Chapter 42
Ivy
I kill the Ducati’s engine in front of the house. The silence that follows is deafening, ringing in my ears after eight hours of constant noise.
My hands won’t open. They’re locked around the handlebars, cramped and seized.
When I finally peel them free, the skin comes with it — raw, blistered, some of them burst and weeping.
My thighs are trembling. My lower back is locked.
I can barely swing my leg over the bike.
I manage to stand and I can feel him close behind me.
I know the moment he notices my hands because his breathing does that micro-hitch. He reaches for my wrist.
“Don’t.”
Everything is exactly where we left it — the Ledger on the table, the dirty mugs in the sink. He’s already moving, clearing the rooms and checking the perimeter with a lethal, practiced focus. I watch him amused.
He is the threat.
I go into the bathroom and lock the door. It’s the first time I’ve locked it and I hope he hears the click.
The water turns my skin red instantly. I catalogue the damage. My palms are blistered, skin torn, dried blood under my nails. My inner thighs are bruised and raw where I gripped the bike. My back is seizing and lightning pain rushes through me when I reach for the soap.
The K on my skin is healed enough not to risk infection. What kind of man marks his territory and abandons it?
I try to process the rage the way I process wounds — systematically, clinically — but it’s impossible. He’s on the other side of that locked door, breathing my air, taking up too much space in a house too small for how angry I am.
I turn off the water and wrap myself in a towel. He looks up when I come out, his eyes tracking the water on my collarbones.
My damaged hands grip the towel. “Shower’s free.”
I walk past him. The towel brushes his knee and both our breaths stop.
He goes to shower and I try to lie down. Every position hurts. My back has fully locked up by the time I give in and lie face-down, head turned toward the bathroom door.
He comes out in just jeans. The moth on his chest is in full display. His breathing hitches when he sees me. He disappears into the bathroom and returns with a bottle.
“Is that body oil?”
“Yes.”
“You have body oil stashed in a safehouse.” I take shallow breaths, trying to keep the whimpers down. “What’s next, a jade roller?”
“Do you want help or do you want to be funny?”
“I want you to explain why a man who kills people has body oil.”
He waits, knowing exactly when to hold still and when to press. Another weapon. I’m too smart to not see it and in too much pain not to fall for it.
“Fine.” I drop the towel to my waist.
This is medical. My back is wrecked and he has functional hands. That’s all.
The oil is warm when his palms flatten against my lower back.
I bite the pillow. His hands work my muscles with a precision that’s half training and half something else — a knowledge of my body that goes deeper than anatomy.
He finds every knot without searching. The pressure sits on the exact line between pain and relief.
His thumbs press into the dimples at the base of my spine and my hips shift involuntarily. He works up, knuckle by knuckle, and when he finds the knot between my shoulder blades I nearly moan.
The woody scent of the oil fills the room. A war is happening inside me. This is just a massage, but every time his thumb drags along my spine I want to arch into him.
I hate you. I hate you, but please go lower.
“Your hands are the only honest part of you.” He goes still. “Every promise out of your mouth is bullshit. But those hands…”
His hands resume, moving dangerously low. His thumbs are tracing the curve of my waist, before dropping to my hips.
“You’re shaking.” His voice is low and raspy.
“I’m angry.”
“You’re wet, Ivy.”
I flip over and grab his jaw. My bleeding palm stains his skin. I pull him down and crush my mouth against his — not a kiss, an attack. My tongue finds his and I bite his lower lip hard enough to draw blood. He groans into my mouth, and his weight comes down on me.
I shove him onto his back and straddle him before he can breathe. I pin his hands above his head. My palms are screaming against his skin, but the pain fuels me. I undo his jeans one-handed, the other pressing his chest, smearing blood over his moth.
“You don’t get to touch me.”
“Ivy —”
“You lost that right when you left.”
I take him in one drop. It hurts — more mentally than physically. I want it to hurt. I want him to see my face when it hurts and know that I chose the pain over the absence of him.
I set a pace that’s more violence than intimacy. My hips are rolling hard, almost punishing. My hands are all over his body, leaving faint blood trails wherever I touch.
“Did you think about this?” His jaw is locked, hands fisted at his sides. “While you were driving to your execution?”
“Yes.” A growl.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes. I thought about you. Every mile.”
“Every mile.” I roll my hips in a way that makes him groan. “That’s a lot of miles to think about a woman you abandoned.” I lean down and wrap my hand around his throat. “Protecting me? Dying for me so I could live with the fucking blessing of being loved by a ghost?”
The orgasm takes me by surprise. Fueled by anger, friction, and the oil making everything slick.
It’s more release than pleasure, a detonation of everything I’ve been carrying since I woke up to an empty bed.
I don’t stop moving. I ride through it with my teeth clenched.
My hips are grinding like I’m trying to break him.
My eyes find his. “That one was mine. You don’t get credit for it.”
“I wasn’t asking for credit.”
“Good. Because you haven’t earned anything yet.”
I edge him. Every time he gets close — abs contracting, breathing going shallow — I stop.
“Ivy —”
“No.”
“I need —”
“I know what you need. You don’t get it until I say so.”
Payback. For every promise he broke. Every hour on that bike. Every mile of desert between his cowardice and my rage.
Killian
She reaches for the butterfly knife on the nightstand and flicks it open one-handed. I taught her well. The blade presses against my throat and I go still beneath her.
Her hips haven’t stopped. She’s giving me slow, deliberate rolls that are keeping me right at the edge without letting me fall. The blade pulses against my carotid in time with my heartbeat.
“You won’t kill me.”
“I might.”
“You rode hours on a motorcycle you’d never driven to bring me back alive. You’re not going to kill me on the bed we share.”
“I rode because you broke every promise you ever made. If you think gratitude looks like mercy, you don’t know me at all.”
She presses harder. A thin red line opens on my throat. Blood traces toward my collarbone. She watches it with the same fascination she watches everything she opens.
“You’re insane.”
“You made me this way.”
I’m letting her do this because I stood on an empty road and cried in front of her.
I’ve never cried. Thirty years of training, of conditioning, of building walls so thick they could withstand artillery and she put a gun to her own head and the walls came down in seconds.
In that moment I understood something Silas never taught me — there are things worse than dying.
Watching her die is one of them. Watching her choose to die because of me is the one after that.
The tears weren’t weakness. They were the sound of every structure I’ve ever built collapsing at once. Silas’s walls. The soldier’s composure. The lie that I could protect her by leaving. All of it crumbling in the time it took her to move the gun from my chin to her forehead.
She saw me cry and didn’t look away. She held me while I broke and then told me to get in the car and follow her home.
Something opened between us on that road.
Something that can’t be closed. She’s seen me at my weakest, and I didn’t die from it.
I’m still alive. She’s still here. And the thing that opened — the crack in the architecture, the gap where the light gets in — is the space where I might finally learn how to stay.
She reaches for the gun on the nightstand, pressing the barrel to my temple without breaking rhythm.
My cock twitches inside her.
“You like this.”
“I like you.”
“You like me with a gun to your head.”
“I like you any way I can get you.”
My hand moves faster than she can react. I eject the magazine, rack the slide, and clear the chamber. The round drops onto the mattress. “Safety first.”
She stares at the empty gun, then at me. “You’re no fun.”
“I’m not losing you to an accident after you drove across the desert to keep me alive.”
“It wouldn’t be an accident. It would be a choice.”
She brings the barrel to her mouth. Her tongue runs along the metal slowly. Her eyes are locked on mine. My hands grip her hips hard enough to bruise.
“Ivy —” She hollows her cheeks around the metal. “What are you doing?”
She pulls the barrel free, licking her lips. “Practicing.”
I rip the gun from her hand and throw it across the floor. My hand finds the nape of her neck. I pull her down into a kiss that tastes like the barrel she just had in her mouth. I flip her onto her back and she wraps around me instantly.
I pick up the knife she dropped and open it. “You used this on me tonight.”
“I was just getting started.”
“I know.” I reverse it, wrapping my hand around the blade. Her eyes widen. “My turn.”
I squeeze. The edges sink into my palm. Blood wells between my fingers immediately. The pain is grounding — an anchor in a moment where everything else is chaos.
This is what it feels like to hold onto you. You cut, and I bleed, and my grip tightens either way.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’ve been bleeding since I met you.”
“That’s not romantic, that’s a medical concern.”
“You’re a surgeon. Fix me later.”
I bring the knife handle between her thighs. Her breath catches.
“Tell me no and I stop.”