15. Ellie
ELLIE
My hand reaches across cold sheets before I’m even awake. Searching. The space where Killian slept, where his body pinned me down, where his fingers left bruises on my hips, is empty. Gone for hours based on how cold the sheets feel against my palm.
I should be relieved. I should use this moment to think clearly and prepare for what's coming, instead of obsessing over the man who has fucked me six ways to Sunday.
I reach for the Glock on my nightstand. The weight feels natural in my hand. Like it belongs there.
The realization should scare me more than it does. It’s a sickness I’m finally letting win.
Because I know exactly what the gun is for. The Order. Cell 7.
The name sits in my mind like a cancer diagnosis. My father spent fifteen years investigating dirty cops and corrupt politicians without realizing someone bigger pulled every string. Judges. CEOs. People who smiled at charity galas while ordering executions over brandy.
Cell 7 is coming for me.
Not just any team. The ones they send when someone important wants you disappeared. When failure means the person who hired them ends up in a shallow grave instead.
Outside my bedroom, I hear the quiet movements of Killian's team. Soft footsteps, the metallic click of weapons being checked, murmured conversations about security things I don't even understand. The sounds of people who know what's coming.
I dress quickly in the clothes Kai left out for me.
Tactical pants with reinforced knees, a fitted long-sleeve t-shirt made of some material he claimed was "slash-resistant," and combat boots that fit surprisingly well. As I lace them up, I catch my reflection in the dresser mirror and freeze. A stranger stares back. Hard-eyed, armed, dressed for combat. Dr. Eleanor Hart, who took pride in helping broken people, is gone. In her place stands someone with a gun strapped to her thigh and a hitman’s fingerprints still bruised into her hips.
Dr. Hart would be horrified.
My hand moves to the bruise on my hip, and I press down until it hurts.
The pain feels right. Like waking up after years of numbness. It beats the years I spent pretending that a soft touch was enough. At least this—I pause, pressing into the center of the mark to feel the ache—is real. Nathan's version of love was just another form of anesthesia.
My boots are loud on the hardwood. I find the stairs and descend, my fingers trailing the railing I used to polish every Sunday. At the bottom, the smell hits me. Coffee and gun oil. A nauseating combination.
Jackson’s taken over my dining table. There now sit six laptop screens where I used to eat breakfast. Gabriel and Kai crowd my kitchen island, surrounding the property maps spread across the granite. Red circles marking kill zones on my lawn and hydrangeas.
My house, my home, now resembles nothing more than a war room.
The air in the room shifts before I even reach the doorway. I don't have to look up to know Killian’s attention has locked onto me. He doesn't just look; he tracks the new line of my body, the gaze lingering on the gun strapped to my thigh before slowly climbing the tactical silhouette of my body.
His head tilts, a predator admiring his handiwork.
His pupils are blown wide in the blue light of the screens.
When his eyes finally find mine across the room, my mouth goes dry.
He holds the look a beat too long. Long enough that my stomach drops, long enough that I forget there are other people in the room.
He built this version of me. He owns the finished product.
I feel that look like a touch on my bare skin.
“Morning.” Jackson doesn’t look up from his screens, fingers moving across keyboards. “We’ve got company. They’ve been circling since three a.m.”
He doesn’t look up as he taps a command, bringing a map of my property to life on the screen.
Red dots crawl along the perimeter of my home like high-tech parasites.
“Here, here, and here,” he says, tapping each dot. He sounds like he’s pointing out weather patterns.
The gap in the formation pulls at something. I lean closer.
"They're creating a perimeter," I observe, pointing to the tactical formation. "But why leave this area uncovered?"
Killian moves behind me. He's taken up the space the same way he's taken up everything else. Completely.
"Possible oversight," Jackson replies, though his tone suggests he doesn't believe it. "Or deliberate misdirection."
“Or they found the old drainage culvert."
Four sets of eyes pin me to the table.
"The what?" Gabriel’s tone carries no accusation. Only the flat assessment of someone recalculating threat levels.
The detail surfaces from the property inspection I obsessed over when buying this place, before I even signed the deeds. I’d flagged every potential security vulnerability. Paranoid even then.
My finger traces the unmarked section on Jackson’s screen.
"Runs through here. Property survey mentioned it was sealed in the seventies, but," I zoom in on the topography.
"This section collapsed during renovations.
Contractors probably made a repair entrance and never bothered closing it properly. "
“Fuck.” Killian braces both hands on the granite. He stares at me for a long second, his jaw tight. "What else haven’t you mentioned?"
“I didn’t think drainage tunnels were tactically relevant." My voice comes out sharper than intended. "Forgive me for not anticipating a military assault when I bought a house, Killian.”
His eyes narrow as I meet his stare. My fingers drum an impatient rhythm on the granite.
Fuck him.
Jackson is already dragging up internal blueprints of the foundation, the blue light of the pipes pulsing against the dark screen.
“Gabe.” Killian’s focus doesn’t shift from the map. “That blind spot. Now.”
"On it." Gabriel is already moving, checking his sidearm and disappearing into the foyer's shadows.
“Anything else I need to know before they kick the door in?” Killian’s eyes soften as he catches the impatient rhythm of my fingers on the granite. It’s almost… amusement. A look that says he doesn’t see the weapon he’s made, he likes the way it bites.
I can bite.
“I don't think so. Just—”
Gunfire shatters my sentence. A crack so close it shatters the leaded-glass window above the sink. My body hits the floor before I even process the noise. I’m on the tiles, reaching for the weapon at my thigh, my heart slamming against my ribs.
The room explodes into movement. Killian and Kai move toward the door, weapons already drawn. Jackson’s hand is on his gun before the echo fades.
"Someone's taking shots within the tree line" Jackson shouts, his fingers dancing across the keys as thermal imaging flickers to life. "Two signatures. Low crawl."
“They’re drawing us out,” Killian says, watching the screens. “Testing our numbers. They want to know what they’re walking into before they commit.”
Killian catches the back of my neck and drags me in, his thumb hitting the same spot he bruised last night. He presses a heavy, possessive kiss to my forehead, then another, slower one to my temple.
“Stay with Jackson.” His voice is a low vibration against my skin. “If anyone but me or Kai walks through that door, you use the Glock. Understood?”
I can’t speak. I can only nod.
He lets me go. Three long strides and he's out the door, Kai falling into step right behind him. I watch them disappear into the growing dawn light, leaving me with Jackson and his wall of screens.
"They'll be fine," Jackson says without looking up. "This is what we do."
I don’t answer him. I watch Killian’s blue outline move through the darkness, moving too fast for the screen’s refresh rate. He’s already behind the first red dot.
Gunfire erupts. It isn’t a crack this time. It’s a roar that vibrates through the floor and the coffee mug Jackson forgot on the desk. One red figure drops.
Just drops. No sound, no struggle. Just a physical absence where a man used to be.
I watch Killian’s blue signature step over the body. The first hit of adrenaline is pure, blinding relief that he’s still moving.
Then comes the rest. A dark satisfaction spreads through me, settling low in my stomach. He's protecting me. He's killing for me.
Watching him kill definitely shouldn’t turn me on. I clench my thighs together, suddenly hyper-aware of the wetness rubbing against the tactical fabric.
Transference, I try to tell myself. A misfiring of high-arousal adrenaline into the sexual centers of the brain.
It's a textbook physiological response to extreme stress, a desperate grab for life in the face of death. I know the theory, I've explained it to victims. But as I watch Killian’s blue signature move with that cold, rhythmic finality, the theory feels like a paper shield against a goddamn hurricane. I’m not just surviving; I’m wanting.
And the clinician in me has no words for the shame of it.
“Nice shot,” Jackson comments as the first red dot ceases to exist.
I don’t take my eyes off the monitors. I don’t even hear Jackson typing. I’m just waiting for the two blue signatures to crawl back out of the blind spot near the drainage culvert, my heart hammering against my ribs until they finally drift back toward the front porch.
Three minutes and forty-seven seconds. I counted every one of them.
Blood soaks through Kai’s sleeve. Not a little bit. A lot. The fabric is saturated, leaving a trail dripping behind him.
Pat. Pat. Pat.
“Let me see.” I move toward Kai, my fingers already finding the medical kit. Jackson pulls out a stool at the kitchen island.
"It's fine, Ell's," his smile is tight. "Just a scratch."
"Kai," Jackson doesn't look up. "She can see the bone."
"Sit the fuck down before you bleed out on her floor," Killian snaps.
Kai wavers, his face turning bone-white, but Killian's hand lands on his uninjured shoulder with enough force to lock him into the chair.