Another stream of curse words flew out of Taylor’s mouth but this time they were aimed at the door. He released his grasp and I slid down the wall to the floor, pulling the curtain with me so that it was straining on the curtain rod. I watched his footsteps cross the room but I was gasping for breath, barely able to hold myself up in a sitting position.

I took big, gulping breaths, willing my heart to slow down, willing my wits to come back. That opened door was my only shot to get out of here, my only shot to escape. As soon as he turned the door handle, I would make my move.

I started to crawl noiselessly toward him. My clutch lay abandoned on the floor and thankfully directly in my path. I snatched it up on my way. I wasn’t very concerned about the designer bag or anything else in it besides my phone and my credit card if I needed to pay for a cab. My vision was starting to clear, and I had enough big breaths now that I felt the strength to run return.

Taylor yanked open the door, wider than I think he intended, but he was blind with bloodlust and unable to gauge his strength. And that was all I needed. I burst forward like a sprinter out of the blocks and bull-rushed his side, squeezing under the space just between him and the door. I ignored Blake’s shocked look of surprise at seeing me bolt out of the room like a bat out of hell and just started screaming at the top of my lungs. The sound was piercing but ragged, shrill but scratching and raspy from the choking incident not forty-five seconds before.

I looked around for the exit, desperate and wild and I just kept screaming. I had to. And even though my lungs were burning and my throat so ready to give up, I willed myself to continue making sound, to fulfill this plan for escape. My vision was still hazy enough that it took way longer than it should have to find the stairs, but all the while irritated guests had started to step out of their hotel rooms to see what the commotion was about. I heard the suspicious sound of a door clicking shut and locking. Without looking I knew it had to be Taylor and Blake hiding away from the crazed girl who would rat them out to the police in a millisecond if they tried to follow me.

I leapt down the stairs, sometimes propelling myself forward by the railings so I could take five and six steps at a time. I never looked back, never glanced behind me, I was too afraid. A tiny, but present rational part of my brain announced that not a door to the stairwell had opened since I entered and only the sound of my feet echoed throughout the stairwell but I couldn’t chance it. I couldn’t take the risk.

Once I reached the ground floor I tore through the door and to the lobby. I spun in frantic circles, looking for Taylor or Blake or Drew. My eyes moved back and forth, frenzied in their search. They could have taken the elevators down; they could be waiting for me. But if I saw them, I would just start screaming again. I would just keep screaming until I drew so much attention to myself that someone called the police and they carted me away to an insane asylum.

I didn’t care.

That could never happen to me again.

That was insane.

I wasn’t. But that was.

Now I just had to figure out what to do. How to get out of here. I dug through my clutch and

pulled out my cellphone with violently shaking hands. I scrolled to the first number on my call list, only because he had called tonight to make me promise that if anything went wrong I would call him, and so I did. I called Ryder.

“What’s wrong?” He asked after the first ring.

“I need you,” I sobbed. “I need you. You said to call if I needed you and I do. I need you.”

People were starting to stare at me, to stop whatever they were doing and just gawk. I didn’t know how I could stop them, or if I wanted them to. As long as they were looking at me, nobody was going to barge down here and take me back up to that room.

“I’m outside, I’m waiting for you outside,” Ryder announced. That was the most wonderful news I had ever heard. Ever.

With numb feet and shaking knees I walked out the lobby door of the hotel and into the frigid fall air. The end of October was bitingly cold, signaling a snowfall soon and the presence of a looming winter. I was convulsing with shivers but I was certain those would have been happening with or without the cold air.

Ryder leapt from his Bronco that he had pulled front and center of the covered driveway. A valet was yelling at him to move his junky POS from in front of the Hilton Hotel, but Ryder ignored him.

Instead he sprinted to me, and opened his arms before I was even close enough to fall into them. I threw my arms around his neck and buried my face against his throat.

“I’m taking you home,” he demanded and then picked me up like a child. One hand supported my back, the other slipped under my knees and he walked directly to his car. He deposited me in the front seat and then buckled me in before taking my face in both of his hands. “I knew this was bad news. I just couldn’t…. I wanted to be here if something went wrong.” He reasoned for his being already present in the parking lot.

“Something did go wrong,” I admitted in a croaky, harsh voice as if it wasn’t obvious. “But I’m glad you’re here.”

Ryder pulled my face down and gave me a sweet kiss on the forehead before closing my door. When he turned around Blake and Taylor were just walking out the sliding doors of the hotel. They noticed me immediately in the passengers’ seat of Ryder’s car and pointed at me. Ryder noticed them too unfortunately and I watched his body physically react to Taylor. It was like I could feel his stare fall on Taylor’s outstretched hand that was bloodied and scratched from when he tried to choke me. I might not have ever gotten a good punch in or hit him back, but scratching his hands turned out to be its own form of karma.

Ryder’s whole body tensed when he realized Taylor was the one that hurt me. It was like he followed that bloodied fingertip up the length of his arm and to his face and put the entire night together in his head. And then Ryder snapped.

He launched himself forward, onto Taylor and his fist connected with Taylor’s face like a branch breaking off a huge tree during a lightning storm. I heard the crunch of bones from even inside the car and then watched the splurt of blood soil Ryder’s face, hands and chest. My hand flew to my mouth and I gasped against the horror of the moment.

And then I just watched in trancelike fascination as Ryder cocked his arm back and delivered one punch after another. Ryder tackled Taylor with his initial hit and so with each subsequent one, Taylor’s skull bounced against the hard concrete. There was blood everywhere, flowing in thin crimson rivers.

And even though Ryder was the younger man, and maybe not even equally muscled he had the element of surprise on his side. And revenge. He was a man possessed by rage and retribution.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. I just watched Ryder take out my pain on the man that inflicted it.

Blake tried his hardest to pull Ryder off, but it was like he was a machine with super human strength. Eventually the valet jumped in to help Blake and then the concierge. Someone called the police but by the time the ambulance and police cruisers pulled up six men had stepped in to restrain Ryder.

I stayed frozen in place while Ryder was handcuffed and then shoved into the back of a police car. His hand swollen, mangled and bloodied. But his face was calm, satisfied…. justified.

And I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel those same emotions coursing through me.

Taylor was loaded onto a stretcher and the ambulance left immediately with sirens blaring. I barely heard the sound though. After everything that happened tonight, I had finally become numb.

I finally started to just float through these events as if everything was happening to someone else. As if someone else’s lungs were burning, someone else had finger length bruises across their neck, someone else had bloodied fingernails and black and blue marks painting their skin.

As if my entire life was happening to someone else.

I hated that Ryder was separated from me. Hated it. But in the same moment I also knew I would get to see him again because of what he’d done for me. And if he wouldn’t have stepped in, I could very likely be back in that sick f-ing hotel room, with that sick f-ing bastard.

The cops approached me eventually, after everyone in the lobby and some from upstairs, pointed me out. They took my statement, in which the only thing I lied about was that I had been set up on this date by my pimp. I told them instead that I was here with some girlfriends and that we happened to meet them in the lobby.

And the only reason I lied about that was because nobody would believe me if I told the truth. Nobody would believe I was this stupid, watered down version of Greek mythology and fate had decided that I spend my endless existence whoring it up for the god of the sea.

Ugh. It sounded so crazy, even to me!

Finally Nix and my mom showed up. The police released me into their care and they loaded me into the back of Nix’s tiny sports car. My feet were propped up on the seat so I had enough room to breathe and my mom and Nix sat in tense silence all the way home.

They had spoken briefly to the cops, but all they came away with was a stern lecture on keeping better tabs of their daughter.

Their daughter. Like they were this happily married couple and I was a wayward teenager.

Finally once we were on Farnam and five blocks away from the apartment complex, Nix spoke to me, “Ivy, I had no idea Taylor was so God damned crazy. I never would have sent you in there, had I known what could have happened to you.” His hands were white as they gripped the steering wheel so impossibly tight and his jaw muscle popped in and out while his teeth ground together in fury.

I was shaking, I couldn’t stop. I wondered if I would ever stop.

I snorted, it was an ugly, accusing sound, but I was beyond caring. “Save it.”

“What did you say?” my mother turned on me, her eyes glittering with anger and some unidentifiable emotion that I didn’t even want to try to name.

“Taylor told me this was my punishment!” I screeched. “The minute he had me alone, he told me Nix set this up to punish me! Look at me! Look at me!” My voice was getting louder and louder, but it was still raspy from being choked and screaming so much.

And my mother did. She really looked at me. For maybe the first time in my life. Her eyes narrowed and then widened with horror. “Did you really ask him to do that to her, Nix? This was your way of setting her straight?”

“I didn’t know he would go this far. I asked him to scare her, I did not ask him to physically harm her.” When I snorted the second time, he grew impatient, “Listen, you’re more valuable to me flawless, so don’t think for a moment that I wanted him to touch your skin or your hair. He was obviously a loose cannon and I take that responsibility on myself.”

“Obviously,” I agreed with dry humor.

“How could you?” my mother hissed, turning to face Nix.

“Therapy didn’t work,” he answered simply and then shrugged his shoulder. And that was the only explanation we were going to get. That was the only explanation he had to give. He was in charge of us. He owned us. He could do that to me every night if he wanted to.

My mother faced forward again, arms crossed tightly across her chest. Nix dropped us off at the front door of our complex without so much as another apology. That was it, what he said in the car was as good as I was going to get and even after all the trauma of the night I was still going to have to see him on almost a daily basis. I was still going to have to serve him, answer to him.

Before I could successfully vomit after that my mother cut into my thoughts, “You’re not going anywhere until those bruises heal, Ivy. I will not have people asking more questions about you. Do you understand? Not even across the street for coffee, alright?”

“Alright,” I accepted this. I didn’t want to go anywhere looking like this, like an ad for domestic violence.

“And Ivy?” she stopped me before I could get to my bedroom and strip all my clothes and then stand under the hot shower until I had brand new skin. I looked up at her, restraining what was left of my tears until I was in the privacy of my own bedroom. “I’m sorry this happened to you. It will not happen to you again.”

I just looked at her. I couldn’t even smile in response. I wanted to believe her, I wanted to trust her…. but she was my mom. So after an acceptable amount of stare-down I disappeared into my bedroom and accepted the fact that this was all the sympathy I was going to get tonight.

This was my life. I could cry it out in the shower, but the minute I stepped back onto dry ground I had to suck it up and move on.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Exie asked from beside me on the sidewalk.

“Uh, no. Actually I’m pretty sure I’m not ready for this,” I groaned, and then ran my fingers through my hair. Again.

“You don’t have to go, you know,” Sloane reminded me. “Your mom said that you could take a few more personal days.”

“Yeah, right. Except my mom doesn’t really know anything and I don’t want to make summer school a permanent part of the summer calendar. Besides, Tanner might lynch me if I call in to school one more time with the same excuse.”

“Lynch? Really?” Sloane rolled her eyes at me and then pulled me in for a two-air-kiss hug. We were so mature for our age.

“See you girls after school?” I asked as Exie received the same snobby goodbye.

“You bet,” Exie answered enthusiastically. “But only if you bring Phoenix down here with you, I have a uh, band I want to show him on my iPod.”

“You’re so cute when you have a crush,” Sloane laughed, but I had the feeling it was a sarcastic laugh. “See if you can’t rustle up a man for me too, Ivy. I could use someone who’s not a class-A douche.”

“Sure thing,” I joked. “I’ll just punch it in to my day calendar. Right between chemistry lab and American government.”