Page 58 of Poisoning Ivy
None of us answer her, but the question must have been rhetorical, cause she goes on anyway. "I wished you had a real bullet in that gun. I've spent the last five years wishing you did, that when you pulled that trigger, I would have died right then. If I had, I would have died wrapped up in your pleasure, your hate. It would have been so much easier."
"Ivy." Monty chokes on her name, shaking his head. "Don't say that."
"Oh, come on, Monty," she laughs. "Does the truth hurt? Knowing that I fucking loved every one of you even though you only gave me hate? Even though you let this all happen and now you're punishing me for it?"
"I think someone drank a little too much," Killian says, his voice stony. "Because you're straight up delusional right now, Bambi."
"Am I?" She challenges, spinning to step toward him. She's so small against his large form that it makes my dick stir, watching her square up against him. "You left me in your bed alone."
I blink at the memory pulling at me of Monty telling Killian to let her sleep while we ran out for breakfast.
I should have stayed with her, let the two of them go without me. I wanted to make sure they got her iced coffee just right, the way I suspected she would like it, so I'd gone with them. I'll never forget walking back into Killian's room, the man on the ground with the hole in his neck, the blood everywhere that mixed with the iced coffee when I spilled it. It slipped through my fingers when I realized she wasn't where we left her.
"We went to get breakfast," Killian argues. "Not to broadcast to the whole town that you were in our bed naked."
"You didn't have to broadcast it." She laughs. "He found me, and it was either me or him, so I killed him with your knife and ran home to my mother. I don't know what I expected her to do, but it wasn't to toss me in the cellar so she could renegotiate the contract they'd just signed. I knew she was mad at me, but I didn't think she was going to let a stranger take me. I didn't believe it until I was being stuffed in the backseat next to him... my father-in-law."
My throat is thick with the need to scream, the rage building at the memory of what we hadn't understood back then.
"You had a gun, Killian. You could have shot him. You could have stopped him from taking me, if you wanted to."
"We thought..." I shake my head when she turns to me, awaiting my pathetic attempt for an excuse. "We thought you were with your parents."
"I screamed for you." She says, clearly not buying our flimsy excuse. "I cried for you. I had my head out the window trying to get you to save me because I knew that if he took me, it would be over for us. But you just let me go... you let me be sold to him. He drugged me, and by the time I woke up, I knew what he did to me. He didn't try to hide it, left his cum all over me. The fifth man in two days to do that."
My hand twitches with the need to wrap it around something, so I curl my fingers into a fist instead and chance a glance at Monty just as he falls to his knees.
"Poison..." The word is strangled, and when she turns back to him, the ferocity in her gaze has him break into tears. "I had no idea..."
He's telling the truth, of course. We didn't know any better, but we should have. We should have stepped in a lot sooner. And I would have, if I'd known how bad it was. I never wouldhave let her go with a stranger. I'd have fought anyone I thought wanted to hurt her. But all the time we knew her growing up, we never intervened because she begged us not to. She begged us to pretend we weren't friends and to stay away from the house. It had been something we did by her request as children and by the warnings of our own parents to stay away fromthat family, that place, those people.
And then as we got older and it felt like she was ashamed of us, afraid to let her parents know she associated with the local boys, the tentative friendship we'd always had turned volatile. It certainly wasn't helped along by the hormones, the sudden realization that she made us all lose control of ourselves. That combined with the fact that we never bothered to control ourselves in each other's presence, was a toxic combination. I know the things we did to her were wrong, that they could be used to lock us up for years behind bars, to take away our freedom. But I also knew that she provoked the beast within us, and she was the only thing that could tame it.
"I'm so sorry," I tell her honestly, feeling myself choke on the words just like Monty. They don't seem adequate. "We didn't know. I wouldn't have... we never would have let you go if we knew."
"Stop crying." She rolls her eyes, kicking out in Monty's direction so that he knows her wrath is for him before turning back to Killian. "And stop pretending you didn't know. I told you everything in my letters."
"Letters?" Killian shakes his head. "What letters?"
"The ones you never returned." She snaps. "The ones where I told you everything... about how I could never say to your face the things I could gather the courage to write you about in the winter. The ones where I told you how much my parents hated me, told you how Uncle Vitoli's lingering gazes made meuncomfortable, how I didn't understand why he still followed me around when I was legally an adult."
"You wrote to us?" I ask, looking to Killian for confirmation.
He wouldn't keep something like that from us, would he?
"Yes," she answers for him, turning to me. "I wrote to all three of you, together and separately. I sent them all to Killian, because I remembered his address. I thought you'd pass them along. But now I know you don't do anything that doesn't benefit you."
Killian laughs, unbothered by the accusation in her voice. "Why would I hide letters from you if I'd gotten them, Bambi?"
Ivy doesn't hesitate. "Because you like me in pain. It's why you let them take me, why you never looked for me, why you're drawing this out when you could have shot me right next to Cody. You know his father will come look for us, that he'll punish me if I'm alive and his son isn't. Is that why you haven't killed me, Killian? You want to let someone else do the dirty work?"
Killian moves fast, his fingers wrapping around her neck as the last word leaves her throat. "You really have me pegged, don't you?" He laughs coldly. "But there's one thing you haven't thought of."
Her eyes ask the question her body can't, because she's too busy fighting for air as Killian presses his thumb against her carotid artery, her eyes fluttering as she tries to resist the siren call of unconsciousness. But her time runs out fast, Killian accepting her body as she begins to go limp against him. Before she fades away completely, he gives her the answer she was looking for.
"I only like to see you in pain when we're the ones causing it."
Chapter thirty-one
