Hot Driver - S01 E86

Story 4 days ago

Hot Driver - S01 E86

Read Story: SEASON 1 EPISODE 86

Ivy Fashion Empire – Two Weeks Later

The car pulled to a stop outside the empire’s main entrance, and for a long moment, Ivory’s new driver sat waiting, watching the woman in the back seat through the rearview mirror.

Ivory hadn’t spoken a word since leaving the mansion.

She stepped out finally, smoothing down the front of her blazer with mechanical precision, and stood for a second staring up at the glass tower she’d once loved so completely.

I came back yesterday to settle things, she reminded herself. One more day. Then I go back to him.

Miles had held the empire together for two weeks in her absence — she knew that, was grateful for it in some distant, unreachable part of her mind — but the moment she stepped through the front doors, every staff member in the lobby seemed to hold their breath at once, as though her presence alone had sucked the air from the room.

She crossed the marble floor slowly, eyes sweeping the space with the old, familiar sharpness that had been dulled these past weeks by grief but hadn’t disappeared entirely.

Her gaze landed on a young receptionist. “Your hair,” Ivory said, voice flat. “Unprofessional. You’re dismissed.”

The girl’s face crumpled, but Ivory had already moved on, eyes catching a small coffee stain on a nearby employee’s collar.

“You too. Out.”

She moved through the lobby like that, cold and mechanical, sacking three more people before she even reached the elevator, and by the time the doors slid shut behind her, the entire floor had gone deathly silent, employees exchanging wide-eyed, frightened glances.

She’s back, someone whispered once the doors closed. God help us, she’s actually back to her old self.

—

Ivory’s Office

She sat down at her desk, and for a while, she genuinely tried.

Files spread out in front of her, quarterly numbers she used to devour with sharp, easy focus. She picked up her pen. Started reading the first line of the first report.

Then stopped.

The words blurred, refusing to hold their shape, and slowly, without her permission, her mind slid backward — back to a courtyard, a rose, Ron’s voice promising things he’d never meant.

Not now, she thought desperately, pressing her palms against her eyes. Not now, please, not now—

But the memories didn’t listen. They never had.

Maeve’s face swam up in front of her — younger, crueler, spitting directly into her eyes, calling her a whore in front of the entire courtyard. The bedsheet. Ron had posted it to the school’s website within hours, red-stained proof of her humiliation spread across every device on campus before she’d even finished crying in the bathroom stall where she’d hidden.

She leaned forward over her desk, forehead pressing hard against the cool wood, and the sobs came without warning, violent and complete, her whole body shaking with them.

“Duane,” she whispered, over and over, the name the only thing that had ever managed to quiet the noise in her head before. “Wake up. Baby, please, wake up—”

Nobody answered her. There was no one there but the empty office, and the memories, and the ache in her chest that never fully went away anymore, no matter how hard she tried to bury it beneath work. The sweet memories she had with him are the best of her life.

—