Chapter 2: No Other Way

“I’m not letting you do this.”

Leo stood in the hallway, blood dried at the corner of his mouth, blocking her path like his body alone could change the math. Ivy pushed past him toward the bathroom, grabbed a clean towel, and pressed it into his hand.

“Hold that on your lip. You’re still bleeding.”

“Ivy.” He caught her wrist. “Look at me. You are not marrying a stranger because of what I did.”

“Then what am I supposed to do? Watch them kill you tonight instead?” Her voice cracked on the last word. She hated the sound of it. She pulled her wrist free. “Tell me the other option. I’m listening.”

He had none. She watched the anger drain out of his face and leave only the guilt underneath, raw and useless.

“I’ll go to the police,” he said, weaker than he meant it to sound.

“And say what? That you borrowed money from a man at a bar and it turned out to belong to the Cross family? You think the police are the ones who scare them?” She shook her head. “Nobody is coming to save us, Leo. There is no version of tonight where somebody else fixes this.”

“There has to be something. A loan. A payment plan. Anything.”

“Fifty-five thousand dollars. Tonight. Name one bank that hands that out on a Tuesday to two people with no collateral and a maxed-out credit card between them.” She pressed her fingers hard against her eyes for a second, trying to push the panic back in.

“So you’re just going to marry him. Some guy you’ve never met. Some guy everybody’s terrified of.”

“I don’t know yet.” It was the first fully honest thing she had said since the men left, and saying it out loud made her stomach turn. She sank onto the edge of the couch. The folded card still sat on the counter where the man had left it, untouched. It looked ordinary. Paper and ink. Somehow it seemed to weigh more than everything else in the apartment.

Leo sat across from her, elbows on his knees, towel pressed to his mouth. He watched her with an expression she had not seen since their parents died. Like he was watching someone else carry a weight that should have been his.

“This is my fault,” he said. “All of it. You shouldn’t even have to think about this.”

“You’re right. It is your fault.” She was not going to lie to spare him. Not tonight. “But that doesn’t change what’s sitting on that counter. Being angry at you doesn’t buy us more time.”

He flinched. Part of her regretted the words immediately. The rest of her was too tired and too out of options to soften them.

“What if I go instead?” Leo sat up straight. “What if I tell them to take me? I’m the one who owes them.”

“They don’t want you. They said it themselves. You have nothing they need.” She looked at him—really looked—at the kid who used to fall asleep on her shoulder during storms, the one she had promised their mother she would take care of. “I’m not letting you throw yourself at men like that so you can feel less guilty. That’s not protecting me. That’s just moving the tragedy somewhere I can watch it happen.”

“So instead I get to watch you disappear into some crime family’s mansion and marry a man who probably has bodies in his basement.”

“Maybe.” Her voice had gone flat. Exhaustion had sanded the edges off the fear. “But I’ll be alive to be angry about it. You won’t be if I say no.”

“That’s not a comfort, Ivy.”

“I’m not trying to comfort you. I’m trying to keep you breathing.”

The silence that followed was worse than the shouting. Leo looked down at the towel in his hands, at the blood already turning brown at the edges, and said nothing. There was nothing left that would change the numbers between them.

Ivy’s eyes stayed on the card for several long seconds before she moved.

It looked ordinary from across the room. Somehow it pulled at her attention the way a held breath pulls at the lungs. She stood, crossed the room, and picked it up for the first time.

The stock was heavier than it should have been. Expensive. The Cross family crest was embossed in black on black, visible only when the light caught it. Inside, in sharp, precise handwriting that was neither warm nor cold—only efficient—was an address and a time. Nothing else. No explanation. No reassurance. No room to negotiate.

She read it twice, memorizing it the way she memorized faces and the exact tone a voice took right before it lied. No name at the bottom. No phone number. Just an address that meant nothing to her yet and a time that was already counting down whether she agreed or not.

Whoever had written this had not expected her to say no. That was the part that scared her more than the debt, more than the men in her living room. Somewhere in this city a man she had never met had already decided the outcome of tonight before she had been given a real chance to decide anything herself.

“Ivy.” Leo’s voice was small behind her. “Please don’t do this.”

“I already decided.” She hadn’t, not completely, until the words left her mouth. Saying them out loud made them true. “I’m going.”

He came off the couch fast. For a second she thought he might try to stop her, take the card, tear it up, something desperate and useless. Instead he just wrapped his arms around her, careful of the blood still drying on his lip, and held on like he was twelve years old again and she was the only solid thing left in a house that had stopped feeling safe.

“I’m sorry,” he said into her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Ivy.”

“I know.” She let herself hold him back for exactly as long as she could afford to, which was not long enough. She felt him shaking. She felt the guilt running through him like a current he could not shut off. For one weak second she let herself imagine a version of tonight where none of this had happened, where he had never walked into that bar, where the biggest problem in their lives was still just making rent. Then she pulled away, wiped her face with the back of her hand, and checked the microwave clock.

Five hours and forty minutes.

“Pack a bag for me,” she said, already moving toward her bedroom. Her voice was steadier now that there was something to do instead of something to feel. “Just the essentials. I don’t know what they’ll let me keep.”

“Ivy, wait. You don’t even know this guy. You don’t know what he’s going to do to you.”

The sound of her phone cut him off, sharp in the quiet apartment. An unknown number lit the screen. She stared at it for a second before she answered. The voice on the other end was cold, clipped, unfamiliar. The man did not bother introducing himself.

“The car will be outside in ten minutes.”

Ivy swallowed. “And if I’m not ready?”

A brief silence stretched on the line, long enough that she almost thought the call had dropped.

“Then your brother dies before sunrise.”

The line went dead before she could draw the breath to answer. Ivy stood frozen in her own kitchen with the phone still pressed to her ear. Leo stared at her, waiting.

“What did he say?” His voice was barely above a whisper.

She lowered the phone slowly. Her hand was not quite steady. “Ten minutes.”

“Ivy.”

“I have to get dressed.” She was already moving, forcing her legs to carry her toward the bedroom, because standing still one more second meant thinking about the voice on that call, meant thinking about how easily it had said sunrise like it was nothing, like her brother’s life was a line item on somebody’s schedule.

“You can’t just walk out that door in ten minutes like nothing happened.”

“I don’t have ten minutes to argue about it.” She stopped in the bedroom doorway and looked back at him. For the first time since the men had left, her voice softened, just slightly. “Pack the bag. Please. I need you to do something useful right now, because if I stand here and think about this any longer I don’t know if I’ll be able to make myself walk out that door.”

Leo nodded, wordless, and disappeared toward the closet. Ivy shut her bedroom door and pressed her back against it.

She counted the minutes she did not have.

Outside, the same engine that had been waiting earlier was still idling at the curb.