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“Detectives?” she asked, peeking around my body to show herself to the two people who could send me back to prison. I cringed. I didn’t know what was going to happen here, but I wasn’t feeling reassured. We weren’t yet married, so Ivy could still testify against me and talk about what she saw. “Were you looking for me?” Her voice was the picture of innocence, and I wondered what she was playing at.
“Ms. Hope?” Alvez stepped forward. “Are you alright?”
Every muscle in my body tensed at the question. Clearly, the detectives thought that I was holding Ivy against her will. In some ways I was. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that Ivy was marrying me out of the goodness of her heart.
“I’m fine.” I released a small sigh of relief at her words. Ivy was going to play along.
“Are you?” This time Detective Scott jumped into the scene. I rolled my eyes. It was clear that he wanted to be part of the action.
Ivy pressed herself closer to me. I could feel the heat from her body through my jeans, we were that close. Her small hand reached out and grabbed my own. “Why wouldn’t I be fine? I’m here with my fiancé.”
The shocked look on both of the detectives' faces nearly made me piss myself with laughter. Whatever they thought, they hadn’t expected Ivy to tell them that we were engaged. “Your fiancé?”
Ivy’s face didn’t falter as she nodded. “Marco and I are engaged to be married.”
“That’s generally what being engaged means.” Ivy squeezed my hand tightly, but it wasn’t a loving squeeze. It was a warning to shut the fuck up before I screwed this up. She was trying to get rid of these two, and I knew that I wasn’t helping.
I saw that minute that the demeanor of the detectives changed. She was now the enemy. The cops didn’t want to protect her; they wanted to use her as a pawn to get to me. I’d escaped the system, and they were determined to bring me back.
“We wanted to ask you some questions,” Detective Alvez said. He walked forward a little more, crowding Ivy. He wanted to be invited inside, but I was not going to let that happen. Ivy was a smart woman, smarter than most, but she wouldn’t know how to stand up against an interrogation. She’d let something slip, and the detectives would use that small opening to blow everything wide open.
“About?” I asked
Ivy said nothing. She was smart, and she knew when to keep her mouth shut and let me do the talking.
“We found a body in the Hudson last night,” Detective Scott said.
My heart stopped, but I did everything I could to keep my face from moving an inch.Fuck me,I thought. Dom’s man hadn’t been as careful as we all thought, and now, there was evidence.
Ivy wasn’t so easily rattled. “Why would you want to talk to me about a body you found in the Hudson?”
Both detectives seemed even more frustrated by Ivy. We all knew that she was pretending, and that she knew that she had seen Adrian the night he went missing. All of those things were on camera.
“That body belonged to a man named Adrian. He was—”
Ivy finishes the sentence. “A bouncer at Red’s.”
Once more, Ivy took us all by surprise. “Yes,” Detective Scott said. “You know him?”
Ivy shrugged slightly. “I’d run into him a few times in the club. He liked to smoke in the alleyway, but I don’t think that we’d ever had a conversation.”
Ivy was sticking to the truth. She’d told me as much. Adrian had only worked at the club for a short period of time, and the two of them had never interacted outside of a casual hello. I was impressed. One of the first things I learned about evading the cops was that you stuck as closely to the truth as possible.
Plus, her story explained why she and Adrian might have been in the alleyway at the same time.
“When was the last time you saw him?” Detective Scott asked.
Ivy shrugged slightly. “I’m not sure. Maybe my last night at the club.” She looked back at me briefly, and I cringed. It was the wrong move. It made it seem as though she were focusing on me and checking if her story was the one I wanted her to tell. She seemed to realize her mistake immediately. “I’m sorry. With everything going on with the wedding planning, I can barely remember what day it is sometimes.”
She laughed slightly, playing up the part of the ditzy bride, but the damage had been done.
“We’d like you to come down to the station,” Detective Alvez said. I’d already pegged him for the more aggressive of the two.
“Why?” Ivy asked. “Can you explain to me why you think that I would know something about a person I barely ever spoke to.” Ivy’s tone was getting defensive, and I knew that she was on edge and scared. This was a bad combination, and if I didn’t get Ivy out of this situation soon then this was all going to go to hell.
I placed a protective arm around Ivy’s shoulder and pulled her back towards me. This was going south real fast, and I needed to get control of the situation before it turned. “If you’d like my fiancé to come down to the station, then you need to talk to my lawyer.”
“We don’t need to talk to a lawyer to ask a few questions.”
