Venomous King (Venom #2)

35. Issy

Chapter thirty-five

Issy

“Your memory feels like home to me. So whenever my mind wanders, it always finds its way back to you.”

Ranata Suzuki

“ M iss. Stratford, there is a call from your sister on the house phone. She was attempting to reach you on your cell phone, but you weren’t answering,” my grandmother’s housekeeper, Gretchen, tries to get my attention from the beautiful winter sunshine I’m consumed with, and I have to pry my eyes away. Those beautiful bare-branched trees resemble me. They, too, have been stripped of all their life; and are now a mere imitation of what they are when in bloom. Looking at them, I realize that although they stand tall and strong, with their roots deep in the ground, and their branches reaching for the sky, they are worn, empty, and waiting to die eventually, just like I am.

“Thank you, Gretchen, I’ll take the call here.” I move away from the large window, and to the desk in my grandmother’s sitting room. I used to hate this room growing up. It was always too quiet, cold, and felt empty, regardless of the furniture, and who was in it. Now, I find solace here. It’s where I come when Julia is playing or napping. A place where I can hide from the world, the demands that my grandmother is ever so slowly making of me, and the life I was positive I never wanted to have. It is the place I come to when I want to mourn them. The men I thought I could leave behind, even though my heart is slowly shredding itself, one bleeding cut at a time, with every day that I am apart from them. Did I make a mistake letting them go?

“Mia?” I raise the portable phone receiver to my ear, and take a deep breath to prepare myself for her nagging. Now that we are all living under the same roof again, it’s hard to miss her disapproving and worried glances. She’s tried to speak to me about Diego and Kai, and why I walked away from them, but I have shut her down every time she does. I don’t want to have to articulate my thoughts and feelings, it’s bad enough that I am plagued with them. I know what I have done might not make sense to someone looking in. Why would I push away the two men who love me in the worst moments of my life? One would think that I would want their support, to grab and hold onto them tighter.

The problem is that those two very stubborn men have the habit of overwhelming me, and taking decisions out of my hands, in some misguided need to protect me. They call it loving me, but I call it controlling me. After everything that I have been through, and all that has been taken from me, the only thing I have left is my right to control my own destiny, and yet the two of them could not understand that. I can’t allow myself to ever go down that route again, no matter how much my decision is hurting me, and them.

“Sister, I need a favor from you, and you have to ensure Grandmother doesn’t get wind of it. Also I would prefer if you said nothing about it to Theo, Carter, and Finn. Only Mateo knows, and he’s here with me now.” Curiosity rises inside of me at Mia’s cryptic words. What the hell is she up to now? The last time she pulled a stunt where she kept Grandmother in the dark, she apparently gave birth to the twins. I’ve heard all about how furious Stella was, when she found out that Mia and her men hid her pregnancy. I wouldn’t have traded places with her for all the money in the Stratford coffers. Fuck that shit.

“Listen, Mia. You know I love you, but please do not put me on Grandmother’s warpath. I can barely get her to stop raging about Julia’s manners, and how she’s picked up bad habits from Diego. I really don’t need to deal with more of her fury.” At the mention of his name leaving my lips, my chest tightens painfully, and I have to force myself to take a few shuddering breaths.

“Issy, don’t disappoint me here, this is important. You could say it’s almost life and death important.” I hear a grunt as if someone’s been hit in the background, and I wonder what the hell is going on. Is she beating on one of her men again, or having kinky fuckery? God, give me strength. I love my sister, but her relationship with the four of them makes some of the dark romance books I’ve read seem tame.

I roll my eyes, knowing I’m going to do what she wants, despite not wanting to. Mia and I have been thick as thieves, since the moment my father married her mother, and brought her to live with us. I used to be such a lonely only child, always envying the other students at school who had siblings they could relate to. I had no one, just my parents and grandparents. Then my mom died, my father shut down, and my grandfather Jaxon followed suit, and Stella became colder and more distant, and I felt utterly alone, discarded. When Mia showed up, full of righteous anger, a fireball of energy, and a mischievous spirit, I realized that fate had found me a soul mate. The missing part of my heart that would always stand by my side and have my back. I spent too many years apart from her already, when I was hiding from Diego, and now, nothing could keep me from her. Not even my misgivings in whatever she’s about to drag me into. “What do you need me to do?”

A huge sigh of relief sounds through the phone, and it pulls a chuckle from me. What the hell has she gotten herself into? Knowing Mia, and the way she likes to piss off Grandmother Stella, it’s probably going to be epic, and Stella will lose her shit. “I bought a house. One I don’t want Stella to know anything about. I want to get out of the mansion with my men and kids, and you know how she is, Issy. She will never let us go. She thinks we need an army around us at all times, but I don’t want that for us. I want Alexander and Caesar to grow up free and wild.”

She bought a secret house? I feel a moment of envy, that she will get to leave the confines of Stella’s vast mansion here in Manhattan, and have a life of her own with her men and sons. The memory of my house in Oregon appears in my mind. The place where I thought that I would get to raise Julia with Kai and Diego. A shudder races down my torso at the memory of why we don’t live there anymore. How that dream was painfully stolen from me, and my hand strangles the phone in a death grip.

“You love my cock splitting you open, don’t you, whore? You’re mine now to use any way I want to.” Joaquín’s evil voice sounds in my mind, and I choke on air.

“Issy? Are you still there?” Mia questions, her voice filled with concern.

“Yes... I... I’m…here. What do you need me to do?” I force the memories away, preventing them from overtaking me and causing me to shut down. I’m not a prisoner. No one here is going to hurt me. I am safe now. They are all dead. I am in control of my life and future. I repeat the mantra over and over in my head, like I have every time my brain tries to flood me with images that will have me sobbing in the fetal position.

“I need you to leave the mansion without the security team, go to my new house, and meet the realtor there to get the keys and the deed. Stella can’t find out what I have done, until we have packed up and gone. I know she’ll be mad, but I can’t risk her stopping this from happening. It’s for the best, Issy. It’s what should have always happened.”

Her words sound a bit cryptic, but Mia’s always been a little dramatic. Honestly, I was expecting her to ask me for something more nefarious than slipping out, and meeting a realtor on her behalf, to get the keys to her new house. I totally get why I have to elude the security team. They report directly to Stella, so the minute they see where I am going, one of them will be on the phone with Clark or my grandmother. How am I going to get out here undetected?

“I’m going to give you a location where a car without a tracking device will be waiting. Leave your vehicle there, and I’ll make sure it gets back home. Oh, and Issy, after I text you the address, delete the message, and power off your phone. Please don’t turn it back on until after you have left there. Grandmother has a tracker on it.” Jesus, this is all so suspenseful. I feel like I’m about to step into a movie or something. Leave it to Mia to make my life more exciting. Maybe this is exactly what I need; a distraction from thinking about them.

“Okay, Mia, but this is a little overkill, don’t you think? Grandmother loves you and she’ll be mad, but she’ll eventually get over it.” I hear the beep of my cell phone letting me know that she has sent the address for the car. All of this is so weird, but rather than argue with her, I’m just going to get this done, so I can get back right away before Julia gets home from kindergarten. “What do I do with the keys and the deed, once I meet the realtor?” I question, already moving out of the sitting room, and trying to figure out how I’m going to leave the property without being followed by my security shadows.

“Take them with you. Oh, and Issy, I’m sorry to do this to you. I had no choice. I love you, sister.” She hangs up the phone before I can even reply, or ask her where she is. What. The. Fuck. This is getting weirder and weirder, and I have a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach. When I see her next, we are going to have a chat about how damn dramatic she is.

I pull up to the house in the charcoal sedan that Mia had waiting for me. When I first arrived at the location, a young blonde-haired woman was waiting with it. Other than nodding politely to me, she quickly got out of the vehicle, handed me the keys, and another car pulled up and took her away, without her even uttering a word. Honestly, if Mia is playing some fucked up game with me, I’m going to beat her ass.

The directions to Mia’s new house were sitting on the passenger seat, written in my sister’s handwriting. I followed them for over an hour, leaving the city, until I found myself off of the interstate, and on the backroads heading into a more rural setting. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve never been out this way, despite living most of my life in Manhattan. It’s beautiful out here, if a bit desolate. I haven’t seen another car for a little while, and the once-bright sunshine seems to be clouding over and darkening the day. Shit, it’s probably going to snow again soon, and I don’t want to get trapped out here. I’m not a great winter driver.

The directions tell me to pull into a darkened driveway coming up on my left. When I make the turn, I don’t see a house at first, just a whole bunch of deep blue spruce trees that create a dense living perimeter. Fuck this is getting creepy. Leave it to Mia to buy a house in the middle of nowhere, and have the whole thing feel like you’re walking into some trap. I pull down the long gravel driveway until I finally spot the two-story Tudor Revival, and a gasp of wonder escapes my lips. It’s stunning. The red brick, ornate windows, and chimneys standing proud against the cloudy skies call to me, as does the decorative half-timbering on the exterior, against the buttery white background. It’s an image plucked right out of my dreams from when I was a little girl. When I dreamed of a house that looked like Snow White and her seven dwarves lived in it. It was always my favorite fairy tale. It’s perfect, how did my sister find this place? I never would have pictured Mia wanting something like this. She loves modern architecture, but this looks like it was built in the early nineteen hundreds.

I pry my eyes away from the impressive architecture and look around. There’s a large black SUV parked off to the side, and I can see a smaller building behind it. Garage, maybe? Well, at least I found the place, and that must be the realtor’s car, so I can grab the keys and deed and head back, before the flurries start to come down. Maybe I’ll just take a quick look around to quench my curiosity, that won’t take too long. The house doesn’t look that large. Honestly, where is Mia going to put all her men? If I were to guess, this house has four or five bedrooms tops, and there are seven of them with her twins, and she mentioned trying for more kids. She’s going to outgrow this place quickly. That saddens me; the thought that this place won’t have children racing in the yard for long.

I get out of the car, walk up to the beautiful stone-covered porch, and knock on the solid walnut-colored doors. After knocking for a bit with no answer, I try the knob, and the door opens. Maybe the realtor is on the phone, and didn’t hear me? “Hello?” I call into the sizeable, empty foyer, which features rich wood paneling, creamy off-white walls, and a massive two-story ceiling with stunning wood beams. The muted light from the casement windows causes shadows to elongate across the dark hardwood floor, as I make my way further into the space.

“Hello, is anyone here?” I call out again as I follow a hallway that leads me toward the back of the house. On my right, a beautiful formal sitting room opens up through double French-style doors, and I spy a real wood-burning fireplace done in more paneling, and crisp, cream limestone. This room, too, is devoid of furniture or artwork. The house is just a shell for now, waiting for a family to make it a home. Another tinge of jealousy tries to rise within me, but I push it away. I’m happy for my sister and her family. She deserves to be happy, she’s struggled and endured so much over the years.

I force myself to move away from the room, even though a part of me is picturing a fire burning in the hearth, and comfortable furniture in the space. This room would make a beautiful space to read in, with a hot cup of tea, as you watched the snow come down from the window seat. “It’s not yours; knock it off and find the realtor,” I mumble out loud to myself. My footsteps take me down the hallway, until I reach a large open space of a combination grand kitchen, an eating area, and a family space. “Hello, I’m Mia Stratford’s sister. I’m here to pick up the keys,” I holler into the space but get no answer. This is weird, where is this person that I am supposed to meet?

A shiver of unease rises up my spine, causing goosebumps to erupt all over my body. I hear a noise behind me, so I swing around, my heart racing in my chest, and sweat rising along my back in fear. What I see in the doorway leading to the kitchen has all my blood rushing in my veins, and causes my jaw to drop.

“Hello, Princesa , miss me?”