Chapter 25
Killian
Then what good are you?
Is it easier when they’re strangers? Is it easier when you don’t have to look at them after?
Her words are still inside me. Lodged between my ribs like shrapnel I can’t reach. I’ve been sitting in my room for two hours, hands braced on the weapons table, replaying every word she said and knowing she was right about all of it.
She asked me for something simple. One scar. One mark on her body that she chose. And I couldn’t give it to her. The man who has killed without hesitation, who carved, burned, and broken on command for twenty years — that man couldn’t bring himself to press a blade against her skin.
Because those people deserved it. And she doesn’t.
And that’s the truth and it’s also not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that I can’t mark her because the thought of her blood on my hands — her blood, not theirs, hers — makes something inside me shut down.
A circuit breaker tripping. A system refusing the command.
I can’t give her what she asked for. But maybe I can give her something else.
She asked how many scars I have. I shut her down.
I’ve never let anyone see the map Silas made — not a doctor, not a lover, not a single person on this earth.
But if I show her, if I tell her every story, if I let her read the testimony written on my body, maybe she’ll understand that survival isn’t about skin.
Maybe she’ll see it on me and recognize it in herself.
Or maybe she’ll see the ruin and be disgusted. I push off the table and walk to her door.
This is insane.
I can hear her breathing through the door. Too shallow for sleep. Uneven, the rhythm of a woman who’s been lying in the dark replaying the worst thing she’s ever said to someone.
I knock. Twice. Softer than I intend.
“Come in.” Small. Raspy.
She’s sitting on the bed, knees to her chest, back against the headboard. The moonlight fills the room with something silver and cold and she won’t look at me. Her eyes are on the wall. Her jaw is tight. Guilt sits on her face like a bruise.
“I’m sorry.” She turns to face me and her eyes are red-rimmed but dry. No tears. She’s holding them back with the same discipline she holds everything. “What I said — Killian, I didn’t —”
“Don’t. You weren’t wrong.”
Confusion. “What?”
“You asked what good I am. If I can’t give you what you need —” I exhale. The sound is too loud in the quiet room. “I can’t mark you, Ivy. I won’t. But I can show you mine.”
She stares at me. I reach for the hem of my shirt and wait.
“Every scar Silas gave me. How I earned them. What they cost.” My voice cracks and I despise it, but I can’t stop it. “You wanted a map? I’m a fucking atlas, Ivy. Let me show you.”
The silence stretches. Her mask slips — I can see it happening in real time, the clinical control fracturing, raw emotion bleeding through the cracks. She unfolds her legs slowly and sits cross-legged on the bed. Pats the mattress.
“Show me.”
I pull the shirt over my head in one motion. If I hesitate, I won’t do it.
I stand in front of her and let her look.
Her eyes start at my chest. I know what she’s seeing because I’ve avoided my own reflection for years.
The ravens tattooed on my right arm. The thorns and anatomical heart wrapping my left bicep.
The silver lines crisscrossing my chest from blade work — short, surgical, practice cuts Silas made when he was teaching me where to put a knife.
My core, thick and functional, built through decades of violence.
And on my left side, low on the ribs, the tight puckered circle of a bullet wound.
I watch her face. Waiting for the gasp. The flinch. The involuntary look away that everyone gives when they see what’s under the ink.
She doesn’t flinch.
She doesn’t look away.
She looks at me the way she looked at her anatomical heart sketch — with the focused reverence of someone studying something they consider beautiful in its complexity. And that look, from that woman, in this light, nearly takes my knees out.
“Turn around.” Her voice is soft. Steady.
I sit on the edge of her bed and turn my back to her.
That’s the worst part. I know what’s there without seeing it — the long ridges from whips, deep, overlapping, some of them carved over older scars.
The craters from cigar burns. I paid a tattoo artist to weave between the damage, trying to turn the ruin into art, but the texture didn’t go away. It never goes away.
She’s quiet. I can feel her gaze moving across my back and the silence is worse than any word she could say.
“Start with this one.”
I turn. She’s pointing to my face. The scar.
I touch it. The old habit, the reflex. “I hesitated.”
“What happened?”
“Silas said soldiers who hesitate need reminders. He did it himself. Straight razor. Told me it would help me remember what happens when I say no.”
Her jaw tightens. Not horror — rage. She’s angry. Not at me. For me. And the distinction is so unfamiliar it takes me a second to understand what I’m seeing.
“And, did you? Remember?”
“Every time I look in a mirror.”
Her eyes hold mine. The anger doesn’t leave. It deepens.
“The cigar burns.”
“Training sessions. When I failed a drill or missed a target. He’d hold the cigar against my skin until I stopped screaming.” I pause. “Eventually I stopped screaming on the first one. Then he’d hold it longer.”
“How old were you?”
“Twelve when they started. Sixteen when I stopped flinching.”
Something moves across her face that I’ve never seen before. Not pity — she’d never insult me with pity. Something closer to fury tempered by tenderness. Like she wants to kill Silas and hold me at the same time and can’t decide which need is greater.
No one has ever asked me to explain these things. People see the scars and look away or don’t look at all. She’s studying me like I’m a manuscript in a language she’s learning to read. And something in my chest is cracking open, and I can’t stop it, and I don’t want to.
“Can I —” She stops. Starts again, her voice shaking. “I need to feel them. The texture. To understand.”
“Yeah.”
I turn my back to her. The mattress shifts as she moves closer. I can feel the warmth of her body before I feel her hands.
Then her fingers touch me.
The contact is light. Barely there. Like she’s afraid she could make the scars worse.
Her fingertips trace the raised edge of the first whip scar — the longest one, running diagonal from shoulder to hip — and my entire body responds.
Goosebumps erupting from the contact point outward.
My fists clenching at my sides. Every muscle in my back contracting against the gentleness because my body doesn’t know what to do with gentle.
It knows violence. It knows impact. It doesn’t know this.
Hold still. Don’t move. Don’t breathe wrong.
“The scar tissue is thick here. Multiple passes with the same weapon.” Clinical. Detached. The surgeon diagnosing.
Her fingers move to the next scar. And the next. Each one mapped, catalogued, filed in her mind. Both hands on my back now, moving without restraint, tracing the topography of twenty years of damage like she’s reading braille.
“He used a belt here.” She traces a wider scar. “But a whip here — thin, leather. Braided, possibly.”
“You can tell that from a touch?”
“I can tell a lot from a touch.”
I stop breathing. Her fingers are fire. Every nerve ending on my back is lit, and the sensation is travelling down my spine, into my hips, settling somewhere I absolutely cannot afford for it to settle.
My pulse is pounding in my throat and I am praying — actually praying, to a god I don’t believe in — that she won’t touch my neck and feel how fast my heart is going.
Her fingers stop on one specific scar. High on my shoulder blade. The deepest one. The ugliest. The hardest to cover.
“This one almost killed you.” Not a question.
“Almost.” My voice is wrecked. “Got infected. Silas said if I was too weak to survive it, I wasn’t worth training.”
“You were a child when this wound happened, Killian.” Her voice is quiet. Furious.
“I was a weapon in progress, Ivy.”
She leans closer. I can feel her breath on my skin, warm and unsteady, and she’s inches away from me and if I turned around right now —
I don’t turn around.
“Turn around.”
I turn. We’re inches apart. Her knees are almost touching my thighs. Her eyes are wet, but she’s not crying — holding it, the same way I hold everything, by force.
Her gaze drops to the bullet scar on my side.
“This is recent. Five years?”
“Seven. Someone wanted to earn Silas’s admiration by taking out his pet.”
“You were shot.”
“Four times. But this is the one I dug out myself. With a blade, no anesthesia, in a safehouse bathroom.”
Something flickers in her eyes. Not horror. Something that looks dangerously close to admiration.
“Why dig it yourself?”
“Silas doesn’t approve of the questions hospitals ask.”
Her fingers hover over the scar. Eyes on mine. Asking permission.
“Go ahead.”
She presses her fingertips to the puckered tissue first. Then flattens her palm against it. Her hand is warm and small, and her fingers span the scar completely and her palm is flat against my abdomen and every muscle in my core clenches under her touch so hard I nearly fold.
She notices. Of course, she notices.
“Your body is reacting.”
“No shit.”
She looks up at me. Her pupils are blown, lips parted, and her breathing is ragged.
“Mine too.”
I’m going to die in this room. She’s going to kill me with her hand on my stomach and her gray eyes and the two words mine too hanging between us like a detonation.
“Ivy —”
“Don’t.” There’s urgency in her voice. “Don’t tell me to stop, Killian.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Her hand stays on my abdomen. My muscles stay clenched. Our eyes stay locked. Eight inches between our faces and every one of them is a live wire.
She breaks the stare, looking at my body one more time. Her hand drops and the absence of her warmth is physical pain.
“All of these were done to you.”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever choose?”
The question is a knife. “No.”
“Neither did I. Every mark on my body was someone else’s decision. But they healed. I have nothing.”
“You have —”
She shakes her head. “I know. Scars that aren’t on my skin.” A pause. “Sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes I need something visible. A reminder. A choice.” Her voice fractures on the last word.
The words start leaving my mouth before I can stop them. Like something inside me decided without consulting the rest.
“I won’t mark you, Ivy.” I pause. “But you can mark me.”
Her hand falls away completely. Her eyes snap to my face.
“What?”
“You want proof you exist? Carve it into me, Little Moth.” My voice is rough, barely controlled. “One scar. Your choice. Your design. One mark on my body that’s yours and no one else’s.”
“You’d seriously let me —”
“I’d let you do anything.”
The words hit the room like a grenade. I hear them after they leave and I can’t take them back.
I’d let you do anything. The weight of that.
The totality. From a man who has never given anyone power over him.
From a man who was trained to control every variable, every interaction, every point of vulnerability. I’d let you do anything.
She stares at me. Something is happening inside her — I can see it moving across her face, an internal war between desire and horror, between the need to take what’s offered and the inability to comprehend that it’s being offered at all.
“I can’t.”
“You can. I’m giving you permission.”
“Killian. You can’t just —”
“Why not? It’s my body. You said yourself — everyone should choose what happens to their own body. I’m choosing. I’m choosing you.”
The silence that follows is so complete I can hear the ocean through the walls.
“That’s the point.” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“You’re giving me a choice. And I’ve never —” Her eyes fill.
The tears she’s been holding all night finally breach the wall and she hates them — I can see her hating them, her jaw clenching, her nostrils flaring.
“No one’s ever given me a choice before, Killian. About anything.”
And that’s when I understand.
It was never about a scar. It was never about skin or marks or proof.
It was about the choice. The power to decide.
To say yes or no and have it matter. Twenty-two years of other people deciding what happens to her body — what she wears, who touches her — and I just handed her the one thing nobody ever has.
The option.
She wipes her tears with the back of her hand., angry at herself for crying.
“I’m not going to cut you.”
“Okay.”
“Not tonight.”
My heart stops. “Noted.”
“But you offered.” Something shifts in her face. The tears are drying. What’s replacing them is something steadier. “You actually offered.”
“I did.”
“Why?”
Because I’d let you do anything. Because you’re the only person alive who’s ever touched my scars without looking away. Because I’m in love with you and I can’t say it because there’s a lie between us that would burn everything to the ground.
“Because you deserve to choose, Ivy. Even if you choose not to.”
I’m still shirtless on her bed. She’s still cross-legged in front of me. The distance between us is the width of a breath.
“Can I —” She stops. A broken laugh. “It’s stupid. Forget it.”
“Tell me.”
“Can you just… stay here? I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
I don’t answer with words. I lie down on my back and stare at the ceiling. She lies down beside me. The bed is small and we’re close enough that I can feel her body heat along my entire right side.
Eight inches apart. I can feel each one.
“Killian?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. For showing me.”
“Thank you for looking.”
Silence rings in my ears. The ocean hums softly through the walls, and the ceiling fan is turning slowly. The tension leaves her body the way warmth leaves a room — gradually, then all at once. She’s asleep.
I don’t sleep. But for the first time in my life, I’m at peace with being awake.
Tonight she traced my ruin and called it a map. Tonight I offered her my body, and she gave me something better — she asked me to stay.
Tomorrow, we fly to Zurich. Tomorrow the hunt begins. Tomorrow, I have to be the weapon again.
But tonight, in this small bed in Lisbon, with her breathing beside me and her warmth along my skin and the ghost of her fingers still burning on my back — tonight I am not a weapon.
I’m just a man. Scarred, broken and holding still while the only person who’s ever looked at his damage and didn’t look away sleeps beside him.
That’s enough. For tonight, that’s enough.