Chapter 33
Killian
I’m walking back from the car, arms heavy with bread, wine, and fresh tomatoes. Domestic things. The kind of things a man buys when he’s coming home to someone.
It’s been over a month since I took her off that balcony, yet she’s still here. She chose to stay. She chose me. And the feeling it produces — this weightless, terrifying, completely foreign sense of peace — is something I’ve been turning over in my mind like a smooth stone for days.
Mine. She’s mine. Tonight I will tell her.
I push open the door. “Miss me?” The smile on my face is real. She made me capable of real smiles.
She’s leaning against the counter, relaxed and still. Too still.
It’s the same stillness she had the night I took her — the composed, glacial calm of a woman who’s been performing for seven years.
“Ivy?”
She smiles and it’s wrong. I’ve seen her real smile — crooked, unpracticed, the one that starts at her mouth and floods her eyes. This one is a weapon.
Training fires before thought. I map exits, catalogue her position, compute distance. My eyes find the phone on the counter in the same spot I left it.
My blood goes cold.
“What’s wrong, Ivy?”
She tilts her head, still smiling. “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong, Killian.
” Her voice is honey poured over a blade.
“Did you miss me while you were gone?” She pushes off the counter and takes one step toward me.
“I had time to think about us. About everything we’ve shared.
” Another step. My heartbeat changes — not faster, harder, recognizing a threat it can’t see.
“All those conversations. All those late nights.” Another step. “All the ways you’ve seen me.”
She knows.
I don’t know how. But my body knows before my brain confirms it. The phone. The folder. Smoke. She found it.
The bags are still in my hands. I set them down slowly and face what’s coming.
She starts circling me. Not pacing — circling. The way I circled the estate before the kidnapping. The way a predator maps a space before closing the distance. She moves through the kitchen with the casual authority of a woman who has all the time in the world and intends to use every second of it.
“You know what I love about this cabin?” Her fingers trail along the counter. She doesn’t look at the phone. “How quiet it is. No distractions. No interruptions.” She’s in front of me now, inches away. “Just you and me and all our little secrets.”
“Ivy —”
“Don’t.” The word cuts like a blade. Every trace of sweetness is gone. “Don’t say my fucking name like you have the right to.”
Her fingers find my scar, tracing it the way she’d trace an incision line — measuring, assessing, deciding where to cut.
“I’ve been thinking about scars, Killian. Yours. Mine. The ones we show and the ones we hide.” Her thumb presses the silver line next to the corner of my mouth. “Tell me something, Little Ghost.”
My entire body freezes.
“When you were messaging Smoke —” She leans in. Her tongue traces the shell of my ear and the heat of it sends a bolt through my nervous system that has no business existing in a moment like this. “Were you hard? Did you get off on playing with me?”
She pulls back before I can respond, recomposing with a speed that tells me she’s been rehearsing this while I was buying tomatoes.
I’m hard. Despite everything — the fear, the guilt, the knowledge that I’m about to lose her — I’m hard. Because the woman shredding me is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever stood next to, and my body has never been able to tell the difference between danger and want when it comes to her.
She moves behind me. “Don’t move.”
I freeze. The training responds before I can think. She uses my conditioning against me and the realization is devastating and arousing at once.
“Good boy.”
The words shoot through me. My cock throbs. My jaw locks. She knows exactly what she’s doing.
“I’m going to talk now. You’re going to listen. After that, maybe I’ll let you explain.” She circles back to face me. “Or maybe I won’t.”
She begins.
“Let’s start at the beginning. You followed me before you kidnapped me. Before you ever touched me. You saw the girl in the gilded cage and thought — what? That she was pretty? Broken? Fun to toy with?”
My jaw tightens, but I stay quiet.
“The night you took me, you were already inside my head. Months before your hands were on my body. The noise fades and the road opens, right?” She air-quotes it.
My own words thrown back at me like grenades.
“Then you had me in your warehouse. Your Little Moth. And the whole time — the whole fucking time — you were also the stranger on my phone. The one I told things I never told anyone. The one I trusted because he didn’t want anything from me. ”
Her voice cracks. She takes a moment to recompose herself.
“I told Ghost I missed someone I shouldn’t. I told you about yourself, Killian. And you — what? Read it? Smiled? Got hard? Saved the screenshot for the next time you wanted to jerk off?”
Each word is a blade and she’s using them with the precision she uses on everything. Each accusation is landing exactly where she aims it — in the places where my armor is thinnest.
“I grieved you.” Her voice drops. “Ghost had to die so I could leave with Killian. I said goodbye. I treated it like a death, because that’s the only way I could survive losing someone I —” She stops. “And he was right next to me. The whole time. You watched me mourn the loss of you to you.”
A bitter smile spreads on her lips. “I gotta say, it’s a fucked-up choice of foreplay.”
I deserve every word. I know I deserve every word. And my cock is straining against my jeans because the woman eviscerating me is doing it with the clinical control of a surgeon and the rage of someone who’s been caged her entire life and just discovered one more lock she didn’t know about.
“How long were you going to keep it going? Forever? Were you ever going to tell me? Or were you going to let me love two versions of you and never —”
She stops, slapping both hands over her mouth.
Love.
She said it. The word she didn’t mean to release. It hangs in the air between us like a grenade with the pin pulled and neither of us moves.
Something in me snaps. The thing I’ve held caged. The thing Silas tried to kill with cigar burns and straight razors. It breaks through.
One second, she’s in front of me shaking with fury, the next she’s against the wall with my hand on her throat and my other hand covering her mouth.
“Stop.” I don’t recognize my own voice. It’s too raw. “Just stop.”
Her gray eyes are on fire. She’s looking at me with the expression of someone calculating twenty different ways to kill me.
I feel her teeth sink into my palm hard enough to break skin.
Blood wells between her lips and my palm.
The pain is electric, sharp, and real. I press harder, letting her taste my blood.
“You can bite me until every drop drains out of my body.” I lean closer, my lips tracing the pulse hammering in her throat. A whimper escapes her — quiet, involuntary. Her thighs press together. “But you’re going to listen, Little Moth.”
I lock our eyes.
“I was going to tell you. I almost told you on the island. I almost told you after the kiss in Zurich —” Her teeth sink deeper. “I know, Ivy. I know. There’s no version of this where I’m not a monster and a liar.”
I exhale against her neck, and the confession starts leaving me like blood from an artery.
“I didn’t plan this. You were a contract.
You were supposed to be nothing. But when I saw you — not when I kidnapped you, on your account, the things you wrote, the way you saw the world — you were already dead and just waiting for permission to haunt something.
” My voice breaks. “I recognized you. You were me. The dead thing walking around in a body that’s not theirs.
The monster pretending to be human. I thought maybe we could be monsters together.
I thought you might be the only person who could ever —”
The feeling of cold steel pressing against my throat makes me stop. The butterfly knife — my gift — is pressed to my carotid by the hand I trained to hold it.
Poetic, Little Moth.
She flipped it open while I was confessing. While I was bleeding for her.
“Let go of me.” Her voice is steady. The blade isn’t.
Ivy
The moment his hands leave my throat I move. My free hand shoots out and grabs him through his jeans. His cock is hard — thick, straining against the denim — and I grip it with enough force to make his whole body jerk.
He’s hard and I’m dripping. We’re both fucking insane.
I use his surprise to shove him into the same spot where he pinned me. The knife stays at his throat, and my hand stays on his cock. I’m in control now.
His breathing is ragged. His eyes are so black they’ve stopped being a color and become a void. The scar catches the light, and his jaw is clenched so hard his teeth might shatter.
“You’re hard.” I trace his length through the denim. His breath catches. “You like this?”
I bring the knife up and start trailing it along his scar. The edge follows the silver line from the corner of his mouth to the hinge of his jaw to his neck, the same path my thumb has traced a hundred times, except now it’s the metal making the journey.
“You gave me this knife.” I trail it down his throat, pressing just enough to leave a mark in the skin — a thin white line, no blood. Not yet. “Did you imagine this? When you were teaching me, standing behind me with your hands on mine?”
“Yes.” His answer is immediate.
“You —”
“Yes.” He looks at me like he’s trying to talk to my soul. “I imagined you exactly like this. Holding a blade to my throat. Making me bleed.”
My arousal becomes painful. A physical ache low in my abdomen that pulses along with my heartbeat. I lose focus for one second. He wanted this. He wanted me to be this. A psychotic, beautiful monster holding a knife to his throat.
“You’re insane, Killian.”
“We both are, Little Moth.”