I'd barely set the receiver down when Ivy's message lit up the screen.
"Sis, don't you dare skip out on me. I've got a special little gift waiting just for you!"
"Those late-night photos of you and the four of us? They're going up as the grand finale lot at the den tonight. Crystal-clear. Totally uncensored~"
Then came the pictures. Dozens of them, one after another. Pictures of me.
My phone started ringing on top of it all, the ringtone shrieking like a man come to collect a debt that could only be paid in blood.
I flinched so hard the phone hit the floor, and something inside me dropped with it.
Every scrap of courage the dissolution pact had given me crumbled.
I'd been so naive. I'd actually believed that ending the pregnancy and burying the past would close the door on all of it.
It wouldn't. Wallace, Ivy, and those two men would hold on to me with everything they had, dragging it back, reminding me every single hour. Omertà cut both ways. They would never let me go quietly. It would never be over.
Shaking all over, I knelt and picked up the phone, and called my father's estate.
That warm, familiar voice came down the line, asking if I'd been eating well, dressing warm, if anyone under the Baxter roof had been treating me badly, and the tears just broke loose. I told them everything, start to finish, every last thing.
In the end I begged through the crying. "Papà, can I break the union now? Can I come home? I can't stay with him anymore!"
When my father had heard it all, a trembling breath came back over the line. In the quiet behind it I could almost hear the soft clink of a bottle, the grappa he poured when something had to be settled.
"Dora, tesoro, you've suffered enough. A car will come for you tonight. The Family will handle the rest. Just come home and get some real sleep. Everything's going to be all right."
Wallace's driver came first. I handed the soldier a file and told him to take it on ahead to the den.
Then I got into the car going home, the ringtone slicing through the quiet, on and on.
Wallace. Those two words kept buzzing across the screen. I pulled the SIM card out and threw it from the window into the dark.
The auction at the underground den was nearly over and I still hadn't shown. Wallace's face had gone darker by the minute, the men around him going still the way men do when the heir-apparent's mood turns, and only now did his soldier finally bring the file over.
"Half the night gone, no wife, and what I get is a sheet of paper?" He let the words hang, and the table held its breath.
The soldier's head dipped lower and lower. "It's... it's true, sir. Madam said what's inside is something she wants. She asked you to keep an eye on it for her. She said she'd be along a little later."
A doting little laugh curved at Wallace's mouth. He glanced sideways, the way he always did, hunting for someone to share the cruelty of it. No one met his eyes. His long fingers slowly slid the file open.
Two words met his eyes, and the smile froze on his face.
Dissolution pact.
At that exact moment, the auctioneer struck the gavel twice across the smoke-thick room. "And now, the final lot of tonight's wager..."
