37. Ellie
ELLIE
The nightmare is a flickering reel of horror.
A projection I can't turn off, playing on the inside of my eyelids. Reed’s hands.
The wet, rhythmic sound of the shower. Grace watching from the corner with that clinical, dead gaze of hers.
I wake up with my own scream trapped in my throat, phantom touches burning across my skin.
"I've got you, Ellie. Breathe. Just breathe."
Killian's voice is a beacon in the dark, pulling me out from the blackness. He’s in the chair.
He’s always in the chair. He hasn't slept properly since we got here. Every night he spends in that chair is another reminder of how much of a burden I’ve become.
I’m so goddamn messed up, he doesn’t even trust the room to keep me safe if he closes his eyes.
"Killian," I whisper. My palms are pressed into my eyes until I see stars. The room is too small. The Montana air is cold, but I can still smell the stale, damp concrete of that basement.
He moves, his shadow shifting against the wall. I hear the floorboards groan, a heavy, familiar sound. He doesn't lunge. He doesn't rush. He knows the sound of my lungs locking up when someone moves too fast. He stops a few feet from the bed, a solid presence in the dark.
"Can I sit?"
I nod. I feel the mattress shift, but he stays on the very edge of the frame, anchored.
He’s holding himself so still he might as well be part of the furniture, trying to make himself small in a room where he’s usually the biggest thing.
Watching him try to be gentle is a different kind of pain.
It’s pathetic, and I hate that I need it.
"Want to talk about it?" He doesn't move, his voice barely more than a rough murmur.
"I don't know how," I whisper. "I don't even know where to start."
I stare at the shadows on the wall. I’ve spent my life helping people find the words for their wreckage, but mine are stuck somewhere inside.
I know the mechanics of this; I know that naming the thing is the first step toward killing it.
But none of the textbooks told me how to say the words when they’re coated in this much shame.
"Take your time," Killian says, his voice a low vibration in the quiet. "I’m not going anywhere."
I take a breath, but my voice snaps. I try to speak, falter, and start again. "It wasn't... it wasn't just everything with Grace. There's more."
I’ve spent years analyzing heads. I know how to dissect trauma, but the science doesn't stop the feeling of fingers that aren't there.
"Grace had help," I say. "A man named Reed. He was... he was part of her guard team, but almost like her enforcer. He hated me."
Killian goes so still I think he’s stopped breathing.
Then comes a sound, a low, grinding rasp of bone on bone as he clenches his teeth.
The air in the room suddenly feels heavy, like the oxygen has been sucked out.
Killian doesn't move, but I can feel the heat radiating off him.
He doesn't have to say a word for me to know he recognizes the name.
"The shower stalls," I continue. "He’d wait until I was on my own. He’d put his hand over my mouth.
Not... to stop the sound of my screams, but to feel the vibration of my fear.
He took some sort of sick pleasure in it.
He used his fingers... he made me watch while he...
I scrubbed myself so hard after he left, my skin bled... "
I trail off. The house is silent except for the faint, dry whistle of the wind through the window frame.
Killian doesn't move, but the mattress is trembling under the grip he has on the edge of the frame. He’s sitting there, absorbing the details of my degradation, and the pressure in the room makes me want to shrink back into the pillows.
"He came after the lights went out," I whisper.
"A 'reminder in cooperation,' Grace called it. He slammed me against the wall, against the bed, anything to get a reaction from me. He bit my shoulder so hard... I thought he’d take a piece of me with him.
He told me my screams were a privilege I hadn't earned yet.
So I stayed still..." I wipe a stray tear from my cheek.
"There was a watermark on the wall, it looked like a bird mid-flight.
He was my friend, the bird. He didn't leave me on my own, even when Reed left me on the floor, the bird stayed with me. "
I clench my hands until my nails bite into my palms, leaving deep, jagged crescents in the skin. I want the blood. I want to feel something that happened here, in this bed, but the memory is stronger than the sting.
"He made me beg. He told me it was my fault. He told me I wanted it because I didn't fight back after the third time. Because my body did what it was built to do, even when my soul was screaming. He walked away with a smile, and I was left with the smell of him on my skin."
Killian doesn’t move. He’s staring at his hands, his knuckles so white they look like they’re about to burst through the skin.
He looks like he’s trying to hold himself together by pure force of will.
I can hear the grit of his jaw, a slow, ugly sound in the dark.
He’s right here, but he’s gone somewhere I can’t follow.
"There were other things," I say. I’m speaking, but the words feel like they’re falling out of a stranger’s mouth.
"The water was the worst. The suffocating, heavy wetness that never stopped. I’d convulse against the straps, my brain convinced I was already dead.
And the blades... she said it was to teach me that pain is only a sensation.
Reed would lean in close and whisper while he did it. He liked watching me struggle."
I finally turn to look at him. Killian’s face is dead. His eyes aren't gray anymore; they’re the color of a winter storm. Coldness pours off him, making the room feel like it’s freezing over.
"I’m sorry," I whisper. "I’m sorry I didn’t tell you."
"Ellie." The name is a rough exhalation. He reaches out, palm up. A lifeline. I take it, and his fingers lock around mine. He’s gripping me hard enough to keep me from drifting back there. No, he’s not a lifeline; he’s the anchor I’m using to keep from drowning.
"You don’t ever apologize to me for what they did.
" He pulls my hand closer to his chest until I can feel the vibration of his voice through his ribs.
"I should have taken my time. I broke his neck in the corridor before I really looked at him.
It was a mercy he didn't deserve. He should still be screaming somewhere. "
I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to value life, even the ones who are damned. But hearing the cold, jagged edge of his hatred is the first thing since the basement that feels like a fair trade. It’s dark, and it’s rotten, and for the first time in weeks, someone matches the noise inside my head.
"Is that why you flinch?" he asks.
"Sometimes. My brain knows it’s you. My body... my body remembers him."
"I know." He squeezes my hand. "I’ll wait, Ellie. I’ve been waiting for seven years. I’m not going anywhere."
Most men would have looked at the floor.
Killian? He watches me. He doesn't look like he wants to run, and for the first time since the basement, I don't feel like a wreckage he has to fix.
I just feel seen. Nathan would have been uncomfortable with this conversation.
He would have wanted me to move past it so he could stop feeling awkward.
"I’m afraid," I admit. "I'm afraid you'll look at me and see something broken. Something dirty."
Killian's gaze snaps to mine. The intensity is enough to make me recoil, but I don't. I stay.
"Look at me," he commands.
I do.
"You survived Grace Ross. You survived a monster like Reed. You’re not broken, Ellie.
You’re not dirty. You could be shattered into a thousand tiny pieces, and I’d still find every single one.
They underestimated who was waiting for you.
I don't see anything but you, Ellie. Always you. Do you understand me?"
I nod, my throat so tight I can't find the air to argue.
"I love you," I say, before I can think to stop it. "I’ve tried a hundred ways to explain it away, but I can’t. I don’t want the reasons anymore. I just want you."
He exhales hard. "Ellie, I don't deserve you."
"Shut up." I reach out, my hand covering the scars on the back of his. They’re rough under my fingertips, the map of everything he’s survived. "I decide what I deserve. And I choose the one who protects me."
For a long moment, he stares at our joined hands. When he speaks, his voice is rough with emotion.
"Seven years," he whispers. "I spent every single day in that cell planning how to get to you, and the second I got out... I couldn't stay away. I didn’t choose to want you, Ellie. It was a hostile takeover. My blood, my trigger finger? They all take orders from you now. I’ve been dead all my life.
Keeping you breathing is the only thing that makes me real.
You're the only reason I didn't pull the trigger on myself in that cell. "
The world seems to shrink until it’s only the two of us and the sound of his rough breathing. I stare at him, the reality of what he said sinking in. He isn't asking for pity; he’s finally telling me the truth.
"Seven years," I have to swallow hard against the sudden dryness in my throat. "And I never even knew you existed."
"I’m not trying to own you, Ellie. I just don’t know how to exist in a world where something else does. I’m staying right here, as long as you'll have me."
"I'm not running, Killian. Stop trying to give me reasons to. I know exactly what you are, and I'm still here."
His hand turns, tangling his fingers with mine. "Against every law of man and god, we’re here."
I look at our joined hands. "Where do we go?"
"Wherever you want. If you need a year of silence, I’ll give it to you. If you need to scream until your lungs fail, I’ll hold the door. No expectations. No pressure."
"And if what I need is you?"
"Then you have me. Until the earth takes me back."
For weeks, I let Grace convince me he was the one orchestrating my fall.
But a man playing a game doesn’t look this much like a car crash when he's with you. He isn't my puppeteer. He’s the only thing that’s been standing between me and her, and I’m done pretending I don’t want to be swallowed by him.
"I need to learn how to be with you again," I say softly. "Without seeing Reed every time you touch me."
His throat works as he swallows. "We go at your pace. Not a second faster."
I nod. I lean forward, pressing my forehead against his, closing my eyes until the only thing in my world is the heat radiating off him.
He smells like wood-smoke and the cold Montana night, a sharp contrast to the damp concrete of my memory.
He doesn't move as he lets out a slow, heavy breath I feel against my lips.
I stay there, using his weight to pin myself to the present until the tremors finally burn themselves out.
When I pull back, I study Killian in the dim light. He doesn’t move, doesn’t push, he waits. And for the first time, I don’t feel like I’m looking at a threat. I’m looking at the solution.
"We're going to take everything from him, Killian," I say, my voice losing its tremor. "Every facility. Every person. Everything he's built. And when he's empty and there's nothing left, I'm handing him to you."
Killian leans in, his shadow swallowing me whole. "Show me the way, Ellie. I’ll do the rest."
As Julian stops being a nightmare and starts being a problem, I know how to solve, I feel the shift.
I'm not looking for a way back to the person I used to be.
I'm looking for a way to make sure Julian never gets the chance to make someone else into a wreckage. We aren't just a man and a woman in a bedroom anymore. We’re a pact. Two broken things who finally realize that we don’t need to be okay, we just need to be even.
"Killian?" I say, my head resting on his chest.
"Yeah?"
"I love you. All of you. The man who kills and the man who stayed. The man you are when you're looking at me, and the man you are when you're looking at the world. I know what they did to you. I know my father wasn't your choice. But you have one now. And you’re choosing me."
He lifts my hand and presses a kiss to my knuckles. "I love you too, Ellie. More than you’ll ever know."
In this moment, in this bed, with Killian's heartbeat beneath my ear and his arms pinning me to the present, I feel something I haven't felt in months.
Peace.