The Ambush

The first gunshot came from downstairs, followed by a second one close enough behind it that Ivy couldn't tell if they'd come from two different guns or the same one fired twice.

Richard grabbed her by the wrist before she'd even processed the sound, pulling her out of bed and down the hallway so fast her feet barely found the floor. Somewhere below them a man screamed, cut short, and then nothing.

"Dad, what's happening?"

"Quiet." His voice shook in a way she'd never heard from him. "Quiet, Ivy, please."

He pulled her into his study room and shoved a bookcase against the door, hands trembling so badly it took him three tries to line it up right. Ivy pressed herself into the corner behind his desk, knees pulled to her chest, listening to the house fill up with sounds she didn't have names for. Boots on stairs. Furniture breaking. Somewhere close, a voice that wasn't shouting so much as giving instructions, calm in a way that made it worse than shouting would have been.

"Dad, who is that? What do they want?"

Richard didn't answer. He was staring at the door like it was already open.

It took less than a minute for the bookcase to stop mattering. The door came apart at the hinges, wood splintering across the floor, and three men walked in over the wreckage of it like they'd expected exactly this kind of resistance and hadn't broken stride for it. One of them held a gun loose at his side, almost bored with it, the way a person holds something they trust completely.

Behind them came a fourth man, unhurried, dressed like he'd walked out of a meeting.

"Richard." He said the name like they'd met before, like this wasn't the first conversation of its kind. "You look surprised. I told you I don't repeat warnings."

"Adrian, please." Richard's voice cracked on the word please, the same crack Ivy had heard in her own voice a hundred times and never once in his. "I can explain. I can get you the money, I just need more time."

"You've had time." Adrian's eyes moved to Ivy for the first time, unhurried, observing her the way he'd observed the room on the way in. "Three months of it. And in that time, instead of finding a way to pay me back, you spent it hiding what you actually did with my money."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"I think you do."

Ivy looked between them, her father's face gone gray, and some stubborn piece of her still reached for him anyway, still wanted to believe whatever version of this he'd tell her afterward. "Dad, tell him. Tell him you don't owe him anything, tell him this is a mistake."

"Ivy." Richard's voice barely made it out. "Stay quiet."

"It's not a mistake," Adrian said, still watching her, still calm. "Your father borrowed against a shipment that never existed. Then he borrowed again to cover the first debt. And when both of those came due, he started making arrangements to disappear instead of paying either one."

"That's not true." The words came out of Ivy before she'd decided to say them, loyalty moving faster than sense. "My dad wouldn't do that."

Adrian didn't argue with her. He looked at Richard instead, and something in his expression shifted just enough to tell Ivy the patience had run out.

The gunshot took her father in the leg before she understood he'd raised the weapon at all.

Richard went down hard, a sound tearing out of him that didn't sound human, and Ivy was moving before she thought about it, dropping to the floor beside him, hands pressed uselessly against the blood already soaking through his pants. Nobody stopped her. Nobody seemed to think she was worth stopping.

"What do you want," Richard gasped, teeth clenched against the pain. "Just tell me what you want and it's yours, I'll get it, whatever it is."

"I already told you what I want." Adrian crouched slightly, bringing himself level with Richard's face, voice never once rising. "I want something close to you. The way you clearly don't value the money, I imagine you value her a little more."

The room went very still.

"Her." Richard's eyes found Ivy, and for one second she thought she saw the man who used to check her seatbelt twice before every drive, the man who might still fight for her even now, even bleeding on his own study room floor. She held her breath waiting for him to say no.

"Take her." The words came out fast, desperate, nothing behind them but relief that it wasn't going to cost him anything else. "Take her, I don't care, just take her and let me go."

Ivy stared at him, the blood roaring in her ears louder than anything Adrian's men had done to the house. "Dad."

"I'm sorry." He wasn't looking at her anymore. "I'm sorry, Ivy, I can't, I just can't."

Adrian straightened, already finished with him, already moving on to whatever came next in whatever version of this he'd planned before he ever walked through the door. "Leave the city tonight. Don't come back for her, don't send anyone looking, and don't let me hear your name again in connection with anything that's mine. That includes her, starting now."

Richard nodded, still clutching his leg, already trying to drag himself toward the door like the offer might expire if he moved too slowly.

"Dad, wait." Ivy's voice cracked wide open. "You're just leaving me here?"

He didn't answer. He didn't look back either, dragging himself past the splintered doorframe and out into a hallway that had gone quiet except for his own ragged breathing, and Ivy watched the last piece of her old life disappear around a corner without once turning to check if she was following.

Adrian crouched down in front of her instead, close enough now that she could see there was no anger left in his face at all, nothing but the same unhurried calm he'd walked in with.

"Ivy," he said, and something about hearing her name in his mouth made the whole night feel suddenly, horribly real. "You're coming with me now."

She didn't fight him. She didn't have anything left to fight with.

He pulled her up by the arm, gentler than she expected from a man who'd just put a bullet in her father's leg, and walked her out through the wreckage of the house she'd lived in her whole life. The hallway was worse than she'd braced for. One of the guards lay near the top of the stairs, unmoving, and Ivy made herself look away before her mind could catch up to what she was seeing. Another body blocked the doorway to the kitchen, and one of Adrian's men stepped over it without breaking stride, like the house had always looked this way and always would.

Downstairs, glass crunched under her bare feet, the front window shattered outward where someone had come through it. A car idled in the driveway, engine running, headlights cutting through the dark.

"You're safe," Adrian said, opening the back door of the car for her like this was any other night. "Nothing here is going to touch you again."

Ivy looked past him at the house, windows lit gold against the dark, blood on the front step that hadn't been there an hour ago, and understood with a clarity that hurt more than the fear did that safe wasn't a word that meant anything to her anymore.

She got in the car.

The door shut behind her, sealing out the cold night air, and for a moment she just sat there, hands pressed flat against her knees, willing her heart to slow down.

Then she saw it.

Tucked into the side pocket of the door, half hidden beneath a folded newspaper, was a photograph. Old, the corners soft with handling. Ivy reached for it without thinking, and the second she saw the faces in it, her breath caught in her throat.

It was her. Younger, maybe eight years old, standing beside her mother on a beach she didn't remember visiting.

Someone had been watching her family long before tonight.