2025-08-09 22:46:05
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367 Half the City
"I do not know," Tyler said.Ivy let out a breath she had been holding since the hotel."I have not found either of them and I have nothing to go on. But nobody has told me they are dead, and until somebody does, I am going to keep assuming they are out there." He looked over at her. "Do you know anything at all?"Ivy shook her head, and it took her a moment to start."All three of us got through the fence at the back with the roof going up behind us. Then there were headlights on the road and men shouting, and Callie shoved me one way and took Junie the other. That was the last time I saw either of them.""Why did she split you up?""Because there were two directions and three of us, and she made a decision in about one second." Ivy's mouth twisted. "That is Callie. She took the one with the headlights on it and gave me the empty one. I did not work that out until I was about seventeen.""How old were you when that happened?""Twelve. I ran for two days and slept in a bus shelter." I
366 Promise
The penthouse was forty floors above the harbour and quiet enough to hear the ice moving in a glass.Ivy came out of the kitchen in cotton shorts and an old grey t-shirt with her hair pulled up in a clip. No makeup. Bare feet on the wooden floor.She looked about sixteen years old, and more like herself than she had all afternoon."Here."She handed Tyler a glass and folded herself onto the couch beside him with her knees tucked under her."So," she said. "Six years. Start talking.""There is not much to tell.""Tyler.""I went in for the parking lot fight. You know that part." He turned the glass slowly in his hand. "I got into more trouble inside. Then they moved me somewhere colder. Montserrat, up in the ice. I stayed there until they let me out."Ivy waited."That is it," he said."That is six years in about eleven words.""It was not an interesting six years."She did not believe him. He could see her deciding not to push it, and he was grateful for that, and he did not say so.I
365 Sweetheart
Tyler carried her out.Her legs had given way back in the suite and they had not come back yet. He wrapped his jacket around her, lifted her off the carpet and took her through the empty doorframe. She kept her face pressed into his shoulder the whole way.Heels came running toward them from the elevators."There you are!"Raina Dustin arrived out of breath with her tablet still under her arm."What happened in there? I have been calling the suite line for six minutes and nobody picked up."She was not looking at the girl in Tyler's arms. She was looking past both of them, down the corridor, at the door lying flat on the floor of her presidential suite."Where is Curtis? Did we get the contract signed or not?"Ivy lifted her head off Tyler's shoulder.Her makeup was gone. Her dress was torn from the hem to her hip and only a man's jacket was holding it shut."Those men tried to rape me, Raina."Ivy's voice broke in the middle of it and she made herself keep going."They locked the doo
364 Mickey Mouse
Tap.Tyler's hand snapped up and shut in the air a foot from his chest. It was the same lazy motion a man uses on a fly at the dinner table.He opened his fingers.The slug sat in his palm, flattened at the nose and still smoking. He turned it over with his thumb and frowned at it, like a man inspecting something that had dropped on him out of a gutter.Ivy stopped screaming.She was still on her knees with both hands over her mouth. The gun had gone off. She had seen it go off from four feet away.And her brother had reached out and taken the bullet out of the air.Curtis Vance made a noise that was not a word."No." He shook his head hard, twice. "No, no. That does not happen. Nothing does that."He brought the pistol up again with both hands.Tyler flicked the slug back at him.It left his fingers with a crack like a whip in a small room. Nobody in that suite saw it travel.The pistol came apart in Vance's hands. The slide tore off and buried itself in the wall behind him with a th
363 Property
For a second nobody in that room moved.Then Curtis Vance found his voice."What the hell is this?""Who are you?" the second producer shouted. "Who let you up here?"Not one of the three of them glanced at the door lying flat on the carpet.It was a reinforced fire door. Steel cored, sound treated, every bolt sunk into the frame. Two men with a crowbar could not have pulled it out of that wall in twenty minutes.None of them thought about that. They were three men who had been interrupted, and their blood was still up, and all they could see was the man standing in their way.Ivy saw the gap and ran.She went along the wall behind them with one hand clutching her torn dress shut. She did not stop until she reached the far corner, with the glass table between herself and every man in the room.Tyler saw the dress.He saw the seam split open from the hem to her hip. He saw the way she was holding it shut. He saw the mark coming up red on her wrist.Something went out of his face.Ivy h
362 Hollywood Break
Eleven floors above the street, Ivy Solaris sat alone at one end of a long glass table.She looked the way two hundred thousand dollars of preparation is supposed to look. The pale gold dress. The hair. The diamond studs LOVELIN had loaned her that morning.She sat with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap.The folder in front of her was open. She had already read it four times.Across the table sat three men.All three were in their fifties. All three were smiling at her, and none of them had stopped smiling since she walked in."That voice," said the one in the middle. "When you sang at the awards in March, my wife cried. Right there on the sofa."His name was Curtis Vance. He had produced eleven films that made money and two that made a fortune."That is very kind of her," Ivy said."And the training." The man on the left let his eyes go down her body and take their time coming back up. "Look at her. Six months ago she was a singer.""Stunt work, mostly. And I run.""It
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