Page 19 of Poison Vows

“These four years you were asking me to see Ivy.”

I hold his stare, but I don’t say anything.

Spider chuckles humorlessly. “I thought and even believed that you couldn’t find her,” he says a bit awkwardly. “But now… well, it seems you’ve always known exactly where both of us were all along, huh?”

I don’t bother responding to that.

I found Angel twenty hours after she and her brother ran away from Westbrook Blues.

I’ve always known where she was. I just didn’t have the power to keep her… and now, I can’t even have her.

Feeling like the world is closing in on me, I repress everything I’m feeling, burying it deep inside

“I’ll take that pest in your garage,” I say instead, then turn to leave.

“Emmett,” Spider calls after me. I stop, but I don’t dare to face him. My pain should at least be private. “Iamsorry. For this unfair heartbreak.”

I suck in a sharp breath, but it does nothing to alleviate the torture in my chest, or the tension in my veins, let alone the agony of loss for the only thing I’ve ever let myself desire.

Everything bubbles up into a million incomparable emotions, blasting at me from Spider’s words, but I know he won’t suddenly change his mind.

If I can’t guarantee Angel’s safety, why risk it?

“What must be done, will always be taken care of,” I mutter, repeating a line from a book I once read.

“Uh, that’s a bit bleak and cold from someone so young,” Spider mumbles, maybe out of a bit of guilt but I don’t mention to him the three other statements of wisdom I read in that same book.

What has to come, will never be late.

What one must face, cannot be avoided.

But it’s the last one that has been engraved in my bones that rings in my head now.

What is, can never be changed.

I was never meant to have anything beautiful in this life…

I can’t have her.

CHAPTER 3

Ivy

THE PRESENT

“I will useyou in every way I desire and the first thing you will do is marry Vaughn.”

Haunted, stunned, and confused, I stare at the now unfamiliar green-eyed man in front of me, feeling numb from what he just said.

“What?” I croak.

His chiseled jaw clenches, flexes, and then loosens as I stare, but his lips remain pressed together in a tight line.

“You want me to… t-to marry Vaughn, your rival?” I stutter, my voice sounding like it’s coming from the depth of a grave.

“I want you to do as you’re told,” he simply says, completely unfazed.

Meanwhile, everything in me is breaking down, exploding, tearing apart like a nuclear bomb just dropped in my soul, leaving a path of toxic destruction in its wake.

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