Chapter 46
Ivy
I push through the reinforced door and recognize the command office instantly from Killian’s descriptions. The desk and monitors are arranged with the precision of a man who runs the world from one room. It’s empty, but the screens stay lit, feeding in every corner of the compound.
I find him instantly. He’s surrounded, but still fighting. His movements are precise, but he’s outnumbered and the precision is costing him something — each strike slower than the last.
I scan the monitors for a route back to him. The maintenance corridors, the secondary passages —
The hallway behind me fills with bodies. They were waiting in the adjacent rooms. The office was the mouth of a funnel, and I walked straight into it.
I spin, firing twice. One man drops. Another staggers into the door frame.
A round hits my left shoulder. The bullet enters the anterior deltoid. High, clean, no exit wound. The pain is white-hot, flooding everywhere for one second — blurring my vision, ringing my ears, threatening to take my knees.
The survival override kicks in. The same system that kept me smiling at Malachi’s galas for seven years. The part of me that files pain under later and moves. I drop to one knee and fire three more rounds into the doorway, before rolling behind the heavy desk.
Assess. Breathe. Assess.
My mobility is compromised but not eliminated. I can move the arm, but I can’t raise it above my head. Fine motor control will degrade once the adrenaline fades. I tear a strip from my shirt with my teeth and right hand, wrapping it around the wound.
The gunfire pauses when Silas walks in. He moves like a man entering his own living room. Behind him, there’s a man built like a reinforced wall — tactical vest, sidearm, and the quiet competence of someone who’s been killing professionally for a long time. He looks at me and smirks.
Silas stops in the center of the room.
I’m crouched behind his own desk, bleeding, in a torn shirt, with a gun trained on his chest. I could fire right now. But the wall behind him has his weapon aimed at me, and there are four more men in the doorway. If I pull the trigger, I die before the second shot.
I study him. He’s shorter than I expected.
Mid-sixties. Grey hair cropped military short.
A face that was probably handsome once, now hardened into something that resembles carved stone more than flesh.
His eyes are pale blue and flat — the eyes of a man who stopped seeing people as people a very long time ago.
He studies me the way someone studies an insect pinned under glass. “So, you’re the Vane girl.”
I don’t lower the gun. “And you’re the man who breaks children.” My voice matches his register exactly — calm, measured, denying him the reaction he wants. “I expected someone taller.”
Something shifts in his eyes. He sees something he didn’t expect.
Good. Keep looking.
“He’s been busy, hasn’t he?” He tilts his head.
“Teaching you to bite.” He gestures toward the monitors where Killian is still fighting.
“Did he tell you what he is? What I made him? Because the boy on your screen there — that’s not a man.
That’s a weapon I built. And weapons don’t get to choose who holds them. ”
The burn behind my ribs is volcanic. My finger itches on the trigger.
The clinical part of me is already cataloguing him — the asymmetry of his shoulders, the right held slightly higher than the left.
Old injury or dominant-side habit. The way he distributes his weight forward, the slight favoring of his left knee.
“He chose.” My voice is quiet. “That’s what you can’t forgive, isn’t it, Silas? Not that he left. That he chose someone over you. Your best weapon looked at everything you built and decided a girl was worth more than twenty years of your investment.”
His jaw tightens. Just for a second. But I’ve been reading the micro-expressions of a man who hid everything his entire life. Silas is an open book compared to Killian.
He steps closer, lowering his voice to something that sounds almost gentle.
“You’re pretty. I’ll give him that.” His eyes move over me — not with desire.
Assessment. The same appraisal I received at Malachi’s galas, when men looked at me like livestock at auction.
“When this is over, maybe I’ll see what he found so…
distracting. A little test to see if the Vane doll is worth what she cost me. ”
The air leaves the room. I don’t flinch. I don’t blink. Every cell in my body is vibrating at a frequency that could shatter glass.
“You won’t live long enough to test anything.” My voice is flat, the tone of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis.
Something flickers behind his flat blue eyes. Not fear. Not yet. But the recalibration of a man who just realized the variable he dismissed might be the one that kills him.
He turns to his man. “Secure her. Bring her along once I’ve had my conversation with Killian. I want him to watch.”
The man holsters his weapon. The threat has been downgraded in his mind. I’m bleeding, outnumbered, and cornered.
He pulls zip-ties from his vest. “On your feet, princess. Hands where I can see them.” I stand slowly. “Drop the weapon. Or I let Briggs over there shoot your other shoulder and we carry you.”
I set the engraved gun on the desk the way I’d set down a surgical instrument — not surrendering, placing. Rough hands pat me down. They find the scalpel set in my thigh rig.
The man turns the roll over in his hands and opens it. “What the fuck is this? Arts and crafts?” He holds up the 10 blade between two fingers. “You bring a craft kit to a gunfight, sweetheart? Gonna scrapbook us to death?”
His men laugh.
I look at the scalpel in his fingers. “You’re holding it wrong.
” He blinks. “The 10 blade has a curved cutting edge. You hold it like a violin bow — thumb and middle finger on the handle, index finger on the spine. Used for large, straight incisions.” My voice is the lecture-hall tone I use when I’m narrating a dissection.
“But you’d know that if you’d ever done anything more precise than beating handcuffed people. ”
His smirk dies. Something cold hardens behind his eyes. He steps closer. “You’ve got a mouth on you.”
“The last man who was condescending to me ended up with a lesson he didn't survive.” I hold his stare without blinking.
He’s quiet for a long moment, before shoving the scalpel roll into his pocket. “Tie her up. We’re moving.”
My scalpels are in your pocket. I’m going to have a wonderful time killing you.
They zip-tie my wrists. The plastic cuts into my skin. The man walks ahead. Two men flank me. One behind, hand on my upper arm. I walk with my head down — not defeated, calculating.
First carpometacarpal joint. The saddle joint. Biaxial. High range of motion. Dislocation requires hyperextension and lateral force applied to the metacarpal base. Three to five seconds of acute pain. Functional recovery within minutes if relocated immediately.
I twist my thumb—a sharp, deliberate motion. Between the hyperextension and the lateral force, the CMC joint separates with a sound like a cracking branch. The pain seizing. I inhale twice. My right hand narrows just enough to slide the zip-tie over my knuckles, tearing skin but pulling free.
I drive the thumb back into the socket immediately. It will swell, but it will be functional.
The guard behind me feels the shift. His grip tightens and his mouth opens, but I elbow to his throat before he can react. The tracheal cartilage buckles inward. He can’t scream or breathe and by the time his hands fly to his neck I’m pulling the sidearm from his holster. My left shoulder screams.
The two flanking guards react too late. The mental switch from prisoner to threat takes a full second they don’t have. I fire twice, their bodies dropping with a thud.
The man in charge turns. He’s faster, already drawing.
His shot goes wide because I’m already closing the distance.
He grabs my injured shoulder and the pain is blinding, nearly taking my knees.
The knife goes in through his elbow — deep enough to sever the brachial artery and the median nerve. His hand spasms dead, dropping his gun.
He swings with the other arm, connecting with my jaw. The impact rings through my skull and blood fills my mouth, but I don’t stop. I stab him inside the thigh, slicing his femoral artery. He drops to his knees.
He’s looking up at me now. I spit the blood from my mouth and reach into his pocket, pulling out my scalpel roll. “Let me show you how it’s done.”
I pick the 10 blade, holding it correctly. He tries to speak, but I don’t give him the chance. I sever his carotid. Slow enough for him to understand that he was wrong about every single thing he thought he knew about me. Fast enough to be efficient.
I stand covered in blood, retrieving my weapons. The radio crackles. The chatter has shifted. Target secured. Moving to primary.
I move faster, ignoring the scream in my shoulder. My thumb is stiffening — twenty minutes before the swelling makes my right hand useless.
The command wing connects to the east wing through maintenance corridors.
The blast doors sealed the main arteries, but the capillaries are still open.
I find them the way I find everything in the human body — form follows function.
Wider corridors mean higher traffic. Better lighting means higher priority.
I hear Silas before I see anything — the calm, measured cadence of a man who believes he has all the time in the world.
Underneath it, a dull rhythmic sound — impact, fist on flesh.
I hear the session — the sound of a man who knows the best way to break someone is slowly.
My heart stops, then restarts with a violent force, powered by a frequency that has moved beyond rage.
At the end of the corridor, the heavy door sits ajar. Silas is arrogant enough to leave it that way, certain that with the building sealed and the girl in hand, he is untouchable.
I approach silently, keeping the gun holstered. What I’m about to do isn’t a gunfight.
Fragments of his voice slip through the gap in the door — that paternal tone, the one that sounds like he’s teaching a lesson while he’s breaking bones.
“—gave you everything. A name. A purpose. And you threw it away for what? A girl with daddy issues?” A wet sound of impact.
“You were my finest work, Killian. And you let a spoiled little cunt turn you into… this.” Another impact.
Harder. “Look at you. On your knees. Bleeding. Just like you were at fifteen. Some things never change, do they, son?”
I press my back against the wall. My breathing is steady. Everything inside me is quiet now.
I can see Killian through the gap — on his knees, hands cuffed behind him, bolted to a ring in the floor. His face is a mask of blood. Nose broken or close to it. Lower lip split. One eye swelling shut. Silas has been working.
His head is down. He’s breathing — I can see his ribs expand.
But he’s not fighting the restraints. Not because he’s given up.
Because his body remembers the position and the pain and the voice of the man standing over him and it’s defaulting to the survival programming that was installed in a child who had no choice.
My grip on the scalpel tightens until my knuckles go white. I stop myself from bursting through the door, letting my heartbeat settle into the rhythm I use before the first incision. The beautiful moment when everything is still and certain and the blade knows where to go.