Page 145 of Burning Ivy (The KORT)

My cock jerks angrily at the attention and honorific she pays him, but he promptly passes her back, and she doesn’t hesitate to lock her limbs around me.

“I’m yours, Wells,” she whispers, as though she understands how difficult it was for me to release her to them. “Always yours,” she coos, falling limp in my embrace.

IVY

While others have often viewed my mind—the way it slips away and swallows time—as my greatest disadvantage, I’ve always appreciated how intrinsicallymeit was.

A glitch hiding greatness.

My father helped me identify the beauty in the very part of me the world labeled broken.

That alone is a gift everyone should be so fortunate to experience. Someone who drags their finger across the craggiest edges of who we are, and instead of wincing at the jaggedness, they marvel at the spectacular sharpness.

The happenstance of being raised by a neuroscientist who could circumvent my brain’s misfiring and mold it into a strength—a weapon that literally saved my life—is a blessing I’m still trying to wrap my head around.

I never grasped the darkness in my mind because he tinted it with so much light.

Those little getaways my brain took were cottony, wispy dreams on the breeze.

Dandelion wishes.

Shooting stars.

Grains of sand.

Butterfly kisses.

Elusive and breathtaking gems pocketed away, replacing that which couldn’t be held.

Not in the same way others hold it anyway.

But right now, my mind—mymisfiring—is a prison.

A black hole hauling me under.

I’m not sure how the world expects me to react to the past few hours, or days, or weeks.

Months.

Lifetime.

To being stolen and given away as a baby.

To being raised in the warmth of a loving home that also served as a training ground for who I truly am.

To falling in love with the man hired to hunt me for a cabal I’m the heir to run, in exchange for millions. To marrying that same man and discovering he is like a son to my father—a father who is a hostage to his malfunctioning body.

To being gaslighted into believing none of it was real by the very people I love most in this world, all in the name of testing my strengths.

To being hunted and chased and shot at.

To being rescued by the men I cherish, men I feared had betrayed me. One whom I’m madly in love with. Another whom I watcheddieafter he confessed feelings for me. All four are chained to my soul like limbs I can’t walk without.

It’s all still such a mindfuck.

As I swirl around the edges of this black hole—the blown-to-bits face of a hired assassin intent on ending me, the monster surging toward me while I prepared my rifle to take him out, the loneliness that etched itself on my abandoned heart—it’s these four men who are anchoring me so I don’t fall into the abyss.

But I’m still fucking pissed. And I’m not sure what to do with that.

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