Chapter 261: Ivy’s Grip

“I think I should leave now,” Rachel said softly.

She was lying beside me on the dusty hotel mattress, her head resting against my shoulder, one hand folded loosely against my chest. The room around us was dark except for the faint silver light pressing through the gap in the broken curtains—moonlight.

It had been nearly half an hour since we’d stopped pretending we were going to sleep anytime here. And we were still here, tangled in each other’s warmth with no particular urgency to change that fact.

“Just a little longer,” I said, tightening my arm around her.

Rachel made a small sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sigh. She shifted and propped herself up on one elbow, looking down at me with an expression of amusement.

“That is exactly what you said ten minutes ago,” she pointed out.

“Ten minutes ago I meant it differently,” I said.

“And now?”

“Now I mean it more,” I replied.

She laughed properly at that—and let her head drop back to my shoulder.

“I just needed more of this,” I said more honestly, my voice dropping to something quieter. My hand moved slowly along her arm without much intention behind it, just the simple need for contact. “It’s been a very long day. I needed to stop moving for a while.”

And it genuinely had been. The kind of day that felt like it had been compressed from several into one—the work of cleaning the hotel in the morning, the afternoon splitting off into separate threads, the encounter with Summer that had come so close to going entirely wrong, and then the news about Mei dropping over everything like a shadow that hadn’t lifted since. The nighttime search that had returned us with a prisoner instead of the person we’d gone looking for.

So much packed into so few hours.

“Oh—”

The thought arrived without warning, and immediately guilt followed along. My hand stilled against Rachel’s arm.

The warmth of the last half hour had done something I hadn’t anticipated. It had made me forget, for a brief and genuine stretch of time, about all of it. About Mei.

And while that was happening—while she was going through whatever she was going through, I had been here, in a warm room, entirely absorbed in something else.

I pressed my hand over my face and held it there for a moment.

“What is it?” Rachel asked. I felt her shift, felt her attention sharpen.

“Mei,” I said simply. “I just…I remembered.”

“You’re feeling guilty,” Rachel said. It wasn’t really a question—she had arrived at the answer before I finished reaching it.

I nodded against the pillow.

There was a brief silence.

“Thank you very much,” Rachel said with quiet exasperation, and then she flopped back down onto the mattress beside me with the resigned air of someone accepting an uncomfortable truth. “Now I’m feeling it too.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t apologize,” she said, cutting me off gently. She stared up at the same section of ceiling I was staring at. “You didn’t do anything wrong by being human for half an hour. Neither did I.” A beat. “We’ll find her, Ryan. We’ll take her back the same way we’ll find Elena and Alisha eventually. We don’t stop until everyone is home.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Rachel was quiet for another moment, then leaned over and pressed a brief, soft kiss to my lips. Then she sat up and reached for her clothes.

She dressed in the dim moonlight with the same unhurried ease she brought to most things—pulling her underwear on, then her trousers, reaching back for her bra. There was nothing performative about it. She was simply getting dressed.

And yet.

I was watching without meaning to, and the combination of silver light, flashlights, and natural unselfconsciousness made something ordinary look like something else entirely. I was already back to being hard again.

Rachel finished with her shirt, smoothed it down, and glanced at me.

She noticed immediately.

She laughed softly.

“We have the rest of our lives,” she said as she turned toward the door. “Goodnight, Ryan.”

And she slipped out into the corridor, the door settling softly shut behind her.

I stared at the ceiling for a long moment.

Then I sighed, sat up, and reached for my own clothes.

Sleep, it turned out, wasn’t going to come easily. My mind was too full and too restless. I needed air more than I needed a dusty mattress.

I dressed quietly, picked up my lighter and the battered pack of cigarettes I’d recovered earlier, and slipped out of the room.

The sixth floor corridor was still and dark. Most of the rooms were quiet now—occasional muffled breathing and the faint sounds of shifting bodies behind closed doors, but the animated energy that had filled the building earlier in the evening had largely wound down. I moved along the hallway and descended the stairs carefully, floor by floor, each level quieter than the last.

By the time I reached the ground floor, the hotel had the particular quality of silence that large buildings develop in the deep hours of the night—not empty, but resting. The flashlight beams and hurrying figures and sounds of industrious cleaning had given way to darkness and the occasional creak of settling structure.

Outside, the night air met me with a cool, clean edge. It was a good air nonetheless.

The rotten burnt Infected flesh air that Brad and his two friends had provided us had vanished it seems and thank god;

A few people were still awake near the hotel entrance, keeping informal watch. Among them I spotted Martin, standing slightly apart from the others, speaking in low tones with someone of their community. He caught my eye as I stepped out, gave me a brief, wordless nod of acknowledgment, and returned to his conversation. I returned the nod and kept moving.

I walked a short distance from the hotel—far enough for privacy, close enough to return quickly if something required it—and stopped behind a small restaurant that sat abandoned and dark on the near side of the street. Its windows were long since shattered, the interior barely visible through the gap, chairs overturned and a thick layer of dust over everything inside that suggested no one had passed through it in months.

I leaned my back against the exterior wall, tilted my head back against the brickwork, and drew a cigarette from the pack.

I held it between my lips for a moment before lighting it, watching the small flame briefly illuminate the space around my hands before I snapped the lighter shut.

The first drag hit me before I’d even fully exhaled—nicotine moving through my system. I felt it soften the edges of things almost immediately. The low, persistent tension behind my eyes eased by a fraction.

God. That was real.

Three days since my last one. Three days of a low-grade irritability I hadn’t fully admitted to myself was withdrawal, scratching away at the periphery of everything else I was dealing with. I hadn’t had the luxury of sitting with that particular discomfort when everything else was demanding attention, but I was aware of it.

Now, leaning against this wall in the cool night air with smoke curling upward past my face, I remembered precisely why I had started in the first place.

Addictive, I thought, not for the first time. Genuinely, stubbornly addictive. Some part of me registered the irony of that thought landing as observation rather than regret and decided to let it go.

I tilted my head up.

The moon was full tonight, brilliantly, and full, hanging in a sky emptied of light pollution and filling the space it had vacated with an almost disorienting luminosity.

I took another slow drag and watched the smoke rise and dissolve.

The silence was deafening.

Atlantic City. The boardwalk, the casinos, the hotels—the entire identity of this place had been built around noise and light and the particular feverish energy of people spending money they couldn’t afford to lose and staying awake past every reasonable hour to do it. Even late at night, before everything changed, this stretch of the city would have been loud and garish and alive without doubts.

Now there was just moonlight and quiet and the distant, occasional sound of something moving far enough away to be irrelevant.

The world had become very still.

I took several more slow, unhurried drags, watching the ember glow and fade with each breath, letting the quiet of the street settle around me without trying to fill it with anything.

It was on my third or fourth drag that I noticed her.

Ivy was standing in the middle of the street roughly twenty meters ahead—perfectly still, her arms at her sides, her gaze directed upward at the same moon I’d been staring at minutes earlier. She wasn’t doing anything in particular. She was simply there, the way Ivy always seemed to simply be places, as if she materialized in spaces rather than walked to them.

I stared at her for a moment, mildly startled despite myself.

I dropped the cigarette, pressed the toe of my boot over it until the ember died against the asphalt, and walked toward her.

“Ivy,” I called out as I approached.

She turned her head toward me slowly.

“What are you doing out here alone at this hour?” I asked, stopping beside her. The night air had sharpened in the last hour, carrying a genuine chill off the water. “It’s cold.”

“I am not cold,” she replied simply, returning her gaze to the middle distance.

I stood beside her for a moment, looking at her profile in the moonlight. She seemed entirely unbothered by the temperature, the darkness, the emptiness of the street. Just standing there in the still Atlantic City night as if she were waiting for a bus that she had all the time in the world to board.

I hesitated before speaking, choosing my words with some care.

“We’re going to get her back,” I said quietly. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

“I am not worrying,” Ivy replied.

I looked at her for a moment longer.

“You and Mei were close though,” I said. “You shared a room for nearly three months back at Jackson Township. And before all of this—she was a student at Lexington Charter while you were posted there as the school nurse.” I paused. “She had to have meant something to you.”

Ivy was quiet for a brief moment before she answered.

“I know her well,” she said. Then, after a beat that carried more weight than its length suggested: “She is, in part, the reason I came in the first place.”

I turned to look at her more directly at that.

“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely confused. “You took the nursing post because of Mei? Is she family? Some kind of relation?”

Something shifted in Ivy’s expression—the ghost of a smile, faint and brief, like a reflection on water. “In some ways,” she said.

She turned slightly and began to walk, moving past me back toward the hotel.

“Let’s hope nothing will happen to her.”

“Nothing will happen to her,” I said to her back, maybe too strongly.

Ivy stopped.

She turned and looked at me—and this time it was different from her usual glancing observations. Something about the intensity of it made me want to take a half step back.

Then her hand moved.

“W—WHAT—”

The sound that came out of my mouth was not one I would voluntarily produce in any other circumstances, loud enough that I immediately prayed no one near the hotel entrance had heard it. Ivy’s hand had dropped with surgical precision directly onto my groin.

“IVY—what are you—” I scrambled to grab her wrist, my face flooding with heat, my brain attempting to process several contradictory things simultaneously.

She tightened her grip with an exploratory and completely unreadable thoroughness that forced a strangled sound out of my throat before I could stop it, my fingers locking around her wrist quickly.

“Did you engage in sexual intercourse tonight?” She asked, looking up at me with the same composed and detached expression.

“YES—so please—STOP!” I managed, my voice dropping to a hissed whisper through pure social survival instinct.

She released her grip.

I stepped back immediately, my face burning crimson in the cold night air, staring at her with an expression that I imagine communicated several things at once—shock, indignation, or confusion.

Ivy looked at me with her calm expression however.

Then she simply turned, tucked her hands back into her coats pocket, and walked back toward the hotel.

I stood there in the middle of the empty street for a long moment, staring after her retreating figure.

This woman. I had known her for months, spent close proximity with her through some of the most extreme circumstances a person could share with another human being, and I was genuinely no closer to understanding a single thing about how her mind worked or what she was just thinking.

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