Chapter 24
Ivy
I’m standing in front of the bathroom mirror with the steam curling around me and I can’t stop looking at my body.
Not the way I looked at it yesterday, when Killian’s hands were on my hips and my skin was electric. Not with want. With something that tastes like metal in the back of my throat.
I study myself the way Malachi’s doctors did.
Starting at the top. Collarbone — symmetrical, prominent, the perfect ledge for diamonds.
Shoulders — narrow, unblemished. Arms — pale, translucent, blue veins mapping the undersides like rivers under ice.
Torso — lean, proportional, no moles, no freckles, no evidence that the sun has ever touched me for more than the five minutes I was allowed.
Hips — the curve Killian’s thumbs pressed into yesterday, the hollows where his fingers found bone.
My fingers travel there now. Mimicking his placement. The ghost of his grip is still warm on my skin and the fury arrives so fast it blinds me.
My body woke up because of him. He did this — his hands, his breath, his proximity — he reached into seven years of numbness and pulled something alive out of me.
And I should be grateful, maybe, except the thing he woke up isn’t mine.
It’s Malachi’s. This body, this unmarked, curated, preserved body — it’s still his product.
His creation. A thing maintained for display and transaction, and the fact that it responds to Killian’s touch doesn’t make it mine.
It just means it’s functional. Working as designed.
I want to claw my own skin off.
My eyes move back to the mirror. No scars.
No marks. No proof that anything ever happened to me.
Killian’s body is a testament — every burn, every cut, every line of silver tissue is evidence that he survived.
People look at him and see a man who walked through fire.
People look at me and see a porcelain doll behind glass.
I touch my collarbone. I can feel the phantom weight of diamonds. Malachi used to clasp the necklace himself before galas, standing behind me in this same position, his fingers on my neck, adjusting the stones until they sat perfectly. Pristine, Ivy. You look pristine.
I imagine a scar there. A thin white line across the bone. Something that says: I survived this. I am more than what was done to me. I was here, and it mattered.
The idea settles into my bones with a certainty that scares me.
I want proof. I want someone to ruin what Malachi built. Not through violence I didn’t choose — I’ve had enough of that. Through something I chose. Something permanent.
There’s only one person I’d trust to do it.
I pull on cotton shorts and a tank top. Vera’s clothes — simple, soft, nothing Ivy would have been allowed to wear. But when I look in the mirror again, the clothes don’t matter. It’s still Malachi’s body underneath. Still pristine. Still his.
The Ledger is on my nightstand. Tomorrow we leave for Zurich. Tomorrow the hunt begins. I should be focused, strategic, thinking about Harlow’s schedule and extraction routes.
Instead, I’m thinking about Killian’s hands and how much I hate the skin they touched.
Not because of him. Because of what it means that this skin has never been damaged.
Every man who groped me at galas, who grabbed my arms, who whispered prices in my father’s ear while looking at my body — they left nothing.
No bruise lasted more than a week. No fingerprint left a mark.
I was so well-maintained that even the evidence of my abuse was temporary.
You have scars. You just can’t see them.
I believed Killian's words then. I want to believe him now. But it’s not enough. I need to see the proof. I need it on my skin, visible, permanent, so that when I look in the mirror I see something other than his fucking doll.
My pulse is in my throat. Fear and anticipation twist into a single wire.
I’m going to ask him to mark me.
The living room is dark. The only light is the glow of the river through the windows, amber on the water, silver on the ceiling. The strip of light under his bedroom door tells me what I already know — he’s awake. He’s always awake.
I count twelve steps from my door to his. My bare feet are cold on the tiles and my pulse is visible in my throat, hammering against the skin where my carotid sits. He could see it if he were watching. He’s always watching.
I construct the script in my head. Not too vague — he’ll deflect. Not too direct — he’ll refuse before I can explain. I need to give him context first, make him understand what Malachi took from me, what this body represents, why I need it ruined —
The script dissolves before I reach his door. It always dissolves. Any careful language I construct crumbles when he’s close, like my brain switches to a frequency I haven’t learned to transmit on.
I raise my hand. Hesitate. Count three heartbeats.
I knock. Three times. Controlled. Clinical.
The door opens.
Black t-shirt. Tactical pants. Bare feet — the detail that makes the air between us feel intimate in a way it shouldn’t. The scar catches the light, glimmering silver. His obsidian eyes find me immediately and I watch them shift from alert to questioning in under a second.
“Ivy.”
Not Vera. He calls me Ivy when it’s the two of us, in the dark, in the quiet. The only time I’ve ever liked my name.
“I need to ask you something.”
His eyes narrow. The assessment is instant — gravity, threat level, emotional state. He steps back to let me in.
His room is sparse. Weapons laid out on the table with the same precision I lay out scalpels. The bed is barely slept in. It smells like him — motor oil, leather, and something underneath that I’ve never been able to name but that I’d recognize with my eyes closed in any room on earth.
I’ve never been inside one of his private spaces. The intimacy of it makes my cheeks flush.
I stand in the center of the room, arms wrapped around myself, fingers tracing the line of my radial pulse. My lips are parted because I can’t get enough air. My pupils are dilated — I can feel the openness of them, the light flooding in.
He leans against the wall. Watches me. Waits. He never rushes me. He never demands that I perform. He just exists in the space and lets me fill it at my own pace.
“I want you to mark me.”
The words leave my mouth and land between us like something dropped from a height. His expression doesn’t change. But something behind his eyes shifts — a door opening or closing, I can’t tell which.
“Explain.”
He’s not refusing yet.
I reach for the strap of my tank top. Pull it down slowly, exposing my shoulder, my collarbone, the pale expanse of skin that has never been touched by anything that left a mark.
His pupils dilate. I watch them expand, black consuming the obsidian, and his gaze drops to the exposed skin with an intensity that raises every hair on my body. Not desire — or not only desire. Something more complicated. Something that looks like it’s costing him.
“Malachi kept me pristine. Do you understand what that means?” My voice is steady, but my hands are not.
“No scars. No marks. No evidence that anything ever happened to me. Every man who touched me — who groped me at galas, who grabbed my arms, who pressed himself against me in hallways when my father wasn’t looking — they left nothing. ”
The trembling spreads from my hands to my arms to my shoulders. I swallow against the tightness in my throat.
“You have scars everywhere. Your body is a map. People look at you and see what you survived.” My voice cracks and I fight it back. “I’m a blank page, Killian. Like none of it happened. Like I didn’t matter.”
I meet his eyes. Hold them. Force myself to not look away.
“I want proof. Something permanent. Something I chose.” My breath shudders. “I want you to give me a scar. Something that says I belong to myself.”
Silence. The only sound is my breathing, ragged and too loud in the small room.
His jaw is working. The muscle ticking under the scar. His hands are fists at his sides. I can see him processing — not thinking, not deciding. Fighting.
“No.”
One word. Flat. Final. The rage is immediate.
“Why not? You’ve killed people. You’ve carved —”
“That’s different.”
“Different how, Killian?”
He pushes off the wall and crosses the room in two steps. The distance between us collapses and suddenly his heat is all I can feel, his body radiating fury and restraint in equal measure.
“Because those people deserved it.”
“And I don’t? I don’t deserve to choose what happens to my own body?”
We’re so close I can feel his breath on my face. My pulse is crashing against my ribs. He raises his hand and for one suspended second I think he’s going to touch me — my collarbone, my shoulder, the exposed skin that’s waiting.
His hand stops, hovers, before falling to his side.
“I won’t hurt you.” His voice is low. Scraped raw. A whisper that sounds like it’s being pulled from somewhere deep. “Not like that. Not ever.”
The frustration breaks. The rage cracks open and something uglier spills out — the thing that lives underneath the clinical control, underneath the careful language, underneath twenty-two years of pristine behavior. The thing that bites.
“Then what good are you?”
His face flickers. Wounded.
I should stop. I know I should stop. The words are already poison and I’m watching them hit him and I should stop, but the rage has my tongue and it’s not done.
“You killed my father without thinking. You put two bullets in a man’s chest and didn’t flinch. But you can’t give me one scar?” My voice is shaking, climbing. “What’s the matter, Killian — is it easier when they’re strangers? Is it easier when you don’t have to look at them after?”
I slap my hands over my mouth.
His expression has gone completely still. Not blank — still. The kind of stillness that happens when something breaks so deep the surface hasn’t caught up yet. His eyes are on mine and what I see in them makes my stomach drop through the floor.
I didn’t just hurt him. I eviscerated him.
“Killian —”
“Go to bed, Ivy.” His voice is flat. Dead. All the roughness stripped out, leaving something mechanical. “We leave for Zurich at dawn.”
I stand in his doorway, hand gripping the frame because my legs aren’t reliable.
He’s turned away from me. His hands are braced on the weapons table, knuckles white, head bowed.
His shoulders are rigid — the tension locked into his trapezius, his deltoids, the muscles along his spine all contracted like he’s absorbing a blow that hasn’t finished landing.
I did this. I watched a man who has survived twenty years of torture and I found the one place that wasn’t armored and I put my blade in it.
“I’m sorry.” My voice is small. Wrong. Insufficient. “What I said —”
“Don’t.”
I start to turn.
“You’re not a blank page, Ivy.”
I freeze. His back is still to me. His voice is barely audible, strained, like he’s speaking through something that’s closing.
“You think you’re unmarked. But I can see every scar you carry.”
His hands tighten on the table. The tremor in his forearms is visible.
“I see them every time you flinch when someone touches you without warning.”
My breath stops.
“I see them every time you apologize for existing too loudly.”
My chest constricts.
“I see them in the way you stand perfectly still because you learned that stillness means survival.”
He pauses. The silence is thick enough to choke on.
“I see them in the way you hold your shoulders — pulled back, perfect posture, because he punished you for slouching. I see them in the way you eat half a plate and leave the rest because you were trained that appetite is ugly. I see them in the way you catalogue every exit in every room because you never knew when you’d need to run. ”
He turns to face me. His eyes are wet. Not crying — wet. Liquid. The obsidian has cracked and what’s underneath is devastation.
“You’re the most scarred person I’ve ever met, Ivy.” His voice breaks on my name. “You’re just the only one who can’t see it.”
I make it to my room. Close the door and lean against it.
I don’t cry. Something worse happens. I go completely still.
The stillness is total. Not frozen — empty. Like the last thing he said reached inside my chest and turned something off. My breathing slows until it’s barely there. My heart rate drops. My hands, which haven’t stopped shaking since I knocked on his door, go steady.
I slide down the door until I’m sitting on the cold tiles with my knees drawn up and my arms around them and I don’t move. I don’t reach for my phone. I don’t reach for my scalpel. I don’t reach for anything.
I just sit.
His words are inside me now. Each one a suture. Each one stitching something closed that’s been open for years.
You flinch when someone touches you without warning. I do. I didn’t know he noticed.
You apologize for existing too loudly. I do. I didn’t know anyone was listening.
You stand perfectly still because you learned that stillness means survival. I’m doing it right now.
He sees me. Not the doll. Not the performance.
Not the blank page I see in the mirror. He sees the damage underneath.
He’s been reading my scars since the factory, since the first night, since he watched me hold a scalpel and understood that a girl doesn’t carry a blade unless something taught her she needed one.
I asked a monster to ruin me tonight and he said no.
Not because he couldn’t. Because he refused to be another man who marks my body without my full understanding of what it costs.
And then he ruined me anyway. Not with a blade. With words.
I sit against the door in the dark and I don’t cry and I don’t sleep and I don’t move. The stillness holds me the way his arms did on the last night at the estate — tight, steady, unrelenting.
Tomorrow we fly to Zurich. Tomorrow the hunt begins. Tomorrow I have to look at him across a plane and pretend that what happened tonight didn’t rearrange everything I thought I knew about what it means to be seen.
But tonight I sit in the dark and let his words do what the scar was supposed to do.
Prove that I survived.