Chapter 2: No Other Way

"I'm not letting you do this."

Leo was on his feet now, blood dried at the corner of his mouth, blocking the hallway like his body alone could stop her from thinking. Ivy pushed past him toward the bathroom, grabbed a towel, pressed it into his hand instead of her own face.

"Hold that on your lip. You're still bleeding."

"Ivy." He grabbed her wrist. "Look at me. You are not marrying a stranger because of what I did."

"Then what am I supposed to do, Leo? Watch them kill you tonight instead?" Her voice cracked on the last word and she hated it, hated that after everything she still couldn't hold it steady. She pulled her wrist free. "Tell me the other option. I'm listening."

He didn't have one. She watched it land on his face, the exact moment the anger drained out of him and left 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's coming to save us, Leo. There's no version of tonight where somebody else fixes this."

"There has to be something else. A loan, a payment plan, anything."

"Fifty five thousand dollars, Leo. 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 to her eyes for a second, hard, like she could push the panic back in through sheer will.

"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 honest thing she'd 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 sitting on the counter where the man had left it, untouched, radiating heat she could feel from across the room even though it was just paper.

Leo sat across from her, elbows on his knees, towel pressed to his mouth, watching her with an expression she hadn't seen on him since their parents died. Like he was watching someone else carry something that should have been his to carry.

"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 wasn't 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 like she'd hit him, and part of her regretted it immediately, but the rest of her was too tired, too scared, too out of options to soften it.

"What if I go instead," Leo said suddenly, sitting up straight. "What if I tell them to take me. I'm the one who owes them."

"They don't want you, Leo. 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 when they were little, who she'd promised their mother she'd 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 was flat now, exhaustion flattening out 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 after that was worse than any of the shouting. Leo looked down at the towel in his hands, at the blood already turning brown at the edges, and said nothing, because there was nothing left to say that would change the math sitting between them.

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

It looked ordinary from across the room. Paper. Ink. A fold down the middle like any letter that might have come in the mail. Somehow it seemed to weigh more than everything else in the apartment combined, more than the couch, the walls, the whole life she'd built here out of overtime shifts and careful budgeting. She could feel it pulling at her attention the way a held breath pulls at your lungs.

Ivy stood, crossed the room, and picked up the card off the counter for the first time.

It was heavier than it should have been, expensive stock, the Cross family crest embossed in black on black, visible only when the light caught it right. Inside, in sharp, precise handwriting that wasn't warm or cold so much as simply 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 everything, faces, numbers, the exact tone a person's voice took right before they lied to her. No name signed at the bottom. No phone number to call if she had questions. Just an address that meant nothing to her yet and a time that was already counting down whether she agreed to it or not.

Whoever had written this hadn't expected her to say no. That was the part that scared her most, more than the debt, more than the men in her living room. Somewhere in this city, a man she'd never met had already decided the outcome of tonight before she'd been given a 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 really, not until the words left her mouth, but saying them out loud made it true in a way that thinking them hadn't. "I'm going."

He came off the couch fast, closing the distance between them, and for a second she thought he might try to physically 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 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 wasn't long enough, would never be long enough. She could feel him shaking, could feel the guilt running through him like a current he couldn't shut off, and for one weak second she let herself imagine a version of tonight where none of this had happened, where he'd 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 time on the microwave clock.

Five hours and forty minutes.

"Pack a bag for me," she said, already moving toward her bedroom, voice 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 and sudden in the quiet apartment. An unknown number lit up the screen. She stared at it for a second before she answered, and the voice on the other end was cold, clipped, unfamiliar, a man who didn't bother introducing himself before he spoke.

"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 say anything else, before she could even draw the breath to answer, and Ivy stood frozen in her own kitchen with the phone still pressed to her ear and Leo staring at her, waiting for whatever had just gone quiet on the other end of that call.

"What did he say," Leo asked, voice barely above a whisper.

She lowered the phone slowly, her hand not quite steady anymore. "Ten minutes."

"Ivy."

"I have to go get dressed." She was already moving, already forcing her legs to carry her toward the bedroom because standing still for 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, and for the first time since the men had left, her voice softened, just slightly, just enough. "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, and Ivy shut her bedroom door and pressed her back against it, counting the minutes she didn't have.