Chapter 9
Ivy
I wake from a dream where my father’s blood was on my hands, and I wasn’t washing it off. I was studying the color.
Killian is at his desk, surrounded by maps and blueprints of the warehouse district, his monitors splitting between the estate surveillance and police activity.
He’s been awake for hours — maybe all night.
The coffee cup beside him has a ring of dried residue that tells me it’s been refilled at least three times.
I watch him from the cot without moving.
His focus is different today. Yesterday we were two people circling each other, testing, negotiating.
This morning he’s working like I’m already part of the machine — his shoulders are looser, his jaw isn’t locked, and he hasn’t touched his scar once since I’ve been watching. That’s a first.
His name keeps forming in my mouth. Killian. I say it silently, testing the weight of it. It fits him the way a scar fits skin — permanent, earned, slightly dangerous.
He senses me watching. Our eyes lock and something passes between us that neither of us names.
“Ready to become very rich?”
We set up the folding table in the center of the room. Two chairs, side by side — not across from each other. Equals. He lays out maps, burner phones, and his laptop. I bring the notebook and sit down, arranging what I know into the order it needs to be in.
Killian starts with logistics. “Malachi arrives at the docks at dawn. I verify the fifty million he transfers. Once confirmed, I reveal you’re alive. The moment he sees you, I take the shot. Quick, clean.”
“Headshot or chest?”
A flicker of surprise crosses his face — not horror, just a half-second recalibration of whom he thinks I am. “Centre mass. Two shots. More reliable.”
I study him for hesitation, doubt, anything that says he might not follow through. There’s nothing. Just confidence and something that looks like anticipation — the same look I imagine on a surgeon’s face before a procedure they’ve rehearsed a thousand times.
“He’ll bring two men. Both armed, but they won’t draw unless provoked.”
There’s something on his face that looks a lot like pride. It makes my chest tighten in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
I focus on the screen in front of me and start typing. Multiple VPNs layered, burner phones lined up for authentication codes, the encrypted browser open and waiting. My fingers hover over the keyboard for one second — not hesitation, ritual — and then I log into the first Cayman account.
The security protocols fall like dominos. I navigate them the way he navigates a building — muscle memory, every wall mapped, every lock anticipated. My pulse is elevated and I can feel it in my neck, but my hands are steady.
“The trick isn’t getting in,” I say, rerouting the first ten million through seven different countries. “It’s leaving no trace.”
I convert the transfer to Monero, then back into dollars in the secure account. The whole process takes four minutes. When the confirmation screen appears, I lean back and show him.
His eyes widen — pure, unguarded shock, the expression so genuine that something warm blooms in my chest. I just made him look like a kid watching a magic trick.
“The first transfer is done. Fifteen to go.”
I let myself smile. A real one, the first in longer than I can remember.
Each transfer feels like a lock breaking — not on a door, but on my ribcage.
Every dollar moved is another chain I didn’t know I was wearing falling away.
I’m not just stealing from my father. I’m taking back the years he stole from me, converted to currency, routed through shell companies, deposited in an account with my name on it.
While we wait between transfers — spacing them to avoid triggering flags — we drink coffee and eat protein bars.
They aren’t as bad as I thought, or maybe everything tastes better when you’re dismantling your father’s empire.
We sit side by side with our shoulders almost touching, and the silence is the most comfortable thing I’ve felt in years.
Killian sighs — not a tired sigh, a preparatory one, like he’s loosening something inside before it can come out. He’s looking at the monitors, not at me.
“I told you Silas found me when I was ten. Made me into a weapon.” A pause. “I didn’t tell you what that looked like.”
I don’t speak. Don’t move. Don’t do anything that might make him stop. Why is he telling me this?
“Combat drills started at dawn. Every day. Failure meant punishment — not the kind you argue with. The kind that leaves marks.” His jaw is tight, but his voice is flat, detached, like he’s reading a report about someone else.
“He made me kill a man when I was fourteen. A homeless man. Silas said he had no value.”
His hands tremble slightly. The rest of him is stone.
“A boy living on the streets, ordered to kill another man living on the streets.” I say it quietly, not as commentary but as recognition — because that’s what Silas did.
He took someone the world said had no value and made him prove it by destroying someone else the world said had no value.
Both their lives were worth exactly as much as Silas decided they were.
I reach out and touch the tattoo on his forearm — the one hiding the cigar burns. His muscle flexes under my fingers, but he doesn’t pull away, and his eyes find mine, searching for something. I know what he’s looking for. Pity. He won’t find it.
“Malachi was more subtle,” I say, because recognition is the only thing I can offer that won’t insult him. “No cigar burns. Just psychological ones. The kind that don’t show on skin but eat you from the inside.”
Why am I telling him this?
I take a breath. “My mom killed herself when I was fifteen. He did the same thing to her that he does to me. She couldn’t survive it.
” My voice is steady. Clinical. I’ve told this story to myself so many times it’s calcified.
“She left a note. Fly, Ivy, before he clips your wings. I’ve been trying to fly ever since.
He just keeps breaking them when I get too close. ”
The silence that follows is different from any we’ve shared. Not comfortable, not tense. Something more careful than either of those, like the air between us recognizes what we just put into it.
His arm softens under my touch. My heart skips and I can feel his pulse under my fingertips, faster than his face admits. He understands me — not because I explained myself well, but because his damage is the same shape as mine.
He touches my hand. Briefly. Then clears his throat. “We should get back to work.”
I open the Ledger — the electronic copy, encrypted, backed up in three locations. I turn the laptop toward him and let him see.
Names. Dates. Crimes. Weaknesses. Medical conditions, financial vulnerabilities, thousands of data points catalogued with the precision of someone who’s been building a case — or a kill list — for seven years.
“Forty-three men. All connected to my father. All complicit.” I scroll slowly, letting the scope of it settle. “These men discussed my value while looking at me like merchandise. They shook his hand knowing what he was doing. Not one of them intervened.”
I turn to face him. “After Malachi — after we disappear — I want to hunt them. One by one. And I want you beside me.” I hold his gaze. “I’m not a damsel. I’m not a socialite who got lucky with a kidnapper. I want to burn every one of these men down.”
If he wants to walk away after Malachi dies, I’ll do the rest myself. But if he’s in, he needs to know what in looks like.
He looks at the screen. At the names. At the scope of what I’m asking. “Show me the first name.”
The relief that moves through me is quiet but total.
The hours blur. I alternate between draining accounts and walking him through the Ledger while he cleans his weapons beside me.
The ritual of it — his hands disassembling and reassembling the gun with the same precision my hands use on a keyboard — is strangely comforting.
Controlled violence, calibrated and purposeful. We’re the same.
“Tomorrow I’ll watch my father die.” I say it out loud because I need to hear how it sounds.
He looks at me and studies my face the way I study his scar. “Are you ready for that?”
“Are you?”
A challenge in both directions. He nods. I nod. Neither of us smiles, but something passes between us that’s warmer than a smile — an understanding that doesn’t need words because words would only make it smaller.
I turn back to the laptop. Another transfer processing. Another lock breaking.
Tomorrow, my father dies. Tomorrow, the cage opens. And the man sitting beside me — cleaning a gun with hands that have killed, hands that fed me dumplings, hands that trembled when I touched his scars — is the reason I’ll be able to walk through the door.
I don’t know what to call this thing between us. Trust is too clean a word for two people broken by men who were supposed to love them. It’s something rawer than that, something that recognizes itself in the wreckage.