Chapter 20
Ivy
I stand in the villa’s kitchen watching condensation drip down a glass of water. The humidity is still foreign, the air is thick and sweet, and my skin is softer than it’s ever been. It’s like the climate is slowly unmaking the version of me that was built for marble and air conditioning.
I’m wearing a white linen blouse and tailored trousers. I have minimal jewelry—enough to look like money without looking like I’m performing it. I sweep my hair back and tuck the scalpel into my bag, nestling it between the banking documents. I don’t leave anywhere without it.
As I move, I recite the account numbers silently. Sixteen accounts—twelve Cayman, four Panama—every digit memorized since I was eighteen.
Today I become someone else. Not the trading coin. Not the grieving daughter. Not the girl who said goodbye to a ghost.
The woman who takes back what’s hers.
Killian drives and I sit in the passenger seat and watch the ocean through the window — it’s turquoise and relentless, nothing like Obsidian Bay’s angry gray. The palm trees are still surreal. Everything here feels like someone turned the saturation up on the world and forgot to tell me.
“Private wealth management,” I say, turning to face him. “They’ll need identification, signatures, biometric verification.”
He glances at me. “And they’ll just hand you three hundred million?”
“They’re confirming access. The money is already mine.”
He looks at me. Not the way he looked at me when I was his hostage, calculating threat and compliance. Not even the way he looked at me as a partner, measuring competence. This is something else. Something darker that lives underneath respect.
It sends shivers down my spine in a way that has nothing to do with the air conditioning.
The bank smells like expensive paper and generational wealth. Marble floors, mahogany walls, and the hushed reverence of a place where money is a religion and discretion is its sacrament. I know these spaces. I was raised in them. The difference is that today I’m not the decoration. I’m the client.
Killian stays two steps behind me as we enter — bodyguard positioning, natural and unquestioned.
A woman with this much money having security detail raises no eyebrows.
The elevator takes us to the third floor, to a private suite with leather chairs and the kind of silence that costs six figures a year to maintain.
Margaret Chen is a Senior Private Wealth Advisor. She has silver-streaked hair, pearl earrings, and a composure so polished it’s practically armored. She assesses me the way investors used to — calculating value and weighing risk.
I take a seat and Killian posts by the door, back to the wall. I can feel his eyes on me.
The verification process begins. Passport scan. Fingerprint. Retinal. Then the security questions — the ones Malachi set up when he made me his insurance policy, never imagining I’d use them without his permission.
The screen populates. Numbers fill the display and my heart rate climbs, but my face stays perfectly still. The doll training is useful sometimes.
Margaret’s expression shifts by a millimeter — the professional acknowledgment of serious money. “We’re pleased to see you accessing the accounts. What can I help you with, Ms. Vane?”
I let my voice drop half an octave. The surgeon’s register.
“I’d like to consolidate the fragmented accounts into three holding structures and set up encrypted access for a secondary authorized user.
” I nod toward Killian without turning. “Establish monthly disbursements to operational accounts throughout Europe. And flag nothing. No unusual activity reports.”
Margaret doesn’t blink. She’s heard stranger requests from quieter people. “Of course, Ms. Vane.”
I sign where she points. Every signature feels like a chain link snapping.
Every authorization code is a door opening.
The numbers on the screen are abstract — more money than most countries’ GDP — but the feeling isn’t abstract at all.
It’s surgical. Each cut is precise, and each movement is intentional.
This is what I was built for. Not the galas. Not the smiling. This — the cold, clinical dismantling of a system that was never supposed to serve me.
I can feel Killian watching from the door. His gaze is a physical thing — I can feel it on my hands when I sign, on my throat when I speak, on the back of my neck when I lean forward to review a document. The awareness of him is constant, humming underneath the professionalism like a second pulse.
We leave through a private exit at his insistence. The Caribbean sun hits me like a verdict — bright, blinding, and impossible to hide from. I just confirmed access to more money than I could spend in ten lifetimes.
I don’t feel triumphant. I feel like I’ve picked a lock that was supposed to cage me forever and now I’m standing in the open with no idea what uncaged looks like.
George Town is a blur of pastel walls and the smell of grilled fish. I’ve just dismantled a financial empire, but the world doesn’t know it. The world just wants to sell me a flamingo t-shirt. The absurdity of it hits me like a physical weight, cracking something wide open in my chest.
“Coffee?”
The question is so normal it gets stuck in my throat. I nod.
He pulls me into a small café on the waterfront. He orders black coffee and I order iced tea because the heat is winning every battle. We sit across from each other like two regular people.
“How does it feel?”
“What? To hold the keys to a kingdom built on my cage?” His eyes darken at that. “Like it’s not real.”
“It’s real.”
“That’s what terrifies me, Killian.”
I take a sip. The iced tea is tastes like a country I haven’t earned yet. The silence stretches between us, comfortable on the surface, but loaded underneath. The phone in my pocket feels heavier than it should.
The thought arrives without permission. Ghost would understand this. He’d know how to articulate the blur of freedom, the vertigo of becoming someone when you’ve spent your life being no one. He’d type something cryptic and perfect at 3 AM and it would make sense of all of this.
The grief surfaces fast, like a wave I didn’t see coming. I want him to see this. I want him to know that the girl who messaged him at midnight about cages and noise is sitting in a Caribbean café with the keys to a kingdom and a man who killed her father. I want Ghost to see who I’m becoming.
But Ghost is gone. And the ache is duller today than yesterday. The sharp edges are rounding into something I can hold without cutting myself. Not healed. Just… manageable.
I look at Killian instead. He’s watching me with an expression I can’t fully read — something moves across his face that looks like guilt, raw and sudden, before he catches it and covers it with his usual controlled blankness. His hands clench briefly on the table.
I file it, but don’t push. Whatever that was, it’s not something he’s ready to hand me and I’ve learned that pushing Killian produces walls, not answers.
He is here. Ghost is not. The man sitting across from me, with his black coffee and his scarred knuckles and his guilt he won’t name—he is the one who’s real.
We go back in a silence that feels different from before—sharper, more deliberate. The moment we cross the threshold of the villa, the humidity of the island is cut off by the heavy click of the door, and the 'real' world outside vanishes.
Back at the villa, I spread the banking documents across the dining table. The paper trail of a woman who no longer exists funding the war of the woman who’s about to.
Killian leans against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, watching me arrange the pieces. I pull the Ledger from my bag and set it beside the bank documents.
The leather cover is warm from being pressed against my hip all day. Forty-four names. Forty-four men who looked at me like merchandise and shook my father’s hand knowing what he was.
“We have enough for the rest of our lives,” I say, smoothing the pages. “This is what it was all for.”
He pushes off the counter and walks to the table.
“When do we start?”
“Soon. We need to plan. Harlow will be in Zurich for a medical conference in two weeks.”
“Then we go to Zurich.”
“No.” I shake my head. “We go to Portugal first. Set up a base. Research. Prepare. Then Zurich.”
He looks at me and something changes on his face. Not surprise — he stopped being surprised by me days ago. Something deeper. The expression a man gets when he watches someone become exactly what they were always supposed to be.
“You’re terrifying,” he says. The scar pulls with the hint of a smile.
I look up at him. At the obsidian eyes. The jaw that clenches when he’s thinking. The scar I’ve traced with my fingers and almost traced with my lips.
“I know.”
The smile that spreads across my face is real. Not performed, not practiced, and from the way his eyes darken, I know he can tell the difference.
I look at the Ledger. At the bank statements. At my hands that signed away my old life this morning and signed in to my new one.
Outside, the Caribbean sun is relentless, too bright, too warm, nothing like the world I came from. Inside, I’m building something dark.
Forty-four men are living their last ordinary days.
They just don’t know it yet.