18. Ethan
ETHAN
T he door clicks shut behind me, but I do not hear it.
My mind is still wrapped around the sound of her voice last night, soft and breathless in the dark, her lips parted beneath mine, her fingers digging into my shoulders like she needed me more than air.
That memory lives in my skin, anchored deep, and yet the screen in my hand tells a different story altogether.
We can't see each other anymore.
I read the message twice before my body even registers the tension that has seized my chest. It sits heavily, too measured to be panic, too sharp to be anything but deliberate.
I stare at the words like they might rewrite themselves if I look hard enough, but they stay fixed, cold and clinical, like she ripped a page out of her own heart and sent it without flinching.
No period. No explanation. Just a sentence designed to create distance.
I press my hand to the kitchen counter to ground myself, breathing through the kind of tightness I have not felt since med school when patients coded before my eyes and I had to choose between freezing or cutting. I don’t freeze now. I have never been that kind of man.
Instead, I text her back.
No. Try again. Call me.
The message shows delivered, but she does not respond. The screen stays silent.
A minute later, the silence breaks. My phone vibrates again, but it is not Ivy. It’s a new number. No name, just a message.
You should have known better, Cross. She's not yours.
The words hit like a blade between the ribs, not because I am afraid but because I know exactly who sent it.
The phrasing is polished, the cadence controlled.
It reeks of money and entitlement and the kind of man who has spent his entire life taking what he wants and never facing the consequences. Daniel Holt.
I forward the number to a cybersecurity contact I have used in the past for patients who needed protection, women who left dangerous men and wanted to vanish quietly.
I ask for a trace. I ask for any confirmed hits.
Ten minutes later, my suspicion is confirmed.
The number is linked to a private business account under Holt Enterprises, flagged once before for harassment complaints that never stuck.
I lock the phone and let my hand fall to my side.
The rage that follows is not explosive. It is cold and steady, the kind of anger that builds without noise, gathering precision like a scalpel before it cuts.
Holt is circling again. Ivy did not push me away because she wanted to.
She did it because he pushed her first. The message was timed.
Calculated. He is sending a warning. Stay away.
Do not protect her. Let her fall back into the cage he once built around her.
He chose the wrong man to threaten.
I pull up Drew’s number and call. He picks up after the third ring, his voice casual, unaware.
“Ethan. What’s up?”
“Need five minutes. Private.”
He pauses. “Okay. You all right?”
“Not really. It’s about Ivy.”
His voice tightens instantly. “What happened?”
I don’t miss a beat. “He’s sniffing around the hospital again. There’s talk he’s trying to slide in a donation through one of his shell foundations. Old money dressed up as new tech. You know how that goes.”
Another pause, shorter this time. I can almost hear him weighing it. “He’s not on any board lists.”
“Not yet. But I’ve seen this play before.
He gets his name on a wing, starts pulling strings behind the scenes.
Next thing you know, patient data’s being used to boost some bullshit biotech valuation.
” I let the disgust bleed into my voice.
“If there’s anything shady in his past, I need to know now. ”
“Stupid, arrogant asshole,” he curses. “I wish I could help, Ethan, but all I know is that he was an ass to my sister, and that’s patchy too.”
“Anything you know is helpful.” It’s a good thing he can’t see my face or how angry I am.
Drew sighs. “I don’t know details. She’s never told me. But I know it ended badly. She came to me in pieces. She told me to never ask about it. I didn’t, but I saw the aftermath. He ruined something in her. And he’s still got his hands on her through fear.”
I lean back against the wall and close my eyes.
“Do you know what he did?” I ask because I need something, any thread to pull.
“No. Only what Cassie once hinted at. That he never hit her, not in ways the law could trace, but that he chipped at her until she was barely herself. Emotional control. Isolation. Gaslighting. The kind of psychological warfare that turns confident women into shadows. At one point, I’m afraid he may have done more, although she never told me.
And she loved him. At first, she really did. Which makes it worse.”
I feel something hard settle inside me. The mere image of Daniel ever raising a hand to Ivy…
The image of Daniel Holt raising a hand to Ivy makes my blood run molten.
I don’t just want him gone. I want to set him on fire, watch him burn until he’s nothing but blistered ruin, then drag what’s left back from the edge of death—just to watch the flames take him again.
I want him conscious for every second of it, want him to know it’s because he touched her.
“He’s back,” I say. “She’s seen him. I think she’s scared he’ll come after me if she doesn’t back away.”
Drew exhales slowly. “He probably will. And that’s why she’s pulling away.”
“I can handle him.”
“Ethan—”
My nostrils flair. “Drew, don’t you think he deserves to be brought to justice?”
“Yeah,” he replies, voice filled with the same quiet rage I feel. “But how do you do it if Ivy won’t say what’s happened?”
“I don’t know,” I snap, “But I sure as hell am going to find out.”
Those words sit with me long after I hang up.
An idea comes to my head as I go to the bedroom.
Sitting on the bed, I pull up Cassie’s social media page, scroll until I find a post from nearly a year ago.
A photo of Ivy, hair shorter, eyes tired but smiling, standing beside Cassie outside some small shop in upstate New York.
The caption is vague. A girl’s weekend. A recovery retreat.
But the comments tell another story. Mentions of fresh starts. Of letting go. Of rebuilding trust.
I follow a tag that leads to a blog Cassie runs under a pseudonym where she writes about survival, about reclaiming identity after coercive relationships. There is no mention of names, no details, but the stories she tells are Ivy’s. I feel them in the space between each line.
Men who take power piece by piece. Who wrap control in gifts and charm. Who raise their voices not to scream but to silence. Men who weaponize love, who twist devotion into leverage, who never hit, never strike, never leave bruises. Only cracks.
My chest tightens as I scroll because I know now what Ivy never said. And I understand the silence she wears like armor. She is still protecting him.
Or more likely, she is protecting me.
But I am done letting her carry this weight alone. I am not some boy she used to flirt with when life was easy. I am a man with teeth, with reach, with the kind of focus that has kept people alive on operating tables even when the odds said otherwise.
If she will not tell me what she is running from, I will find out myself.
I set the phone down and cross the room, grabbing my laptop off the shelf and opening it with more force than necessary. The clock in the corner tells me it is just after midnight. That does not matter. Not to the person I’m about to call.
I scroll through my contact list until I land on a name I have not used in over a year.
Mason Garrick. Ex-cop. Now works freelance in the cracks between legality and necessity.
The hospital used him once for a protection case involving a patient’s stalker.
The man is quiet, competent, and terrifyingly efficient. Exactly what I need.
I type out the message.
Need a background run. Discreet. Call me tonight if possible.
I send it without preamble and toss the phone onto the bed.
I pace while I wait. The apartment is too clean, too still, filled with the residue of a night that was supposed to be something else.
She should be here. Not because I want to possess her but because for the first time in years, I let someone inside the walls I built, and she fit like she had always known the blueprint.
The silence stretches. I check the phone again. Still nothing.
I move to the kitchen and pour a glass of water, then dump it in the sink without drinking.
I have sutured arteries with steadier hands than I have right now.
My pulse hammers low in my throat, not fear, not doubt, just an endless current of frustration and determination braided so tightly I cannot separate one from the other.
Finally, the phone vibrates.
Unknown caller. I answer on the first ring.
“Mason.”
“Long time,” he says, voice gravel over steel. “What are we looking at?”
I glance out the window, city lights blinking back at me in fractured amber patterns. “A woman. Ivy Dawson. I need to know everything. Fast.”
“Runaway? Witness? Threatened?”
“She’s not a criminal. She’s scared. There’s a man—Daniel Holt. Old money. Valleria circles. She dated him once. I think he’s trying to pull her back under.”
There’s a short silence on the other end. “You think or you know?”
“I know enough,” I answer, the words harder than I mean them to be. “And if I’m wrong, I’ll owe you a bottle of something expensive. But if I’m right, she’s in real trouble.”
“Send me what you’ve got. Full name, last known address, timeline if you have one. I’ll dig.”
I’m already forwarding the information before he finishes speaking. “I want every tie he has. Legal or otherwise. Anything on Ivy too. She won’t talk, but I need to know what happened to her.”
“Give me an hour,” Mason says. “Maybe less.”
The call ends. I drop the phone on the table and lean back in the chair, staring at the ceiling like it might give me answers the world refuses to offer.
I think of Ivy’s face that morning in the cabin, all soft lines and sleepy heat, the way her hand curled around the swell of her belly like she was learning how to be two people at once.
That kind of tenderness doesn’t come from nowhere.
That kind of resilience means she has already survived more than I can guess.
I close my eyes, just for a moment.
When the phone rings again, I answer before the first vibration finishes. Mason sounds winded, like he’s been moving quickly.
“You might want to see this in person.”
I sit up straight, the tone in his voice slicing through the calm I was trying to reclaim. “What is it?”
“I’m sending a file to your secure line, but this is not the kind of thing I want to explain over the phone. If I’m right, your girl’s got a serious problem. One that’s not just emotional.”
My jaw clenches. “Where are you?”
“Office off Winthrop and Eighth. Upstairs. No signage. You’ll find it.”
I grab my jacket and keys, already moving toward the door. “Text me the access code.”
“It’s unlocked,” he says. “I’m not expecting company. Just hurry.”
I end the call and shove the phone in my pocket, the adrenaline already working its way through my veins like a second heartbeat. I do not know what I’m walking into, but I know one thing for certain.
If Holt is as dangerous as I think he is, he just made the worst mistake of his life because now he is my problem too.