Chapter 10
Killian
Night has fallen and my guns are cleaned. Primary, backup, emergency — laid out on the folding table in a row, each one checked, rechecked, and checked again. Twenty years of this ritual and I’m not testing my luck on the one night it actually matters.
Tactical gear is staged by the door. Vest, boots, mask, comms. Everything positioned so I can be dressed and armed in under ninety seconds. The monitors are running live surveillance of the exchange location — the warehouse district docks, quiet now but not at dawn.
I should be focused. I am focused. But I keep looking at her.
Ivy is cross-legged on the cot with the laptop in her lap, processing the final transfers.
The blue screen light catches her face and makes her look like something that shouldn’t exist in a place like this — too sharp, too still, too much.
Her fingers haven’t stopped moving in hours.
She knows what tomorrow means and it’s driving her forward like fuel.
I run through the plan again. Every step includes her now — not as an asset, not as leverage, but as a partner. Five days ago she was a name in a file. Now she’s in every contingency, every extraction route, every version of the future I can see.
I crouch beside her to check the progress. She’s navigating the Panama accounts’ firewalls with the same ease she does everything — fluid, precise, three steps ahead.
“These transfers need to be staggered so they don’t trigger alerts.
This is the last forty-three million.” She doesn’t look at me when she says it.
Multiple windows show transfer confirmations, crypto wallets filling, funds routing through shell companies she built years ago and has been waiting for someone to help her use.
I watch her from the corner of my eye — the way her eyes narrow when she concentrates, the same focused intensity as a sniper behind a scope. Her typing has the precision of a surgical instrument. Every keystroke deliberate, nothing wasted.
She hits the final key harder than the rest. Leans back. Raises her head to look at me.
“Done. Three hundred forty-seven million, six hundred thousand, eight hundred and twelve dollars.” A beat. “And thirty-five cents. Half for you. Half for me.”
She closes the laptop with a soft click. The sound is final — like a door locking behind them, the kind that doesn’t open again.
“You just became one of the richest women in the country.”
She grunts softly. “No. Not until he’s dead.”
It was never about money. Three hundred million could’ve been three hundred dollars and she’d still be sitting here, wanting the same thing. Revenge doesn’t have a price tag. It has a pulse, and hers has been beating for seven years.
I help her stand and guide her to the folding table. What she doesn’t know — what she was too absorbed in her work to notice — is that I’ve been preparing something between the monitor checks and the gun cleaning.
Actual plates on the table. Ceramic, not paper.
Pasta with butter and garlic, bread cut unevenly because I used a combat blade instead of a bread knife.
A bottle of red wine that’s been open for an hour because I read somewhere that it needs to breathe, and I don’t know anything about wine — I know motorcycles, kill zones, and how make a body disappear.
But I looked it up on my phone while she was draining the Panama accounts.
She stares at the table. Then at me. Then back at the table.
I don’t know what to do with my hands. I’ve set up extraction points and field-stripped rifles blindfolded, and I don’t know what to do with my hands while a woman looks at the dinner I made.
“You cooked.”
“It’s pasta. It’s not complicated.”
“You set plates. Real plates.”
“They were in the cabinet.” I sound defensive.
I am defensive. This was a stupid idea — we should’ve eaten protein bars and kept working.
But this is the last night. Tomorrow we either succeed or we die, and I wanted something normal.
Something that looks like what people do when they’re not planning an execution at dawn.
I’ve never had a last dinner with someone.
I’ve never had dinner with someone. And doing it wrong feels worse than not doing it at all.
She sits down and touches the edge of the plate with her fingertip, looking up at me with something in her eyes I can’t survive if I stare at it too long.
“Thank you.”
I nod awkwardly and sit across from her, filling her glass with wine.
She picks up the zip-ties from the table. I watch her stand, walk around to my side, and hold them out with a smile that belongs on something far more dangerous than a twenty-two-year-old in borrowed clothes.
“Your turn.”
I understand immediately what she’s asking, and something shifts in my chest — not a crack this time, more like a lock releasing.
The idea of being vulnerable in front of her, of letting her bind my hands the way I bound hers, of trusting her with the kind of surrender I haven’t offered anyone in thirty years of being alive.
I extend my wrists. Palms up.
She zip-ties them loosely — the same way I did for her, tight enough to hold and loose enough to feel like a choice. I could snap them in a second. She knows that. This isn’t about restraint. It’s about proof.
She pulls her chair next to mine, close enough that our arms almost touch. Takes a fork, twirls pasta, and brings it to my mouth. “Open.”
I open. The pasta is mediocre at best, but the way she watches me eat makes the taste irrelevant.
Her pupils are dilated, but her body is relaxed.
She alternates between feeding me and feeding herself, and there’s a rhythm to it that feels ancient, like something people have been doing since before language.
She brings the wine glass to my lips. I drink.
A drop stays on my lower lip, and she wipes it with her thumb without thinking — the same gesture, the mirror of what I did to her.
Her eyes catch on what she’s just done, and I watch the realization cross her face.
But she doesn’t pull away. Her thumb rests on my lip for half a second longer than it needs to, and the warmth of it sinks through my skin like a brand.
We keep eating. Eyes locked. I’m starting to think she’s leaving traces of food on my lip on purpose, because her tongue goes over her own lips every time she wipes mine.
When she cuts the zip-ties, her fingers stay on my wrists. She stares at the point where her skin meets mine, and her lips part, waiting for words to arrive.
I get there first.
“I’ve never done this before.”
“What?” A half-smile. “Planned a murder? Or let a woman feed you?”
“Trusted someone.” The humor drains from the room. “Every job was solo. Silas trained me to work alone. Trust no one, need no one.” I search her face, deciding how deep to go. “Tomorrow I’m putting my life in your hands, Ivy. That’s… new.”
Her eyes widen. Then settle.
“I’ve never trusted anyone either. Malachi made sure of that.” She shifts closer. “But I trust you to kill him. And I trust you with my life.” She pauses. “When you took me, I thought it was over. Turns out it was just the beginning. I died seven years ago, Killian. Tomorrow, I start living.”
The knot in my throat is so thick I have to push words past it.
“You know the original plan. Take the money. Kill the witness.” I watch her carefully. “You heard it on the recording.”
“I did.” No flinch. “But you won’t. Why?”
The real answer is one word — the word I whispered into a recorder at four in the morning, the one she replayed twice, the one that’s been sitting between us unnamed for two days. I can feel it pressing against my teeth.
“Because the moment I saw your file, something broke.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend.
“Something I didn’t know could break. And now I can’t…
” I stop, regroup, try again. “I don’t let things matter to me.
It’s safer that way. But you walked into this factory and started mattering and I can’t make it stop. ”
She’s inches from my face. I can feel her breath on my skin, warm and shallow, and her pupils have eaten the gray almost entirely.
She heard what I didn’t say. I can see it in her eyes.
“Killian, if something goes wrong tomorrow —”
“It won’t.”
“But if it does.” Not a question.
“You run. You take the money. You disappear.”
I walk her through it. Three extraction routes, different vehicles stashed at different points. A short list of mercenaries I trust. I’ve already prepared new identities that will make her someone new.
“If Malachi escapes, I hunt him,” she says. Not a request — a fact. “I’ve waited seven years. I won’t wait longer.”
“He won’t escape.”
“We hunt him together if he does.”
“When Silas realizes I’ve gone rogue, he’ll send others. We’ll need to disappear completely.”
“Then we disappear together.”
Not a question. She’s already decided for both of us, and the simplicity of it hits me somewhere I wasn’t braced for. She wants me with her — not just the killer, not just the partner. Me.
We check everything one last time. Weapons loaded, phones charged, alarms set for 4:30 AM, gear by the door, money secured. Nothing left but waiting.
I reach into my pocket and take out her scalpel.
Her eyes catch the light before the steel does.
I hold it out, and she takes it like she’s being reunited with a part of her body, her thumb tracing the edge immediately in that practiced, precise motion that makes my pulse do something it has no business doing.
She’s beautiful with a blade in her hand.
Five days — that’s all it took. Five days from kidnapper and hostage to whatever this is.
She looks up and catches me staring. “What?”
“Nothing.” I try to make it sound casual. It doesn’t. “Just… memorizing.”
“Memorizing what?”
“This.”
Her whole expression changes — softens in a way I’ve never seen from her, like she’s looking at something she didn’t think was possible.
Then she closes the distance between us.
Her hand comes up slowly, and I can see it approaching in my peripheral vision, her cold fingers reaching for my face. Every instinct says don’t flinch, don’t pull back, let her.
She touches my scar.
Her fingertips trace the line from the corner of my mouth down to my jaw, and my neck — light at first, clinical, the surgeon mapping the wound, measuring the depth, reading the history written in silver tissue.
Then it changes. Her fingers slow down. The pressure softens.
It stops being an examination and becomes something else, something I don’t have a word for because no one has ever touched this scar like it was worth being gentle with.
I flinch. Barely — a micro-movement my training can’t override, because this isn’t combat and it isn’t a threat. It’s a woman’s cold fingers on the ugliest part of my face and my body doesn’t know what to do with tenderness.
She doesn’t pull away.
My eyes are locked on hers. I’m afraid to blink in case I invented this — in case my sleep-deprived brain built it out of wanting.
But her hand is real. The cold of her fingers is real.
The way my jaw unclenches under her touch, slowly and involuntarily, like she’s disarming something I didn’t know was loaded — that’s real.
The factory is silent. No monitors, no keyboards, no buzzing lights. Just our breathing, hitched and uneven, filling the space between us.
She’s looking at me like I’m not a monster. Like the scar and the kills and the twenty years of blood don’t add up to what she sees when her fingers are on my jaw.
Dawn is coming and it’s bringing blood with it. But right now, in this factory, with her hand on my face and three hundred and fifty million dollars in encrypted accounts and the guns laid out by the door — right now is the most peace I’ve ever had.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. I just let her touch me and try to remember what it feels like, in case it’s the last time anyone does.