Chapter 7
Ivy
I’ve been awake since dawn because my body doesn’t know how to do anything else — chronic insomnia doesn’t care that I’ve changed locations. It just recalibrates to the new environment and keeps me staring at brick walls instead of glass ones.
He’s at his desk, typing aggressively and monitoring the feeds. He hasn’t slept either. The shadows under his eyes are getting darker by the day and the smell of black coffee has become a permanent feature of the room, as constant as the concrete and the hum of his equipment.
He keeps touching his scar. The same unconscious gesture, over and over — fingers tracing the line from lip to jaw.
It’s his version of my pulse-checking. We both have our tells.
My hand drifts to my neck without permission, pressing against the steady beat, and yesterday floods back.
His thumb. My lip. The way neither of us breathed.
We haven’t spoken since. The only sounds are his keyboard and my pencil scratching the paper as I sketch. It’s a comfortable silence, which is the part that unsettles me.
Comfortable silence with your kidnapper. Sure, Ivy. Completely normal.
I should be planning my next move, thinking about what happens after the money lands.
Instead, I keep memorizing the way his shoulders tense when something on the monitors bothers him, the way his jaw works when he’s thinking, the way his hands move across the keyboard — fast, precise, almost violent.
What is wrong with me?
He stands abruptly. “I need to make a supply run.” He looks at me on the way out. “Don’t try the door. It’s biometrically locked.”
He already left me here unsupervised once. He knows I didn’t try to escape. What reason would he have to worry about the door now?
“What if there’s a fire?”
“Burn beautifully.”
I’m almost certain I see a smile start on his lips before he turns and leaves. The door closes. The motorcycle starts outside, revs, and fades.
I wait five minutes, then I get up and go to the door to check the lock again. Biometric, my ass. It’s a keypad lock. I watched him enter the code twice without him bothering to hide it, which means either he’s careless or he’s testing me. He’s not careless.
I turn away from the door. Not because I can’t open it. Because I don’t want to.
What I want is information. I need to know what he’s planning, need to make sure our partnership isn’t just a leash with a nicer name. My hands are sweating as I cross to his workstation, because I know what I’m about to do.
The monitors show surveillance feeds, news coverage, encrypted files — standard operational setup. But what catches my eye is the small voice recorder beside his laptop, the red light blinking, still recording.
Mercenaries keep operational logs. Plans, assessments, tactical notes. He’s been recording during the few hours I actually sleep.
I stare at the recorder. This is a breach of privacy. A violation of whatever fragile thing we’re building between us. But he kidnapped me. Fair’s fair.
I press rewind. Then play. His voice fills the room. The real one — deep, rough, stripped of the modulator.
Operational log. Day four. Vane contract.
Malachi Vane has forty-eight hours remaining. Intel suggests he’s liquidating assets. Complying with demands. Exchange is scheduled day six, warehouse district, dawn.
A pause.
Standard protocol: secure payment, release hostage, eliminate primary target post-exchange. Untraceable.
Another pause, longer. The chair creaks.
Standard protocol stopped being applicable the moment I saw her face in that file.
My breath catches.
Silas expects Malachi Vane killed at the exchange. That hasn’t changed. The man earned what’s coming.
A beat.
What has changed: standard witness protocol. No loose ends. That’s the standing order.
My heart rate spikes so hard I can hear it. Standard witness protocol. No loose ends. That means —
I’m not killing Ivy Vane.
My name in his voice. My name in that rough, quiet voice, spoken to an empty room while I was asleep. Something drops inside my chest.
This is insubordination. First contract I’ve ever altered for personal reasons.
A bitter laugh, short and dark. It makes me flinch.
I told myself I’m keeping her alive for tactical advantage. She knows Vane’s network, his accounts. Useful intel.
Silence. Three seconds. Four.
That’s a lie. I’m keeping her alive because the thought of her not existing in this world makes me want to burn the rest of it down.
I set the recorder on the desk because my hands are shaking too hard to hold it.
She’s… mine.
End log.
Click.
I stare at the recorder. The silence in the factory is absolute.
Mine.
He said it like he was confessing to a crime. Like the word itself was something dangerous he’d been keeping in a locked room, and it got out while he wasn’t watching.
I should be horrified. He was hired to kill me. The standing order is no loose ends, and he’s defying it, which means he’s risking his life — his freedom, his escape plan, everything — for a girl he’s known for four days.
The horror doesn’t come.
What comes instead is relief. A long breath I’ve been holding for seven years leaves my body and I feel my spine soften against his chair.
My father is going to die. Not maybe, not someday, not in some fantasy I play out while sharpening scalpels at three in the morning.
He is going to die, and this man is going to do it, and I don’t have to be alone anymore.
The joy that follows the relief is dark and deformed. I should be ashamed of it. I’m not.
Then the next thought hits, colder — I’m happy that someone is going to kill my only living parent. I’m not planning to stop it. I’m planning to help.
I wait for the guilt, but it doesn’t come.
Malachi Vane drove my mother to suicide.
He caged me for seven years. He traded me like livestock for a merger.
He kept my skin pristine because damaged goods sell for less.
He brought this on himself the moment he decided his daughter was his best return on investment.
And me? I’ve been planning a massacre for seven years and the only thing that stopped me was being alone. But I’m not alone anymore.
The motorcycle hums outside. My pulse jumps. I place the recorder exactly where it was, check the angle, check the chair position, cross back to the cot, pick up the notebook, and start sketching. My hand is steadier than it should be.
The door opens.
“Behave yourself while I was gone?”
“Burned the place twice, flooded it once. Got bored. Rebuilt it.”
His lips start forming a smile and stop at the last second. “Smart ass.”
I give him a grin, tongue between my teeth, playing the part. The girl who doesn’t know what she knows.
He’s carrying grocery bags, and he unpacks everything with the same methodical precision he applies to everything — each item placed deliberately, efficiently, like a man who learned to organize his life because the alternative was chaos he couldn’t survive.
I watch him and replay his words in my head.
She’s… mine.
He doesn’t know I heard it. He doesn’t know I’m sitting here with his confession burning inside me like something swallowed too hot. I’ll keep this for now. Let him come to me on his own terms.
Everyone thinks I’m a victim or an asset. He thinks I’m his. He’s wrong about that. But not in the way he’d expect.
I’m not a victim. I’m not an asset. I’m not his. I’m a woman with a hit list and surgeon’s hands, and the man unpacking groceries in front of me is the weapon I’ve been waiting for.
He is my scalpel.