Chapter 3
Killian
I’ve been watching the estate for an hour from the tree line across the road, counting guard rotations.
One patrol every thirty minutes, two guards, predictable loop.
The security feed is on a thirty-minute splice — I looped it remotely before I left the Ironworks.
Twelve exterior cameras, all of them seeing nothing but empty grounds on repeat.
The blueprints flicker in the back of my mind. Old mansion, original bones, the weakest points are where the extensions meet the foundation. Her room is on the west wing, second floor. Malachi’s is east wing, third floor, light off since one fifteen. Hers is still on.
She can’t sleep. That makes two of us.
I move through the shadows along the perimeter, sticking to the blind spots I mapped earlier.
Full tactical black — combat boots, cargo pants, fitted long-sleeve, gloves.
Zip-ties and duct tape in my pockets, a half-mask covering my nose and mouth, the voice modulator clipped to my collar.
No gun. Too loud, too traceable. This is an extraction, not an execution.
The west wing faces the cliff. Two hundred feet straight down to Obsidian Bay, and no guard coverage on this side, because no sane person would approach from here. That’s the thing about people who design security systems — they assume everyone’s sane.
I touch the phone in my pocket one last time. Her comment is still in there, saved with all the others. Then I put it out of my mind, because the next ten minutes don’t have room for whatever she makes me feel.
The cliff face is wet with mist. Salt air and something floral — night-blooming jasmine from the gardens — come through the mask as I find my holds in the black steel and stone and pull myself up in a rhythm I’ve perfected on a hundred other jobs.
The waves crash below, steady and indifferent.
My breathing stays even. I’d rather not be winded in case she puts up a fight.
My lips twitch behind the mask. She’s not going to put up a fight. She’s going to do something worse.
I pull myself over the balcony railing, slow and silent. The gauzy curtains are useless — I can see straight into her room. Minimalist. Cold. Grey silk sheets on a bed that looks like no one has ever been comfortable in it.
She’s sitting on the edge of the mattress, phone in hand, staring at the screen.
Her dark hair is loose, falling in soft waves.
The silk nightgown is champagne-colored, thin, and it makes her look smaller than she should.
Her skin is so pale it’s almost translucent in the low light — not a mark, not a flaw, nothing.
Like someone made her from porcelain and forgot to make her look alive.
For three seconds I just watch her. The file said Ivy Vane, 22, biomedical illustration, only child. The file said nothing about the way her collarbones catch the light, or the way she holds her phone like it’s the only thing in the room that’s real.
Ivy
It goes fast enough to outrun anything but the truth.
I’ve been turning Ghost’s reply over in my head for the past hour, holding it the way you hold something small and heavy, trying to feel the shape of it.
My right hand rests on the scalpel that’s in my garter.
My left holds my phone, his words still glowing on the screen.
I should be sleeping. I should be planning.
Instead, I’m sitting on the edge of my bed trying to figure out how to become a ghost myself before Harlow’s ninety days run out.
The soft click of the balcony lock stops everything.
My heart rate spikes — sixty to a hundred in under two seconds. I don’t scream. Screaming is for people who believe someone’s coming to save them. I lock the phone, leave it on the bed, and stand slowly, positioning myself in the center of the room facing the balcony.
A figure steps through the curtains. Massive.
The moonlight behind him makes the silhouette almost theatrical.
I scan him the way I scan everything — fast, clinical, automatic.
Boots. Cargo pants. Shoulders that fill the door frame.
A half-mask covering his nose and mouth, leaving only his eyes visible.
His eyes lock on mine and I try to find his pupils, but the obsidian of his irises swallows them. Black on black. For a moment I get caught there, before my gaze drops to the scar.
It’s jagged. Silver-white. It starts at the corner of his mouth — or what I can see of his mouth beneath the mask — and slashes down his jawline and neck, deep and old and badly healed. Whoever stitched it didn’t care about cosmetics. Or maybe nobody stitched it at all.
I take in the rest. Six-two, maybe six-three. Two-twenty minimum, heavyweight frame, all functional muscle. The kind of body built by violence rather than vanity. He’s enormous compared to everything in my room — compared to everything in my life.
Threat level: extreme. Escape probability: low. Interesting.
He reaches into his pocket — duct tape, probably — and I speak before he can use it.
“About time.” His hand freezes. I keep my voice flat, bored almost, even though my pulse is hammering hard enough that I can feel it in my fingertips.
“You’re here for me, I assume? Unless you have an urgent craving for expensive wine. ”
He doesn’t answer. Just stares at me with those black eyes, looking for fear. He won’t find it. I buried it so deep even I can’t reach it most days.
“Let me guess. Ransom? Leverage against my father?” I study him the way I’d study a cadaver — professional interest, zero sentiment. “Or are you here to kill me? Because if it’s the latter, I’d prefer you make it quick. I have very sensitive skin.”
He steps towards me. “Turn around. Hands behind your back.” The voice is wrong — gravelly, electronic, distorted. A modulator. So, he’s smart enough to hide his voice, which means he’s planning to let me live. Dead girls don’t identify voices.
I tilt my head and study the scar instead of complying. “The scar. Blade entry at the oral commissure, inferior trajectory.” I can practically feel him short-circuit. “Did it sever the marginal mandibular branch of your facial nerve, or did you just get lucky?”
Silence. Then his voice drops to something dangerous. “Turn. Around.”
“If I comply, do I get to know your name? Or is Scary Mask Man what you’re going for?”
He doesn’t answer that either, and I can see the patience running out of him in the way his shoulders tighten. Good. Impatient people make mistakes.
“Fine.” I let it sound like I’m the one being inconvenienced. “But I’m going to need shoes.”
“No.”
“I’m not dying in a nightgown because you didn’t plan for footwear.”
I can feel him recalculating. “Thirty seconds. Go.”
I walk to the closet. Black sneakers first. Then a hoodie from the shelf, because I said shoes, not just shoes. My hand hovers over the row of dresses for a moment — the pivot wall is right there, behind the Valentino. My lab. My scalpels. My real life.
I pull on the sneakers and the hoodie, turn my back to him, and put my hands together behind me.
I don’t look at his face when he steps close.
I feel it instead — the heat coming off his body, his controlled breathing, the way his gloved fingers brush my skin as he loops the zip-tie around my wrists.
The shock is immediate. Electric. Like touching a live wire through leather. He notices — I know because his fingers pause for half a second before pulling the tie tight. Not cruel. Professional. But his thumb grazes my pulse point, and I know he can feel my heart going faster than I want it to.
What was that?
I don’t have an answer. My body just reacted to a stranger’s touch like it recognized something my brain hasn’t caught up with yet.
He turns me to face him and straps me to his chest with a harness I didn’t see him pull from his pack — quick, efficient, practiced. Then he lifts me over the balcony rail like I weigh nothing, and we start descending.
The ocean roars below us. Two hundred feet of nothing between my bare legs and the rocks.
My thighs tighten around his waist with every move he makes, my nightgown bunching up around my hips, the cold mist raising goosebumps across my skin.
I should be calculating fall velocity and the force of impact and the statistical likelihood of surviving a two-hundred-foot drop.
Instead, I’m aware of his chest against mine.
The heat of him cutting through the thin silk.
The steady, controlled rhythm of his breathing, like his body is a machine that has done this a thousand times and expects to do it a thousand more.
My hair moves in the wind, and he smells like leather and something metallic — not cologne, not trying to be anything. Just what he is.
His eyes find mine in the dark. Black, locked, unreadable. I stare back because looking away feels like losing.
When we reach the ground, he unstraps me and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. He grips my arm and walks me toward a black cargo van parked in the trees, opens the back doors — no windows, a blanket on the floor, nothing else.
“Charming. Is this where you take all your dates?”
He doesn’t respond, just gives me a small push, and I climb in and settle on the blanket. The doors slam shut, and the engine roars to life.
I kick the back of his seat.
Nothing. I kick it again.
“Hey, Scary Mask Man. I’m talking to you.” I wait a beat. “Is there a snack situation back here? Or is menacing silence the only thing on the menu?”
“Shut up.”
“It speaks! And it’s grumpy.” I lean back against the van wall, bracing against the bumps. “Did you skip dinner, or is the mask too tight? That would explain the blood flow issue. Also, the poor choice in transportation — this suspension is terrible.”
I can hear his teeth grinding from back here. I know I should stop — the smart play is silence and compliance — but I’ve been silent and compliant for seven years and look where that got me. At least this man is honest about what he’s doing. My father kidnapped me with a smile.
“You’re a hostage. Act like it.”
“Oh, sweetheart.” I let the word land. “I’ve been a hostage since I was fifteen. You’re just the first one who had the balls to put me in a van.”
Silence. But a different kind this time — not annoyed but hit. I can feel the shift in the air, the way the van accelerates slightly, his grip tightening on the wheel. That line landed somewhere it wasn’t supposed to.
Good.
The van stops hard enough to jolt me forward. A door slams. Then the back opens, and he’s standing there, taking a breath of industrial air like he needs a moment before he deals with me again.
He helps me out. An abandoned factory of some kind — brick walls dark with moisture, rusted window frames, and a reinforced door that doesn’t match the rest of the building. The only new thing in sight.
“Industrial chic. It suits you.”
He grabs my arm and leads me inside, then pulls out a knife and I feel my pulse jump before I can stop it — but he just cuts the zip-ties. I rub my wrists, red and raw, and turn to face him.
We stare at each other. His eyes are impossible in this light — not brown, not dark blue, just black.
My gaze moves down to his jaw, the scar, the mask, back up.
He’s looking at me the same way, tracing my nose, my cheekbones, my mouth, and I lick my lips without meaning to and his gaze follows the movement.
My neck is exposed, and I know he can see my pulse. It’s steady, but only because I’m holding it steady by force. I take half a step toward him. He takes one too, before something stops him and he steps back.
“Are you going to tell me what happens now?” My voice is even. My hands are clasped to keep them still.
“If you cooperate, you survive.”
The word lands wrong. Survive. Like that’s supposed to be enough. Like that’s supposed to be the thing that moves me.
“I don’t want to survive,” I say quietly, and it’s out before I can filter it. For a second I think I imagined saying it out loud. But his body goes completely still — dangerously still — and I know he heard me. “I want to feel alive. There’s a difference.”
He doesn’t respond. But something shifts behind his eyes, something neither of us has a name for yet.
He turns toward the factory entrance. “Move.”
I follow him inside. The reinforced door closes behind us with a sound that’s heavy, final, the kind of sound that’s supposed to mean the end of something.
It doesn’t feel like an ending.