Chapter 49 #2
My jaw tightens. “It’s the shoulder. The bullet sat in the tissue for hours. Every time I moved, fought, drove, held your weight — it shifted. It could have been compressing the nerve pathway the entire time. Now that it’s out, the swelling might resolve and the tremor stops. Or —”
“Or?”
I am quiet for a long time.
“Or there’s compression damage. Inflammation that scarred the nerve. I won’t know without imaging and a real doctor.”
The tightening in my chest is something the clinical language can’t contain anymore.
The clinical language has been failing all night — cracking at each revelation, each wound, each moment where the surgeon was asked to feel instead of diagnosing.
And now, looking at my shaking hands, the last wall falls.
He reaches out slowly, his fingers closing around mine. One of his hands takes the needle, setting it down and the other just holds my trembling hand.
“Don’t.” My voice is strangled. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I just lost something.”
The silence that follows is the heaviest we’ve shared.
“I don’t know if it comes back.” My voice is detached, the way it gets when I’m trying to hold the flood behind clinical distance. But my eyes are burning. “The precision. The way I could hold a blade at two-millimeter depth for six inches without deviation. I don’t know if that comes back.”
He opens his mouth. I see the apology forming.
“Don’t. Don’t you dare apologize for this.”
“You gave up your hands for —”
“I gave up nothing.” I look at him. My voice softens. “I’d rather have unsteady hands with you next to me than perfect ones without you. The math isn’t hard, Killian. I chose.”
I watch my words land on him. His face changes into the expression of a man who has just been told he is worth something irreplaceable and doesn’t know where to put it. The information filling his chest leaves no room for air.
“Say something.”
I know it’s too much. His mother. Silas’s words about me. And now this. There’s nowhere for any of it to go.
I take his hand, pressing it flat against my throat, over my pulse.
“Feel that? That’s mine. Not his. Not yours. Mine. I decide who touches me. I decide what I sacrifice. I decide what I’m worth.”
His hand is shaking against my pulse. I guide it to my jaw, cupping it the way he always does. His thumb finds the bruise and traces it until his palm settles against my cheek.
“There you are.” I lean into his touch. “There you are.”
His mouth finds mine. The kiss is the first breath after drowning. Desperate, shaking, tasting like blood from his split lip. I grab him, pulling him closer. He makes a low, broken sound — the sound of a man finally letting go of the thing he’s been holding.
Killian
When she knelt in front of me and opened the first aid kit, I almost told her not to touch me because Silas’s voice was between us, describing what he’d do to her, and my hands felt like his.
When she pulled my shirt off and her fingers brushed the cut above my hip, every nerve screamed two things at once — her and him. The warmth of her touch and the cold of what he said. I wanted to crawl out of my own skin.
When I stitched her shoulder, my hands shook so badly I thought the thread would snap. Every stitch was an apology I couldn’t say out loud. She talked me through it in that surgeon’s voice, and I held onto it like a rope over a canyon.
When I saw her hands shake — the tremor in the fingers that have never once trembled — something inside me shattered that I didn’t know was still intact. She gave this up. For me. She traded the steadiest hands I’ve ever seen for a man on his knees in a room that smelled like blood.
And then she took my hand and pressed it to her throat and her heartbeat pushed against my skin and Silas’s voice went quiet. Not gone. Quiet. Buried under the rhythm of her. Overwritten by the frequency of her pulse against my palm.
She kissed me and it tasted like blood and it was the best thing I’ve ever tasted because it meant she’s real and she’s here and she’s choosing me. The broken thing. The weapon that malfunctioned. The ghost who burned everything he touched.
I pull back from the kiss just enough to see her. She’s looking at me with blood on her lips — my blood — and she doesn’t wipe it off.
My voice is wrecked when I start speaking. “Little Moth. That’s what I named you. The thing that flies toward the fire even though the fire will destroy it.” My hand is trembling on her jaw. “But I was wrong.”
She watches me the way she does when she knows I’m building toward something.
“The moth chases the flame. That’s the story. The moth can’t help itself — it sees the light and it flies, even though the fire will destroy it.” My thumb traces her jaw. “But nobody ever asks what the flame wants.”
Her breath catches.
“The flame wants the moth, Ivy. The flame needs the moth. Without something to reach toward, to burn for, a flame is just destruction. It eats everything and illuminates nothing. It’s just a weapon, burning whatever’s in front of it until there’s nothing left.”
Her eyes fill. Her fingers are still gripping me.
“You didn’t fly toward me. I’ve been reaching for you since the night I took you off that balcony. Every DM. Every ride. Every time I stood in the dark and watched you through a scope and told myself it was surveillance.”
The poetry falls away. What’s left is the most honest thing I’ve ever said.
“I can’t survive without you. I never could. You are the only thing that makes the burning mean something, Ivy.”
My voice breaks.
“You’re not the moth. You’re the reason the flame exists.”
She looks at me for a second longer. Then she climbs onto me — careful of the ribs and the knee, slotting herself into the space between my arms like she was made to fit here.
Her face presses into my neck. Her shaking hand flattens against my chest, over the moth. I hold her with both arms like it’s the only thing worth doing with my hands.
In the mirror across the room, I can see her shoulder. My stitches. Jagged, uneven, nothing like her precision. She’ll carry this scar forever — the most permanent thing I’ve ever done that isn’t destruction.
Her breathing slows against my neck. The kind of slowing a body does when it finally feels safe enough to stop performing survival.
My hand finds her hair, smoothing it back from her face. I comb out the dried blood with my knuckles and she exhales against my skin — long, slow, the sound of someone setting something heavy down.
“Killian?”
“Yeah, Little Moth?”
“Your stitches are ugly.”
The sound that comes out of me isn’t quite a laugh. I’m too wrecked for laughter. But it’s close. The closest thing a man can make when he’s being broken and put back together in the same night by the same woman.
“I know.”
She presses her lips to my throat, right over my pulse. I close my good eye and hold her tighter, letting the ugly stitches and the fluorescent hum and the blood drying on both of us become the most sacred place I’ve ever been.