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Dante

Time had disappeared.

I had been held up in this house with a girl who made me forget the hours completely. And not once did I think about what was coming. There was a meeting I had to be at, one I couldn't miss.

The message pinged off in my pocket, a deadly reminder that my time with her was drawing to an end. But I couldn't accept that.

Has it really been two weeks already?

I didn't want to leave Ivy, I hated leaving her. I had only left the house a couple times since I brought her here. Today I was leaving for a reason that I honestly didn't want to consider; giving her back. It was time to force Remo's hand.

My father had given him the benefit of the doubt, his deadline had come and gone, and now it was time to throw our weight.

But this woman had started to consume me. When we talked, it was real. A real conversation that wasn't made up of false curiosity or some dick just trying to stay on my good side.

With Ivy, I wanted to know about her, I wanted to hear her talk. Which was a first for me. Her voice sent my heart into double beats, the way her lips moved made my cock stiff.

When I asked her to tell me about where she came from, she didn't have to pause to find the words.

She told me stories of the dairy farm she grew up on, and how she loved the smell of manure.Gross.

I had grown up on a completely different end of the spectrum. We lived in the city, played baseball in an old rundown parking lot. Our evenings consisted of big family meals, and my father started breeding my brother and I for the business when we hit our teens.

Most childhoods are made of stories like hers, but mine . . .

My stories were made of torture, money, and silver lined events.

But a twinkle of that nostalgic childhood happiness was all I could see when she reminisced about her life, and it drew me in. It was exactly what childhood stories should sound like. Her mother and father were good people. But Remo had given them promises he never planned on keeping.

Ivy told me how he had promised her father that he would care for her, love her, and always keep her happy.

And her family believed him.

But I didn't believe the bullshit he fed her. I knew that man, I knew what he was built of, and none of it was good.

And she knew it now, too.

It was the money that talked, that was the nail in her coffin. Her father never gave her an explanation to his decision, but she refused to think it was because he didn't love her.

Deep down, Ivy felt he didn't have a choice.

I wasn't so sure about that.

Did her father really love her?

How does a man sell off a piece of his own flesh and blood for profit? It didn't make sense. I could never imagine a day where a scumbag like Remo could walk into my life and convince me to sell my child.

I would've killed him if he came to me with an offer for my daughter. There had to be more to the story. Maybe her father had debt to him or needed the money to save something else in his life.

But money could turn people wicked in the worst possible way. It had the power to consume you to the point where nothing else mattered.

I saw that now. For the first time ever, I saw who I had become.

Power, money . . . They bled together. With money, you had more say; you had more control.

And that need to have it all was toxic.

I had been poisoned by greed.