Chapter 6
Ivy
I’m sitting cross-legged on the cot, sketching a cross-section of a neuron synapse during neurotransmitter release.
He gave me this notebook yesterday without me asking — just set it on the bed next to a pencil and walked away.
I never knew how grateful I could be for a notebook.
In science, everything is clean. Diagrams don’t lie.
Synapses don’t play power games. The dopamine either fires or it doesn’t.
He’s been pacing. Not nervously — he doesn’t seem like a man who does anything nervously — but restlessly, touching his scar, checking the monitors, glancing at me. I raise my eyes every time and try to read what’s going on behind those black ones, but he stays locked tight.
Then he sighs, grabs his jacket, and walks out.
The door closes, and I stare at it for a moment. He left. He actually left me alone. Is this a test? Is he standing on the other side, waiting to see what I do?
I look at the door, then at the window, then at the door again. My legs tense.
But where would I go? This factory is the most freedom I’ve ever had. No one watching, no one performing, no one measuring my value per square inch. Just me and a notebook and a concrete room that smells like motor oil and cold metal.
I go back to sketching, but the neurons start looking the same, and I’m mostly just filling the silence with the sound of pencil on paper. My stomach growls. I can’t remember the last time I ate.
The door opens and I look up. “You left. Bold move.”
He crosses to the folding table and sets down takeout containers, arranging them with that systematic precision that is so entirely him it’s almost funny. He ordered food. During a kidnapping.
“You’re not going anywhere.” He doesn’t look at me when he says it. “Not because you can’t. Because you don’t want to.”
He’s right, and my chest tightens at the fact that he knows it.
The smell hits me. Pad Thai, dumplings, lo mein, spring rolls — sesame oil, peanut sauce and ginger, filling the factory like the room. My stomach betrays me with a sound that could wake the dead. He doesn’t comment, but I think I catch his mouth twitch.
“Come here.”
Not a command. An invitation. There’s a difference and he’s choosing the right one.
I cross the room and sit in the folding chair across from him.
His mask is off — he’s kept it off since the ransom call.
In the warm light from the single bulb above us, his scar looks different.
Not brutal. Almost molten, like silver that was poured and set wrong.
My fingers itch. I want to trace it, feel whether it’s warm or cold, how deep it goes. Anatomical curiosity.
Liar.
“Eat.”
I reach for the chopsticks and his hand closes around my wrist. Warm. Rough. The calluses press into my skin, and something hums through my nervous system, low and insistent.
“Not yet.”
“What?”
He pulls zip-ties from his pocket and I stare at them, then at him. “Partners. But you’re still my hostage.”
I give him a sharp look. I already proved I won’t run. I’m not going to hurt the only person who’s offered to help me. We got past this.
Except we didn’t, because this isn’t about security and we both know it. He doesn’t think I’m going to grab a knife and stab him. He wants to see if I’ll let him — if I’ll choose to surrender the little control I have, here, at a folding table, over takeout.
“You’re going to feed me.”
“Yes.”
If he wants a game, I’ll give him one.
I extend my wrists, palms up.
He zips them tight enough to hold but looser than last time, and his fingers brush my pulse point and the tingle runs all the way through me. I almost wish he’d put his gloves back on.
Then he reaches for the voice modulator clipped to his collar and switches it off. The humming stops. The silence that follows is enormous, like something physical being removed from the room.
He picks up the chopsticks, takes a dumpling, and brings it to my lips.
“Open.”
His voice. His real voice, without distortion.
Deep and rough, like gravel dragged across something raw.
It vibrates somewhere in my chest, and I have to force myself not to flinch — he sounds nothing like the robotic growl I’ve been hearing for two days.
He sounds like a person. A damaged, low-voiced, dangerously warm person.
I open my mouth.
The dumpling is hot, sesame oil bursting against my tongue, and after two days of nothing it’s so good my eyes nearly close. I chew slowly, swallow, and meet his gaze. He’s watching my mouth. He looks away the second I catch him.
He feeds me Pad Thai next — noodles, peanut sauce, and the faint heat of chilli. His hands are almost steady. Almost. I can see the micro-tremor in his fingers when he brings the chopsticks close to my lips, and I know this is affecting him. He’s just better at hiding it than most people.
Not better than me, though. I notice everything.
A rhythm forms. Bite, chew, swallow. He alternates dishes without asking but pays attention — when I lean slightly toward the dumplings, he gives me more of those. Neither of us speaks. The silence buzzes between us, filling the space like static.
This is more intimate than the strip search. That was vulnerability forced by circumstance. This is vulnerability by choice — I’m letting a man who kidnapped me put food in my mouth with his hands, and it feels like I’ve been starving for far longer than two days.
The taste of peanut sauce blooms on my tongue and I lose a sound. Soft, involuntary. A moan I didn’t give permission to. His jaw flexes visibly, the scar pulling, and he looks away. I cross my legs under the table.
When he reaches for the spring rolls, his sleeve rides up.
Purple-black bruising across his forearm. Fresh. The pattern is immediately readable to me. “You’re hurt.”
He pulls his sleeve down. “It’s nothing.”
“Let me see.”
“No.” He shifts in his seat, flustered in a way I haven’t seen from him before. The observer doesn’t like being observed.
I lean forward, my bound hands gripping the table edge, and get in his face. “I showed you my scalpel. Show me.”
His lips twitch. He rolls his eyes, lets out an exasperated breath, and pushes his sleeve up.
“Metacarpal impact.” I study the bruising, the swelling pattern, and the discoloration. “What did you punch?”
“A wall.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“After the call with your father.”
Something shifts in my chest. He punched a wall because Malachi didn’t ask if I was okay. This man — who took me off a balcony and zip-tied my wrists and is holding me in a warehouse — was angry enough on my behalf to break his own hand on concrete.
“That’s stupid,” I say, softer than I mean to.
“Probably.” He shoves his arm closer to my face, letting me look, like he’s hoping the clinical examination will distract me from what it means. It doesn’t.
“Your turn.”
“I don’t —”
“Who touched you?”
Direct. No room to dodge. I swallow. “Harlow. He was… enthusiastic about the merger.”
The change is instant. Every muscle in his neck and jaw constricts, pulling the scar taut. His nostrils flare. The man sitting across from me disappears and something else takes his place — something cold and calculated and very still.
“Where does he live?”
“Why?” I flutter my lashes, knowing exactly why but wanting to hear him say it. Needing to.
“Because I’m paying him a visit when this is over.”
Flat. Cold. The voice of a man who means it the way surgeons mean we need to operate — not emotional, just true. My heart does something it hasn’t done in a long time. It stutters.
“I have his address,” I say, and the words are out before I can stop them. “And a lot more.”
“What do you mean?”
Can’t go back now. “I keep records. On all of my father’s associates. Everything you’d need to make them disappear.”
The look that crosses his face isn’t the way men usually look at me — not appraising, not calculating what I’m worth. He’s looking at me like I just revealed a weapon he didn’t know existed.
“How long have you been planning this?”
“Seven years.”
He goes still. “Show me.”
“When the time is right.”
He nods, respects it, doesn’t push. His eyes stay on mine and every muscle in his body contracts slightly, making him look bigger, more present.
I’ve seen him in tactical mode — efficient, contained.
This is different. This is a man who just found out the girl he kidnapped has been building a kill list for seven years.
He picks up the last dumpling, dips it in peanut sauce, and brings it to my lips. I take it. But this time his gaze doesn’t leave my mouth, and the intensity of it stops me mid-chew, heat spreading through my chest and lower.
His hand moves. Slowly. His thumb reaches my lower lip and wipes the sauce from the corner of my mouth.
Everything stops.
His thumb is rough, calloused, warm, and it stays on my lip half a second longer than it needs to.
My lungs forget how to work. My stomach twists.
My wrists are bound, and his thumb is on my mouth and I can feel both our pulses — mine through my throat, his through the pad of his finger — and they’re both too fast.
Something is happening behind his eyes. A war. I can see the moment he catches himself, the way his jaw tightens, the way he pulls his hand back like my skin burned him.
“You should sleep.”
He cuts my zip-ties in one motion, and I inhale sharply, my hands suddenly free and feeling strangely empty without the restraints.
I watch him pack away the containers. Methodical. Controlled. Putting the professional back together piece by piece.
I walk to the cot on legs that aren’t entirely steady and lie down, turning my back to him, facing the brick wall. Behind me, I hear him settle at his desk and the monitors hum back to life.
I touch my lip. The place where his thumb was. It’s still warm. Or maybe I’m imagining it — maybe I want it to still be warm because that would mean it happened, it was real, and I’m not just building something out of nothing the way lonely people do.
He fed me with hands that have killed. He bound my wrists and I let him. He wiped sauce from my mouth with his thumb and for half a second neither of us breathed.
I don’t think I’m a hostage anymore. I don’t know what I am. But I know that when his thumb touched my lip, I didn’t want him to stop. And that scares me more than anything Malachi or Harlow have ever done.
I close my eyes. His voice is still in my ears — the real one, without the machine. Deep, rough, warm. I fall asleep to the sound of him breathing on the other side of the room.