her a much needed frosty beer. “They didn’t last a month past Mom’s death.”

“I never knew she was an heiress. I thought that was the first wife.”

---