Chapter 23
Ivy
Lisbon appears below us like a painting someone left in the sun too long — terracotta roofs, stone hills, the Tagus River glimmering in shades of gold and rust. The light here is different from the island. Not white. Amber. Like the city is permanently bathed in the hour before sunset.
I watch through the window as we descend, and something shifts inside me that I can’t name. Cayman was a hiding place. This feels like a beginning.
Killian’s contact meets us on the tarmac with clean documents. Portuguese residency cards, travel papers, credit cards linked to shell companies. His identity is already filled in. Mine is blank.
He wanted me to choose.
The apartment in Alfama is at the top of a narrow cobblestone street that barely fits a car. The building has a faded yellow facade, rusty iron balconies, four floors, and no elevator.
Killian sweeps the apartment before I’m allowed inside. There are two bedrooms separated by a thick wall, an open living space with windows facing the river, a small kitchen, and an even smaller bathroom. The whole place could fit inside Malachi’s study.
We’ll be in each other’s space constantly.
The villa had distance — separate ends of the house, a deck to escape to, rooms where you could disappear.
This apartment has proximity. I’ll hear him breathing through the wall.
I’ll feel him move in the kitchen when I’m in the living room.
The thrill and the terror of that sit in my stomach like something swallowed whole.
He gestures me in and sets the blank documents on the kitchen table.
“Your documents need a name.” There’s no pressure in his tone.
He leaves to check the building’s perimeter, giving me space the way he’s learned to — not because I asked, but because he noticed that I need it.
I stand by the window. The river is catching the late sun, and the light turns my hands gold.
A name.
I was Ivy for twenty-two years. Named after a poisonous plant because Malachi thought it was poetic — decorative, clinging, meant to crawl along walls and look beautiful doing it. I've always hated my name, but I never thought about changing it because the cage didn’t offer alternatives.
I pick up a pen and pull a blank sheet toward me.
Elena. My mother’s name. I write it and stare at it and the ache that opens in my chest is immediate and too large. Her name carries her death. Her piano. The letter that said fly. I can’t carry that every time someone says my name.
I cross it off.
Maria. Common. Invisible. I spent twenty-two years being invisible inside a glass cage — seen by everyone, noticed by no one. I don’t want to be invisible.
I cross it off.
I want something sharp. Something that cuts when you say it.
Something that feels like the blade of my scalpel — precise, intentional, chosen.
I need it to carry the weight of the fact that this is the first thing in my life I get to choose.
Not assigned, not inherited, not negotiated by men in rooms I wasn’t allowed to enter.
What would Killian call me if I asked?
The thought arrives before I can filter it. Not Ghost. Not what Ghost would call me. What Killian would call me.
I think about what survived. Glass cages and silent dinners and a father who sold me.
A mother who killed herself. A scalpel under my pillow.
A stranger on the internet who called me Smoke.
A man who called me Little Moth and kissed my forehead in a park and came back. My wings survived countless fires.
I pick up the pen and write.
Vera.
From the Latin verus. True. Real. The one who survived.
Killian comes back from his perimeter check and looks at the paper. I watch his face, my heart hammering, suddenly desperate for something I refuse to call approval.
Something flickers in his eyes. Recognition, maybe. Or something deeper.
“It fits.”
The breath I’ve been holding leaves my body. “It’s mine.”
We look at each other. The amber light fills the kitchen, and the weight of the moment hangs between us. I glance at the documents, then back at him.
“What did you choose?”
He slides his papers toward me. “Marcos Silva.”
“Marcos Silva.” I test the syllables and scrunch my nose. “It doesn’t suit you.”
“It’s not supposed to.”
“What would you choose? If you could?”
The question is the same one I just asked myself. What name would you give yourself if you could start over?
“I’d keep Killian.”
“Why?”
“Because someone gave it to me before I knew what it meant. It’s the only thing I’ve ever owned.”
Something fractures inside me. Not breaks — fractures. A crack in the wall I built between clinical observation and feeling. He wasn’t given that name by Silas. Someone before Silas named him Killian. Someone who loved him. And he held onto it through twenty years of being unmade.
I move closer to him. I don’t decide to — my body decides for me, closing the distance before my brain can argue. I search for his eyes and find them already on mine.
My hand rises slowly. I’m watching it happen from somewhere outside myself, my fingers reaching for his face with a certainty my mind doesn’t share. My palm cups his cheek. My thumb finds the scar.
The texture of it under my thumb is smooth, raised, the silver tissue mapping a wound that healed wrong and beautiful. I trace it from the corner of his mouth to his jaw, the way I’d trace an incision line, except this isn’t clinical. My hand is shaking.
His breathing changes. His jaw unclenches under my palm — the same thing it did the first time I touched his scar, in the factory, a lifetime ago.
And then he leans in. Just slightly. His cheek pressing into my hand, his eyes closing for one second, and the hunger in that lean is so raw it stops my heart.
He pulls back and steps away, leaving my hand hanging in the air.
We stand there in amber light, two people who don’t know what’s happening, who don’t have the vocabulary for what lives in the space between them. But something has changed. I can feel it settling into my bones like a new name.
I’m not Ivy anymore. I’m Vera. And Vera touched a killer’s scar like it was the only real thing in the room.
◆◆◆
The next morning he tells me he’s teaching me to shoot.
This means his body behind mine. His arms along mine. His breath on my neck.
I dress in black because I’ve decided this is Vera’s color.
I pull my hair into a high ponytail and look at myself in the mirror.
The woman looking back is sharper than the one who landed in Cayman.
Leaner. Hungrier. Something is being refined in the heat of this city and I’m not sure whether it’s a blade or a bomb.
The facility is underground, beneath a warehouse in an industrial district. Soundproofed walls, old concrete, the smell of cordite and something chemical that burns the back of my throat. Three weapons are laid out on a steel table. Ammunition sorted by caliber. Safety glasses. Ear protection.
This is his domain. Down here, in the dim light and the gun oil, he’s the expert and I’m the student. The power dynamic shifts and my body registers the change before my brain does — my pulse climbing, my skin prickling, the awareness of him sharpening to a point.
“Treat every weapon as loaded. Never point it at anything you don’t intend to shoot.” His voice is instructional. Flat. Professional. “Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire.”
I pick up the Glock. My hands are steady. Surgeon’s hands.
“Your posture is wrong.”
He moves behind me.
His hands settle on my hips.
The world narrows.
His palms are hot through the fabric of my trousers. His fingers press into the bone, adjusting my stance, and the pressure sends a current through my pelvis that has nothing to do with posture correction. Every nerve ending between my hip bones fires at once.
“Feet shoulder width. Weight slightly forward.”
I shift. My body brushes against his chest and the contact is electric — his body heat bleeding through the thin space between us, the solid wall of him behind me. I can feel his heartbeat against my shoulder blade. Faster than normal.
He’s feeling this too. I’m not insane. We’re just pretending we’re not.
His arms extend along mine, guiding my grip.
His hands cover mine completely on the Glock — massive, scarred, the veins prominent — and the sensation of being held by hands that have killed more people than I can count while simultaneously holding a weapon does something to my body that is not in any textbook I’ve ever read.
I’m wet. Already. From his hands on my hips and his arms along mine and his breath hitting the exposed skin of my neck. The arousal is instant and total and I can feel it — the slickness, the pulse between my legs, the heat concentrating low in my abdomen like a fist tightening.
“Interlock your grip. Support hand fills the gaps.”
His voice is rougher than he intended. I hear it catch. My thighs clench.
I fire. The recoil kicks through my arms and his body absorbs part of it behind me, his chest pressing harder against my back for one second. The bullet hits two inches left of center.
“Not bad.”
“Not good.”
He steps back and the cold air where his body was hits me like a punishment.
I empty the magazine. Every shot precise, tight grouping, consistent placement. But always slightly lower left. My hands are steady. My breathing is controlled. My body is doing everything right.
Everything except the thing between my legs that won’t stop pulsing.
I reload. He’s watching me from five feet away and I can feel his gaze on my hands, my neck, the exposed strip of skin above my waistband where my shirt has ridden up.
“You aim like a surgeon.”
I turn to him, eyebrow raised. “Is that a criticism?”
“An observation. You have precision, but you don’t have power. You’re in your head too much.” His eyes lock on mine. “You’re thinking about where the bullet should go. You need to feel where it needs to go.”
Feel. He wants me to feel. The man who makes my body revolt against seven years of numbness every time he’s within three feet of me is telling me to stop thinking and start feeling.
“Show me again.”
This is not about the gun. We both know it’s not about the gun.
He walks toward me and something in his eyes has shifted. He’s not instructing anymore. He’s decided something.
He places himself behind me. His hands settle on my hips with intention — not adjusting, not correcting.
Holding. His fingers press into the bone and I inhale sharply and for one second I lean back into him.
I feel his grip tighten. His thumbs press into the hollow just above my hip bones and the pressure sends a jolt straight to my clit that makes my knees soften.
I lock them. Barely.
He lowers his head. His lips are close enough to my ear that I can feel the heat of his mouth without contact. The almost-touch is worse than touching — it’s a promise that’s not being kept, and every centimeter of skin on my neck is screaming for him to close the distance.
“Stop thinking.” His voice is low, rough, a vibration that travels from my ear through my jaw and down my throat and settles in my chest and keeps going. “Feel everything around you. Feel the weight of the gun. Feel the balance. Feel the recoil in your entire body.”
I feel everything.
I feel his chest against my back and his breath on my neck and his hands on my hips and the gun in my palms and the pulse between my legs that’s become a heartbeat of its own.
I feel the warmth of him bleeding into my skin through every point of contact.
I feel the wetness soaking through my underwear.
I feel the ache in my lower abdomen that’s so intense it’s almost pain.
I fire.
Dead center.
“Better.” I can feel his smile, his cheek next to mine.
When did he get this close? His jaw is an inch from my temple and I can see the scar in my peripheral vision and my head starts turning toward it, involuntarily, drawn to it the way I was drawn to it last night when my thumb traced its length —
His phone buzzes.
He steps back. Checks the message. His face goes unreadable.
“That’s enough for today.”
I stand there, gun in my hand, breathing like I’ve been underwater.
My entire body is vibrating. The space where his chest was against my back is cold, and the cold feels like grief.
I can still feel his thumbs in the hollows of my hips.
I can still feel his breath on my ear. I can still feel the spot on my underwear that’s wet enough that I’m going to have to change when we get home.
I set the gun down. My hands are steady.
The rest of me is not.
We walk back through Alfama’s narrow streets in silence. The old stones force us together every time a tourist passes, shoulders brushing, arms touching, the proximity unavoidable.
He’s carrying the gun case. I’m carrying the memory of his grip on my hips and the weight of a new name and the knowledge that when I stopped thinking and started feeling, I hit dead center.
He keeps glancing at my lips. He doesn’t think I notice.
I notice.
Each glance is a match struck in an airless room. I lick my lips once — unconscious, reactive, trying to put out the fire his gaze starts — and I see his jaw clench. The scar pulls.
We reach the apartment. He unlocks the door and steps aside to let me enter. Our eyes meet in the threshold and the air between us is so charged I can almost hear it hum.
I step past him. His knuckles are white on the door handle.
I go to my room and close the door and press my back against it and stand there, breathing, feeling, alive in a way that is new and terrifying and completely, irreversibly Vera.
Ivy was numb. Ivy was pristine. Ivy catalogued sensation without feeling it.
Vera feels everything. And what Vera feels right now — standing against a door with her pulse hammering, and her thighs pressed together and the ghost of a man’s hands on her hips — is not something she’s going to survive without consequences.
He’s not just waking me up. He’s waking up someone who didn’t exist until I wrote her name on a piece of paper in amber light.
And she wants things Ivy never dared to.