Chapter 30
Killian
A click from the front door shatters the peace from her body curled against mine and my hand on her bare waist under the hem of my shirt. My body moves before my brain.
My hand covers her mouth before she can make a sound. My lips press against her ear. “Don’t move. Don’t speak.” She goes rigid, then relaxes into compliance. Even half-asleep she trusts me.
I roll off the bed in silence and take the gun from under my pillow. There are multiple footsteps coming from the compromised front door.
If they touch her, I’ll burn this world to ash.
I move through the dark the way I was born to. The first operative comes around the corner — night vision goggles, suppressed MP5, tactical vest. Silas’s men. Trained, but not trained by me.
My hand finds his throat before he can raise the weapon. I grab it and twist. The crack is soft and his body goes limp. I lower him to the floor, and the stitches pull so hard I feel them tear. Pain is information. Pain means I’m alive.
The second comes from behind. Too fast — I sense him late. I grab the knife from the first body’s vest and drive it through his ribs. He drops heavy. Two down.
The bedroom window shatters behind me.
Ivy.
Every instinct screams to turn back, but she’s not an asset. She’s a monster and monsters don’t need saving.
I move toward the living room. The third operative fires, but misses. I use the half-second he takes to regroup and put two rounds in his head.
The silence is deafening, before her voice cuts through it. “Clear.”
I exhale so hard my torn stitches scream.
That’s my girl.
I step over the bodies to reach the hallway. She’s emerging from the bedroom, the butterfly knife bloody in her hand, wearing my t-shirt, barefoot, covered in arterial spray.
Her eyes sweep me immediately checking for wounds. I do the same — no visible injuries on her. The operative who came through the window is on the bedroom floor, knife wound to the neck. I have a cut on my cheek, and the stitches are torn and bleeding. She notices instantly.
“We need to move. This was the welcoming team.”
“But your stitches —”
“Later.” I grab the go-bags. “Stay close.”
I start the car and Lisbon disappears in the rearview. Her hand is in mine on the center console. Neither of us speaks. The silence is different from the weighted silences we’ve had before — this one is full, dense, pressurized. Like the air after an explosion.
Thirty minutes in, her hands start shaking.
I feel it through her palm. At first, I think it’s the adrenaline crash — the normal come-down after combat, the body processing the violence.
But her pattern is wrong. She’s not nauseous.
Her skin isn’t cold — it’s warm. Her breathing isn’t the shallow rasp of someone crashing.
It’s deep, controlled, like she’s trying to manage something that’s building instead of receding.
I’ve spent twenty years reading bodies. What’s happening in her right now isn’t fear. It isn’t trauma.
She’s shaking because she liked it.
Harlow was personal and rage-fueled, but the operative was a stranger — a body in tactical gear who underestimated her and died for it.
I know the feeling. I felt it the first time I killed without orders and realized the absence of guilt wasn’t numbness — it was aptitude.
She doesn’t know that I know. She’s staring out the window, jaw tight, processing. Terrified, probably — not of what she did, but of what it means that she enjoyed it.
I start tracing circles on her palm with my thumb.
I’ve got you. Whatever you are. I’ve got you.
Ivy
The cabin is cradled by wheat hills and oak forests that stretch to the horizon. It’s simple — one kitchen, one bedroom, one bath — the kind of place where the world ends and begins at the same property line.
Killian opens the door, but I don’t move. My hands are still shaking. I thought the drive would settle it — the steady hum of the engine, his thumb on my palm, the miles between me and the body on the bedroom floor. But it hasn’t settled, because it’s not an adrenaline crash.
Harlow was personal. The rage was specific and targeted, earned over years of his hands on my body.
I could explain Harlow. But the operative was a stranger.
A man in tactical gear who came through my window and died with my knife in his throat, and my body responded the same way.
The same warmth. The same pulse. The same electric current running from my hands to my core that has nothing to do with justice.
I liked the killing itself and it wasn’t personal this time.
“Ivy.” His voice is tender. “We need to get you cleaned up.”
Elevated heart rate. Flushed skin. Tremor in the extremities. Pupil dilation.
The same symptoms I catalogued during the Harlow kill. The same ones I felt when Killian’s hands were on my hips at the shooting range. The same physiological response applied to three completely different situations.
This is not a response. It’s a trait.
I am someone who gets aroused by violence. Not just the violence done to the men who hurt me. The violence itself.
The thought should horrify me. Part of it does — the part that’s still Ivy Vane, pristine, appropriate and controllable.
But that part is getting smaller every day.
And the part that’s Vera, the part that carved a moth into a man and opened another man’s throat with a butterfly knife — that part isn’t horrified at all.
That part is hungry.
Killian helps me enter the house. I don’t think I reacted to what he said.
His stitches tore during the fight. I can see the blood seeping through his shirt.
“Shower’s through there,” he says.
“Your stitches.”
“They’re fine.”
“You’re bleeding, Killian.” I move toward him. My hand catches the waistband of his pants before I’ve decided to touch him. My confidence surprises me.
He catches my wrist gently and his eyes lock on mine.
“Ivy —”
“We both need to clean up. And I need to see the wound.” I hold his gaze. The war in his eyes is visible — the wanting and the restraint fighting for the same space. I rise on my tiptoes and stop an inch from his lips, close enough to feel his breath.
We sit like that for a second before I take a step back and pull his shirt off my body. I turn to face him and I don’t cover myself. I let him see the black lingerie that’s soaked in dried blood.
“Are you coming?”
His eyes darken to pitch and his jaw grinds. I step into the narrow shower and hear him pull off his pants behind me. When he steps in, he’s in boxers.
The water takes a moment to warm. When it does, it hits me first, running red down my body. Other people’s blood pooling at the drain.
I turn to face him.
I’ve seen his scars in the dark. I even traced them with my fingers.
But this is the first time I see them this close and in full light — the whip marks, the cigar burns, the ravens, and thorns woven between the damage.
Water runs down his chest, following the contours of muscle and scar tissue.
His boxers are clinging to him, leaving nothing to the imagination.
He’s hard.
He turns slightly, trying to hide it, but I have other plans.
“Turn around. Let me see the stitches.”
He turns slowly. I step closer and press my fingers to the wound edges, checking for separation. “Two stitches pulled. Not the deep ones. You’ll heal.”
“I always do.”
I take another step closer. My palm flattens against his abs and every ridge contracts under my touch. The water is running over both of us and the space between our bodies has collapsed to inches.
I lower my eyes slowly over his body. I stop at the waistband and stare at the shape of him through the wet fabric. My lips part and I lick them without thinking and something snaps in the air between us.
“Ivy.” A warning.
“I know.” I know we shouldn’t. “But I don’t want to know anymore.”
I place my hands on his chest. His heartbeat is hammering against my palms. I rise on my tiptoes and press my body into his. “Please.”
The word opens something inside me that I didn’t know was closed. I don’t know exactly what I’m asking for. To be touched. To stop shaking. To feel something other than the hunger that’s been building since I opened a stranger’s throat.
“Killian. Please.”
One hand fists my wet hair and the other hooks under my thigh and lifts me. My legs wrap around his waist, making my back hit the cold stone wall. His mouth crashes into mine and it’s nothing like the before — this is feral. His tongue curls around mine and I moan into his mouth.
He presses me harder against the wall. His mouth moves to my neck, teeth dragging, tongue following, each point of contact leaving a trail of fire on my skin.
One bra strap falls. The wet cup barely holds, and he pulls it lower with his teeth, his mouth covering my nipple, and the sound that leaves me isn’t a word — it’s something raw and guttural, dragged from a place I didn’t know existed.
My nails rake down his back, and he groans against my skin, the vibration travelling through my chest straight into the ache between my legs. The stitches are under my fingers, and I feel the torn edges. I should care about his wound, but his mouth is on me.
His hand slides from my thigh, moving inward. His fingertips trace the edge of my underwear where the lace meets the skin, and the anticipation is so acute I’m shaking harder than before.
His hand cups me through the lace, pressing against the soaked fabric and the pressure is so sudden that my vision whites out and a moan tears from my throat that I will never be able to unhear.
His fingers roll against me in a way that tells me he knows exactly what he’s doing, and my entire body clenches and my thighs tighten around his waist and I’m —
He stops.
His forehead drops to my shoulder. He’s breathing like he’s drowning. His whole body is shaking from the restraint it’s taking to pull his hand away.
“Ivy.” He sounds wrecked. “Ivy —”
“Don’t stop. Please.”
“I have to.”
“Why?” My voice cracks.
He lifts his head. His eyes are pure black, consumed, the lust so naked it’s almost violent. But underneath it there’s something else. Something that looks like it’s costing him his life.
“Because if I don’t stop now, I won’t stop at all.”
“I don’t want you to stop, Killian.”
“I know.” His thumb finds my cheekbone. “But when I’m inside you —” He stops. “When that happens, I want you present. Not crashing. Not running from what we did tonight. You deserve more than a fuck in a shower.”
“I’m not running.”
“You’re shaking, Ivy.”
“I know. But it’s not fear.”
His eyes search mine. “I know what it is.” His voice drops. “Believe me, Little Moth. I know.”
He knows. He’s known since the car. The shaking that isn’t trauma, the flush that isn’t adrenaline. He’s known because he felt the same thing standing in a doorway watching me kill.
“I want you so badly I can’t think, Ivy. But I won’t be something you regret.”
He’s not rejecting me. He’s protecting this. Protecting what it will mean when it happens. Because it will happen. Not as a reaction to violence or a replacement for what I can’t name. As a choice.
My hand cups his scar. “Okay.”
He exhales in relief. He puts me down slowly. My legs are unsteady, so he wraps his hands around me. The moment my cheek touches his chest, something ruptures.
I cry.
I cry because I killed a stranger and liked it. Because my body doesn’t know the difference between violence and sex and I don’t know what that makes me. Because a man just had his hand between my legs and chose to stop because he wanted it to matter, and no one has ever wanted me to matter before.
He holds me. Standing in the shower, water running over us, his arms wrapped around my body, his chin on my head. He doesn’t tell me it’s okay. He doesn’t tell me to stop. He just holds me and lets me break apart against his chest.
The crying lasts until there are no tears left. When I lift my head, his eyes are waiting.
He turns off the water and wraps me in the only towel, covering me completely, and turns his back while he pulls on dry boxers from the bag.
He leads me to bed. I crawl under the blanket, and he curves behind me like a shield, with his chest against my back and his arm around my waist. The warmth of him seeps through the towel and into my bones.
“Killian?”
“Ivy?”
“Thank you. For not.”
His arm tightens around me, and his lips find my ear. “When we do, I want you to remember every second. Not just the waiting. The having.”
My breath catches. I press back against him and feel his body — still hard, still wanting, still choosing to wait.
“Okay.”
“Get some sleep, Little Moth. We’re safe now.”
Safe. I’m in a stone cabin in the middle of nowhere, wearing nothing but a towel, pressed against a man who killed three people for me tonight.
A man who had his hand between my thighs ten minutes ago and chose to stop because he wanted it to mean something.
A man who felt me break apart in a shower and held me until the breaking was done.
I’ve never felt safer in my life.