Page 23 of Fractured Loyalties
Twenty-Three
ROMAN
My cock is already throbbing with all the things I want to do with Ivy this afternoon. I’ve cleared my fucking schedule, and Irena is Paris-bound for the next few days.
However, the moment Ivy climbs into the passenger seat, I know something is wrong.
“Bad day?” I’m already contemplating how I can make it better for her. “Ivy?”
“Don’t,” she snaps, and the single syllable hits me in the gut with more force than my father’s left hook.
I study her profile for a second. The skin under her eyes is purple, and her lip is swollen, clearly bitten. Her knuckles are raw and split in two places. At first, I thought maybe she got into a fight.
But that makes no sense.
“You gonna tell me what this is about, or do I have to start guessing?”
Ivy’s fingers dig into her thigh, deep enough to leave marks. “You fucking know what it’s about, Roman.” Her voice is like cut glass. “Don’t act as if you’re not the reason everyone at school is calling me—” She cuts herself off, a look of disgust on her face.
“Calling you what?”
She turns on me, her eyes reddened and angry. “Don’t fucking play dumb. You sent it to everyone, didn’t you? My whole fucking life is a joke now, and you did it for what? A laugh? To prove something to your father?”
A sharp, ugly sound jumps out of my throat. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
She pulls her phone from her pocket and shoves the screen in my face. It’s paused on a video, one with my hand fisted in her hair, her face ruined and desperate. I, shadowed, unmistakably the villain, but she the star.
Oh shit… Oh fucking shit. They had eyes in her room.
My brain freezes, then starts running again at a higher speed, overclocked and overheating. I feel fucking murderous.
“I didn’t do this,” I mutter, barely able to breathe. “I would never?—”
She laughs, and the sound is so empty I seriously want to kill something.
“You’re the only one who’s ever had any access to me. You and your fucking pictures and your surveillance of my entire life!”
I want to argue, but I don’t know how. The video is real. I can’t deny its existence, but… I didn’t do it.
Ivy’s voice drops. “Everyone’s seen it, Roman. Everyone . You fucking destroyed me, and you probably got off on it.”
We’re already almost back to the estate, and my head is spinning, but I have to keep trying to win her back. “You really think I’d do this to you? After everything? After what I said to you?”
She snorts, ugly. “Don’t flatter yourself. You don’t care about me. You just want to own me.”
“Maybe I do,” I can’t argue with that. “But I don’t fucking share.”
“You’re the only person who could have done it,” she says, and the pain in her voice is torture. “You’re the only one who gives a shit about ruining me—or my existence in general.”
Ivy lets out a laugh that just fucking hurts.
I turn to her, and for a second, I want to hurt her back, even if it’s pathetic and desperate. “Maybe you have a secret boyfriend on the side? Maybe he took the video and planned to ransom it, and I just beat him to the punch.”
Her hand flies out before I see it coming, and the crack of her palm against my cheek is so loud it startles the car behind us into honking.
“You hit like a girl,” I sneer.
She glares at me, pure rage in her face. “You fuck like a bitch.”
“Then I guess you like bitches, because you sure as fuck liked me,” I growl back at her. As I pull into the circular driveway of the house, I prepare to reach for her and remind her that no fucking video leak is going to break us.
But Ivy doesn’t even wait for the car to stop before she’s out and sprinting to the front door.
My face throbs where she hit me. I throw the car in park, jump out of it, and race after her, ignoring the weird look on Edward’s face. He clearly hasn’t seen the video.
I follow her all the way to her room, and then stop in the doorway, my brows skyrocketing.
She’s fucking lost it.
Ivy tears open her dresser, yanks out the drawers, and dumps them on the floor. Clothes scatter, buttons ping off the wall. She grabs a lamp and throws it against the closet door, the ceramic shattering.
She’s not even crying, just breathing hard, sweating, wild-eyed.
She claws at her bedding, yanking it off in huge handfuls, exposing the bare mattress beneath. There’s a weird sort of beauty to it, the way her rage is all-consuming and pure. The room looks like a war zone in less than a minute.
I step in, carefully, as if she might have a knife hidden somewhere.
“Ivy, what the fuck?—”
She ignores me. She’s pulling everything apart, looking for something, or maybe just trying to destroy every trace of herself.
She goes for the nightstand next, knocking over the lamp, and then sweeps all of the books, jewelry, and photo frames off the top in a one-arm sweep.
The glass of a picture frame shatters, but she keeps going, bare feet crunching the fragments into the rug.
I want to go to her, but I don’t know what I’d do. She’d probably bite me. And that might turn me on.
I consider it, but then something catches her eye—the digital clock. I already know what it is, and I hate myself for not noticing.
She reaches out, slowly now, all the rage burned away by this new horror. She pulls the thing out and holds it up, her hand trembling. Then, she turns to face me, panting.
“You wanna see what I found?”
I don’t move. I don’t even breathe.
She holds the camera up between two fingers, the way you might hold a bug you found crawling in your food.
“Why is this here, Roman ?” She’s shaking so badly the camera jitters in her hand. “You want me on film? You want to show everyone what a whore I am?”
I step forward, hands up. “Ivy, I swear to God?—”
She screams and hurls the camera at my face. “I fucking hate you!”
I’m in shock at her words for some reason. It’s not a numbing kind of shock, either. It’s the kind that makes my stomach hurt and makes me wish I could jump from a third-story balcony, my brains splattering across the concrete below.
“What the hell is going on in here?” a voice comes in from behind me. I don’t have to turn to know who it is.
Or how bad this is about to get.
“My office. Both of you. Now. ”