Chapter 5
Killian
Fourth coffee. The monitors are burning my eyes and I haven’t slept, which is standard procedure on a job, but this time the sleeplessness has a different texture. Heavier. Her scalpel sits on the desk beside my laptop, catching the light every time I shift. I keep looking at it.
This is a job. She’s an asset. Focus.
I glance in her direction. She hasn’t slept either.
She’s been lying on the cot for hours, staring at the ceiling, completely silent — no escape attempts, no negotiation, no tears.
Just that unnerving stillness, like someone set her down and forgot about her.
Except dolls don’t have pulse points I can see from across the room.
The police showed up at the estate at 6:47 AM — one of the housekeepers flagged her absence. I’ve been watching the feeds. Squad cars in the driveway, officers moving through the grounds. Malachi appeared at the front door in a robe looking more inconvenienced than concerned. Interesting.
It’s time to make the call.
I go over the setup one more time. Voice distortion humming and ready, burner phone, VPN routed through seven countries. I’ve done this a hundred times. Identify, demand, timeline, threat, hang up. Clean and simple.
My hand is unsteady on the phone.
I look at her again. She’s sitting up now, watching me, the doll mask back in place — expression blank, eyes a washed-out gray, not a flicker of emotion. But her knees are drawn to her chest, her head resting on them, and the posture makes her look smaller than she is.
Whatever he says, don’t believe it. You’re worth more than any number.
The words almost make it out of my mouth. I swallow them and make the call. The ring reverberates through the factory.
“Who is this?” Irritated. Not panicked, not desperate. Irritated, like I’m interrupting his morning.
“The man who has your daughter.”
There’s a brief pause, and then his voice comes back flat and measured. “What do you want?”
“Fifty million. Cryptocurrency. You have five days.” I let that land. “Proof of life every twenty-four hours. No further police involvement beyond what’s already happened.”
Silence. I brace for the demands, the threats, some version of please don’t hurt my little girl — anything that proves this man has a pulse connected to a heart.
“Fifty million is significant, don’t you think?”
He’s negotiating. His daughter is zip-tied in a warehouse and he’s running a cost-benefit analysis.
“This will generate significant press attention. I assume you understand that the optics can be… problematic.” A pause. “She must be returned in pristine condition. I need assurances.”
Pristine condition.
Like she’s a painting he loaned out and wants back without scratches. My blood goes cold, then hot, then something beyond temperature. I glance at her. She’s motionless, face empty — but her hands are clenched so tight her knuckles have gone white.
“You haven’t asked if she’s hurt.”
The edge in my distorted voice surprises even me.
A pause. Then, with the tone of someone being reminded to tick a box, “Is she?”
“No.”
“Good. Then we can proceed in a rational manner. It will take forty-eight hours to liquidate the necessary assets. I trust you’ll keep her comfortable.”
Comfortable. My jaw clenches and my fingers find the scar, tracing it through the mask. This man is discussing his daughter’s kidnapping with the emotional range of a quarterly earnings call.
I drop my voice to something dangerous. “Let me be clear. Five days. Not six. Not seven. Every hour you delay, I get creative with how I spend my time.” A pause. “And your daughter is… something.”
A sharp intake of breath — the first sign that anything human lives inside Malachi Vane. “If you hurt her —”
“Then pay on time.”
I end the call, drop the phone on the concrete, and crush it under my boot. The crack echoes through the factory and then there’s nothing. Just silence, heavy as a body, pressing down on both of us.
Every word. She heard every word.
I stand and turn to face her, waiting for the collapse — the tears, the shaking, what happens when someone hears their own father put a price on their life and find the number inconvenient.
She stands. Her face is stone.
“He didn’t ask if I was hurt.”
“No. He didn’t.”
“He asked about my condition.” She starts walking toward me, slow and deliberate, eyes locked on mine. Not a hostage approaching her captor — something else entirely. “Do you know what ‘pristine condition’ means in his world?”
I shake my head, though I can guess. After seeing her body — the curated perfection, the absence of any mark — I can guess.
“No scars. No marks. No damage to his investment.” Her voice is so calm it makes my skin crawl, and I can see that the calm is costing her something — I catch it in the tension along her jaw.
“I’m not his daughter. I’m a trading coin.
My body for a merger. He was going to marry me off to James Harlow in ninety days.
So, when you said you’d get creative?” A beat.
“He wasn’t worried about me. He was worried about his deal. ”
The rage that moves through me has nothing to do with this job.
It’s aimed at Malachi, at Harlow, at every man who’s ever appraised her and found the price acceptable.
And at myself — because I just used her as leverage on a phone call, which makes me another man in a long line of men who’ve used her body to get what they want.
“I won’t hurt you.”
The words come out rough and honest, and before the decision fully forms, I’ve already done what I’m about to do. My fingers grip the tactical mask. I pause for half a second, then pull it off.
The morning light hits my face, and I feel every inch of the scar — lip to jaw to neck, jagged, silver-white, ugly in daylight. Uglier than it is in the dark, where shadows are generous. I close my eyes and brace for the flinch, the recoil, the look that says monster.
She studies me. The way she studied the scar through the mask, the way she studied my forearms — with the focused calm of a surgeon assessing a wound. Her gaze traces the line from the corner of my mouth down to my jaw and my neck, following it like she’s reading a map.
She doesn’t flinch.
“If you wanted to hurt me, you already would have.”
Something cracks in my chest. Not breaks — cracks. Like ice under pressure, the kind that doesn’t shatter all at once but lets you know what’s coming.
We’re too close again. Every conversation with this woman ends with us too close and me not quite remembering how we got there.
“How much of that fifty million were you planning to keep?”
Direct, no preamble. I almost respect her for it. “Thirty percent. The rest goes to my employer.”
“You have an employer.” Not a question. She files it away behind those gray eyes, the way she files everything.
“I need enough to disappear,” I say, and I don’t know why I’m telling her this. She’s the hostage. But her father’s voice is still in my head — pristine condition — and the mask is off, and my face is bare, and I feel like I owe her one honest thing.
“Disappear from what?”
I don’t answer. Some truths are too dangerous, even for a woman who carries a scalpel in her garter.
“You should eat something.” I nod toward the protein bar on the table.
“I’m not hungry.” She watches me for a long beat, and I can see something forming behind her eyes, something that’s been building since before I took her off that balcony. “But I’ll make you a deal.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“You want fifty million from my father’s accounts. I can double that. Maybe more.” She lets it sit. “You help me destroy him. I help you get rich enough to disappear from whomever you need to disappear from.” A beat. “Partners.”
I stare at her. This woman — half my size, barefoot in a nightgown, standing in a warehouse where I’m holding her captive — just pitched me a murder with the composure of someone ordering coffee.
I shouldn’t believe her. I should say no. I should stick to Silas’s plan, collect my thirty percent, and disappear the way I’ve been planning for a decade. Taking a deal from the hostage is the kind of decision that gets people buried in shallow graves.
I extend my hand.
“Partners.”
Her hand grips mine — small, cold, steady. Mine is scarred, twice the size of hers, and trembling just enough that I end the handshake before she notices.
She noticed.
She turns and walks back to the cot, sitting down and folding her hands in her lap. Composure intact. Like she didn’t just recruit her own kidnapper.
I stand in the middle of the factory with the morning light cutting through the frosted glass, trying to process what just happened. Silas gave me a job — drain the accounts, grab the girl, kill the father. Simple and clean.
The girl just rewrote the entire operation in under two minutes.
And the part that should scare me is that I don’t want to go back to the original plan. I want to watch her take Malachi apart. I want to see what she looks like when she’s free.
Her scalpel is still on my desk, catching the light.
I’m in trouble.