Chapter 27
Ivy
I wake up slowly, in degrees. Killian’s arm is wrapped around my waist, heavy and possessive even in sleep. My cheek rests on his chest. Last night he kissed me.
He kissed me.
The memory arrives in fragments, each one landing in a different part of my body.
His mouth crashing into mine. The roughness of his lips, the scar tissue catching against my lower lip.
The taste of him — coffee and something darker underneath.
The sound I made that I can’t believe came out of me.
His hands framing my face like I was something he was afraid of breaking while his mouth treated me like something he wanted to consume.
The ache between my legs that kept me awake for an hour after he fell asleep. The way I said come back and he came, like my voice was a command his body couldn’t disobey. The way he looked at me when I stopped us like I’d given him something sacred instead of taking something away.
I know what today is. In a few hours I’m going to kill a man. But right now, with his heartbeat under my ear and the warmth of his body wrapped around mine, I want to catalogue this. File it somewhere the violence can’t reach.
He stirs. His arm tightens, pulling me closer.
“Morning.” His raspy makes my heart flutter.
I tilt my head up. His eyes are soft, half-lidded, sleep still clinging to them. He’s painfully handsome — the sharp jaw, the dark lashes, the scar that makes his face asymmetric in a way that’s more beautiful than symmetry could ever be.
“Morning.” I rub my nose against his cheek and feel him exhale.
His hand finds my hip. He pulls me under him in one fluid motion and suddenly I’m on my back, his body between my legs, his forearms caging my head. My legs wrap around his waist instinctively and I feel his muscles flex against my thighs.
One of his hands finds my thigh, pressing into the soft inner skin. The other plays with a strand of my hair. His face lowers toward mine and my pulse rockets and for a moment I think he’s going to kiss me, but his lips land on my neck.
His teeth bite into the sensitive skin below my ear and the gasp that leaves me is embarrassingly loud.
He doesn’t care. His mouth is hot and wet, and his teeth leave a sting that his tongue immediately soothes and a fire ignites low in my abdomen.
I grab his shirt and pull him closer because I need him closer, I need the weight of him, I need —
He pulls back and looks at me for one charged second, before getting up and leaving the room. My legs are still open and my heart is trying to break through my ribcage.
What the hell was that?
I get up confused and find him in the kitchen making coffee. He slides a cup toward me — black with a drop of cream. My chest tightens. He learned how I take my coffee just by watching.
“Harlow’s schedule?”
And just like that, the morning folds. The softness stores itself away and the surgeon steps forward.
“Checking out at eleven. Summit ends at noon. Private car booked for 12:30 to a medical facility on the outskirts. Isolated location, minimal security.” I map the route, the timing, the extraction. “We intercept the car. Transfer him to our facility.”
He’s watching me with that expression — the one that lives somewhere between respect and something darker.
“You’ve been waiting for this.”
My cheeks flush. “Yeah, it’s my turn now.”
The sedan Killian’s driving is untraceable. One of his hands is resting on the gear shift, near mine. Close but not touching. The scalpel kit is in my bag, each blade in its pocket, arranged by size.
My pulse is 62. My hands are steady and my mind is clear.
I’ve catalogued Harlow’s body hundreds of times in my head — the metacarpals, the extensor tendons, the radial nerve path, the carotid artery’s depth at the sternocleidomastoid junction.
I originally planned to use his medical vulnerabilities.
The shellfish allergy, the Metformin. Something that looked like negligence.
The only problem is that I want the fucker to see my face.
A black Mercedes appears in front of us and Killian forces it off the road. He handles the driver while I go around and open the rear door.
Harlow looks up at me. Recognition and confusion hit first, then — slowly and beautifully — fear.
“Ivy? What is —”
“Hello, James.” I smile and watch the color drain from his face. “Do you remember the last time you touched me?” I tilt my head. “You left bruises from the excitement. What did you say to me? That you couldn’t wait to get to know me intimately.”
“I — I don’t —”
My voice is pleasant, almost conversational. “I can’t wait to get to know you better, James.”
Killian appears beside me. We zip-tie Harlow’s wrists and transfer him to our car. He doesn’t stop begging. Men used to beg for Malachi’s mercy. None of them got it. Maybe I’m more like my father than I thought. The difference is that my mercy was never on the table.
The abandoned surgical suite smells like rust, old disinfectants, and something biological that never fully left the walls. I chose this location on purpose. If I’m going to perform my first surgery, I want it to feel like one.
Harlow is restrained in the chair in the center of the room, thanks to Killian. His face is a ruin of snot and tears.
“Please. Please, Ivy, I’m begging you — I have children!”
I pull a metal table next to him and open my scalpel kit, each blade catching the industrial light. I flex my fingers.
“I know. Two daughters. Eleven and fourteen.” I select the number ten blade — curved, precise, and perfect for soft tissue. “They’ll be better off. Considering you merged your business with my father’s so you could own a twenty-two-year-old, I’d say they’re inheriting an upgrade.”
I thought my hands would shake. I imagined this moment more times than I can count, and every time I imagined it, I worried about the tremor. The hesitation. But my hands are perfectly steady and all I feel is clarity.
I start with his right hand — the hand that gripped me last time. The hand that left four bruises on my skin. The hand that Malachi saw and said nothing about because damaged merchandise is still merchandise as long as the bruises heal.
I make the first incision along the dorsal surface, just proximal to the metacarpophalangeal joints. The blade parts the skin cleanly — the ten blade is sharp, the tissue offers almost no resistance. Blood wells immediately, dark red, pooling in the creases of his knuckles.
The sound of his screams fill the room, but I don’t flinch. What I hear is my own steady breathing.
“Do you know what these are, James?” I peel back the skin flap to expose the tendons beneath — pale, glistening, beautiful in their functional elegance.
“Extensor tendons. They connect the forearm muscles to the phalanges. They’re what allow you to extend your fingers.
” I look up at him. “The same fingers you straightened before wrapping them around me.”
I sever the extensor digitorum communis. The tendon snaps apart with a wet, satisfying separation. His fingers curl involuntarily, the muscles losing their anchor.
I move to the metacarpals, tracing them with the handle of the scalpel.
“The human hand has twenty-seven bones. Thirty-four muscles. Thousands of nerve endings, each one screaming right now.” I glance at him.
“I’ve studied this anatomy for years, James.
Textbooks. Cadavers. But there’s something special about a living specimen. ”
I turn his left hand with the palm up. The skin of the inner wrist is thin and delicate, the veins visible beneath the surface.
Beautiful canvas. I draw the first line of the moth’s body, the blade moving with the same precision I use on anatomy sketches.
Then the wings. Each line is deep enough to bleed beautifully.
He’s barely conscious. The pain and blood loss have taken him somewhere gray. His whimpering is distant. It’s the sound of a body operating without a mind.
“So they know who sent you,” I say softly, finishing the last wing. The moth is small, perfect, carved into his wrist like a signature on a masterpiece.
I stand back and look at him. The man who appraised me like livestock and shook my father’s hand and planned to own me.
My hand goes to his neck. I find the carotid artery with the same ease I’d find it on a diagram — the sternocleidomastoid, the internal jugular, the external carotid branching at the superior border of the thyroid cartilage.
I press the blade to the skin and with one swift motion blood comes immediately — arterial, bright, pulsing with his heart rate.
It pools and rivers, running down his chest, spreading across the floor.
I hold his face and watch him. His eyes go wide, then something behind them starts to dim. I reach into his ruined mouth and place the strip of skin I cut from his hand between his teeth.
So they know you died screaming.
I’m breathing like I’ve been running. My entire body is vibrating. The rush hasn’t faded — it’s settled into me like a second heartbeat, thrumming and insistent. I was close. I was close to coming.
The realization hits me like a diagnosis I’ve been waiting for.
I am what I am. And what I am is a woman who just killed a man with a scalpel and carved a moth into his wrist and nearly orgasmed watching the light leave his eyes.
Killian is in the doorway. I don’t know how long he’s been watching.
His body is still, leaning against the frame, arms at his sides.
But his eyes are doing something I’ve never seen from him — moving over me slowly, tracking the blood on my hands, my arms, the spatter on my neck.
Then to Harlow’s body. To the moth on his wrist. And back to me again.
There’s a glimmer in his expression — he’s turned on.
The realization lands and something inside me tightens. He watched me kill a man and his body’s response mirrors mine. He’s looking at me with blood on my hands, and his pupils are blown and his breathing is controlled in the way it gets when he’s exercising maximum restraint.
We are the same. Two people wired the same wrong way. Two monsters who see each other’s darkness and don’t look away.
He takes a step forward. “You okay?”
“Yes.” I look at the blood drying on my fingers. “More than okay.”
His eyes move to the moth carved into Harlow’s wrist. Something shifts in his expression — recognition, respect, and something possessive.
“The moth.”
I smile at him. “My signature.”
He disposes of the evidence while I watch, learning. When we’re outside, the cold air hits my overheated skin and the shiver that runs through me has nothing to do with temperature.
“You weren’t what I expected.” His voice is quiet.
“What did you expect?”
“Hesitation. Remorse. Something.”
I look at him. This man watched me kill for the first time. He saw the surgeon and the monster and the woman who felt nothing but clarity doing it.
“Did it scare you?” Something tightens in my chest at the possibility.
“No.”
His mouth finds mine and this kiss is different. The first one was discovery — days of restraint breaking. This one is claiming. His tongue finds mine and his hands frame my face, gentle despite everything, the way they always are with me. But the kiss is not gentle. It’s consuming.
His hand slides into my hair, fisting at the base of my neck, tilting my head back to deepen the angle.
A sound leaves him — low, primal, something that vibrates through his chest into mine.
My nails scratch through his shirt, making his grip tighten, and the arousal that’s been building since I made the first incision crests so high I can barely stand.
He barely pulls back. Our foreheads remain pressed together while we’re catching out breaths.
“My Little Moth.” His voice is wrecked.
I smile against his mouth. “Your monster.”
A short laugh escapes him and my heart skips. I like that sound. I want to hear it every day for the rest of whatever this is.
Something has changed between us again. He saw me at my darkest and kissed me anyway. This is how it is for people like us — no matter how much blood, or how many blades. Just choosing each other in the aftermath.
Hand in hand, we walk toward the car. His gait is slightly off — the micro-hesitation on his right side more pronounced than usual. He’s exhausted.
I open my mouth to say something about taking care of himself the way he takes care of me, but my head snaps toward the sound of an engine approaching fast. Too fast. Killian’s hand tightens on mine and his body shifts, positioning itself between me and the road.
A black SUV rounds the corner at speed.
Shit.