Chapter 37
Killian
I wake into the stillness. My eyes open and immediately begin the scan — the room, the door, the window, and finally, the steady breathing beside me.
Once the perimeter is clear, the rest of the world follows.
The sheets are ruined. They are twisted around us and stained with the evidence of what we did last night. The air still carries it — sex, blood and her underneath all of it. The zip-ties are on the floor. The butterfly knife glimmers near the dresser.
This is what we did.
Ivy is on her stomach beside me with hair tangled across her face and the K visible from where I sit. My hands left bruises on her body and her inner thighs carry the rest of what I left behind.
I did this. I made this.
I stare at her. The hunger is already back — immediate, insatiable, twenty years of control burned through in a single night. She’s marked and mine and I’m already getting hard just looking at her.
I look down at my own chest. Her work pulls when I breathe
She marked me first. Made me hers before I could make her mine. She’s insane and I’m obsessed with her. Matched and branded.
She shifts. A soft sound escapes her lips before her eyes open and find mine immediately.
“Morning.” My voice comes out rough.
She stretches like a cat, wincing through every movement. I watch the pain cross her face and feel the satisfaction settle warm in my chest.
“I can’t feel my legs.” Her words come out breathless.
“Good.”
She tries to sit up and hisses. Her hand goes between her legs and comes away sticky. “I need a shower. I’m disgusting.”
“You’re perfect.”
“I’m covered in —”
“Me.” I sit up and pull her to the edge of the bed. “You’re covered in me. And I’m not done looking.”
I help her stand and guide her to the bathroom, settling her in front of the mirror above the sink, standing behind her.
“Look.”
Her eyes widen as she takes herself in. Her hair is a tangled mess, matted in patches, while finger-shaped bruises deepen to purple against the pale of her neck.
Her lips are swollen, bitten raw. Below, her breasts bear the red tracks of my teeth, and the K looks angry at the edges.
Down further, her thighs are still smeared with a mix of everything.
She looks ruined. She looks like she belongs to me.
“See what I did to you?” I lower my mouth to her ear, my hands sliding down her waist to her hips, then between her thighs. “See how beautiful you look like this?”
She’s swollen and sore, still sensitive, but she doesn’t close her legs. I find her clit and she whimpers, her thighs trying to press together, but I hold them open with mine.
“Eyes on the mirror, Little Moth.”
She watches herself while I work her open — slow at first, letting her feel the stretch, then a second finger, then a third, my thumb circling her clit until she’s gripping the sink edge with white knuckles and can barely hold herself upright.
“You’re still full of me.” I can feel the slick of last night mixing with her. My other hand finds her nipple. “Still dripping. And I’m going to fill you up again.”
She comes apart on my hand with a broken sound, almost folding, and I hold her up.
Once her breathing steadies, I help her get into the shower. She looks at me when I turn on the water — the particular look that means she’s remembering something.
“You said no before. When we got here.”
“I was an idiot before.”
“What changed?”
I press her back against the cold stone wall. She gasps, her chest pushing into mine. My hand finds her throat and holds her eyes to mine.
“You. Me. Everything.” The steam is rising around us, and the water feels cold against our hot bodies. “I spent twenty years on a leash, Ivy. You burned it.”
I lift her and she wraps her legs around my waist. “Killian, I’m still sore —”
“I know.” I push inside her. Her cry echoes off the stone.
I can see it in her face — the place where pain and pleasure have fused into something without a name. I don’t give her time to find the boundary. I press her back against the cold wall and tighten my grip on her throat until her air narrows.
“What’s your name?”
She blinks. “W-what?”
I slam harder. Her head falls back. “Your name. Say it.”
“Ivy —”
“Wrong.” My hand tightens, her vision starting to blur at the edges. “Try again.”
“V-Vera —”
“Still wrong.” I’m slamming into her now, her mouth falling open, filling with water as she gasps. “You’re mine. That’s your name. Say it.”
“Yours —”
“Again.”
“Yours. I’m yours, I’m yours —”
I cut off her air just long enough for her eyes to roll back—for her to lose herself until the world narrows to nothing but me inside her.
The second I release her she gasps for air. “Good girl.” My hips don’t slow. “My good girl.”
Her sounds have dissolved into broken noise — desperate, incoherent, my name scattered through the rest of it. “Come for me. Now.”
She shatters. Her nails find my back, hungry for blood. I follow her — filling her, claiming what’s left of her from the inside.
We stay there, the water running over both of us, both catching our breath.
I press my forehead to hers. “Can you stand?”
She barely shakes her head. It pulls a laugh out of me. I hold her until her legs remember what they’re for.
She finally finds her voice. “What did you ask me?”
“Your name.”
“I forgot it. I actually forgot my own name.”
“I know.” The smirk forms on my lips before I can stop it. I kiss her forehead. “That was the point.”
Ivy
I’m steadier on my legs now. Killian wraps a towel around his waist, and I pull on one of his t-shirts. It smells like him and I want to live in it.
“Sit.” I gesture to the wrecked bed. He raises an eyebrow. “Your stitches. They need to come out.”
I reach for the med kit. Out of the corner of my eye, I watch him obey — this lethal man, sitting when I tell him to sit. The satisfaction that spreads through me is warm and addictive.
He’s wrapped around my finger. He sits when I tell him to.
I kneel in front of him, between his legs. The stab wound has healed well — pink and shiny, the stitches ready to come out. My chest tightens when I think about the steadiness my hands had that night. That I kept him alive.
“Hold still.” I lean in and begin snipping and pulling each stitch carefully. He doesn’t flinch. He just watches me with those dark eyes like he’s trying to read something written beneath my skin.
Not like he didn’t fuck it out of me last night anyway.
Halfway through the procedure, the towel shifts. “Are you serious?”
“I can’t help it.” He sounds amused. “You’re on your knees between my legs. What did you expect?”
“Killian, I’m performing a medical procedure.” My voice climbs a notch.
“And you’re doing it beautifully.” His hand finds my hair, taking a few strands between his fingers. “Don’t let me distract you.”
I sigh and snip another stitch. The towel is tenting now. “Killian.”
“Ivy.”
“Be careful, or you’ll poke me in the eye.”
He laughs — low and dark — and my pussy clenches in response. “I can think of better places.”
I roll my eyes as I pull the last stitch and apply the antiseptic, making him hiss.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, his tone shifting to something lighter. “About training that throat of yours.”
I freeze. “What?”
“I want you to take me without choking.” His hand wraps into my hair. “Practice makes perfect, Little Moth.”
I don’t know if it’s the proposal itself or just him, but I’m already staring at him in anticipation when the towel disappears. I lick my lips before I can stop myself when I see how hard he is. I should be exhausted. I should want nothing to do with sex for days.
“Open.”
I open my mouth and he pushes in without easing me into it. His hand fists in my hair, controlling everything — the pace, the depth, the angle. I gag immediately, but he doesn’t stop.
“Breathe through your nose. Relax your throat.” His voice is steady in a way that his hips are not. “You can take it. You’re going to take all of it.”
Tears and spit stream down my face from the gagging. I’m so wet I can feel it on my thighs.
He pulls out, letting me gasp. “Good girl. Again.” He pushes my head deeper until my nose brushes his pelvis and I spasm around him. “That’s it. Swallow around me. Just like that.”
He pulls out again and tilts my chin up. “Open your mouth.” I open it, tongue out, confused. He spits, landing at the back of my throat, and the whimper that escapes me is involuntary.
“Swallow.” I do. “Who do you belong to?”
“You.” My voice is wrecked. The word comes easily. “I belong to you.”
“That’s right.” He guides himself back into my mouth. “Now make me come.”
I use everything I have. My tongue works around him, and I take as much as I can, my hands covering the rest. My pace is fast. When he comes, he holds me there, buried deep, hand firm in my hair, and I swallow until there’s nothing left.
“Perfect.” He releases me. I cough, searching for his eyes. “We’ll keep practicing.”
Training my throat like I’m his to use. And I’m already looking forward to next time.
I wipe my face on the sheet and make him lie down. I straddle him — trying to ignore the way he twitches beneath me — and examine the moth on his chest.
“This could get infected. We weren’t exactly sanitary.”
“Worth it.” He smirks.
I snort and start cleaning the carving carefully. He stares at my face the entire time.
“Stop staring.”
“No.”
“You’re making this weird.”
“You carved a moth into my chest and then rode me until we both saw God. The weird ship has sailed.”
I snort again as I tape the gauze in place. I kiss the bandage before I can stop myself and feel his breath catch.
He sits up, switching our positions, and pushes the hem of his shirt up to my stomach. He examines the K. It’s worse than the moth — I carved it deeper, because I was angrier. He starts cleaning it with a tenderness that makes my chest ache.
“You shouldn’t have done this,” he says quietly.
“You told me not to stop.”
“I know. I should’ve stopped you anyway.”
“Why didn’t you?”
His jaw tightens as he applies the bandage, pressing his palm flat over the wound. “Because I wanted it. I wanted my initial on your skin more than I wanted to protect you from yourself.” His dark eyes meet mine. “Because I’m selfish and you’re mine, Ivy.”
We get dressed and we almost look like ordinary people instead of the blood-soaked monsters we were last night.
“We can’t stay here,” I say.
He nods. We both knew this. But for these last days the outside world didn’t exist.
“We’ll use the same airstrip we used coming in. I have a contact who can get us back into the States without questions.”
“Not Veridian Shore.”
“No. Texas or Arizona. Somewhere with space. Somewhere where I can —” He stops.
“Somewhere where you can what?”
“Plan.” His jaw tightens.
I’ll have to fight him about that soon.
“Vera and Marco?”
“We’ll change the identities when we arrive. I can’t guarantee they’re still clean after the Lisbon ambush.”
“And when we get there?”
“We find Silas.” His voice hardens. “And we end this.”
We. I don’t trust it. But I’ll let it stand for now.
“Pack. We leave in an hour.”
I turn to gather things, but there isn’t much — a few clothes bought in Lisbon, the weapons, and the Ledger. I pack them into bags while Killian strips the bed and burns the sheets in the fireplace. Any evidence of what we did disappears into flames.
I stand watching the fire for a moment. No matter how many sheets we burn, we’re never going to be clean.
I take one last look at the cabin. This is the place where I found out he was Ghost. Where I confronted him. Where I carved myself open and let him fill the wound. Where I stopped being Ivy and became his.
This is where I became his. And he became mine.
“Ready?”
I turn. The man who kidnapped me, haunted me, broke me and remade me is standing in the doorway with our bags in his hands.
“Ready.”