Chapter 12
Ivy
Blue and red lights are pulsing against the gray morning. Somebody puts a blanket over my shoulders, and it’s too heavy, wrong weight, wrong texture — not the scratchy wool from the factory cot.
A woman is talking to me. Officer Martinez — I read her name tag because reading is automatic, because my brain hasn’t caught up with the fact that I’m supposed to be in shock and keeps cataloguing details like it’s collecting evidence.
She’s asking if I’m hurt, if the captor is nearby, if I know where I was held.
I answer. My mouth makes the right sounds. Cracked voice, trembling pauses, wide eyes. I don’t know where the performance ends and the numbness begins.
Killian left thirty-seven minutes ago. The bench is cold under me.
My pulse is too steady for a traumatized victim, and I try to make it race, but my body won’t cooperate — it’s stuck somewhere between the park and the warehouse floor, between the sound of his engine fading and the silence of my father’s stopped heart.
Someone guides me into an ambulance. The doors close and the siren doesn’t start because I’m not an emergency. I’m a situation.
The smell of the hospital — disinfectant, latex, and something underneath that reminds me of my lab.
I know this equipment — the swabs, the photography protocols, the chain of evidence procedures.
I’ve studied them from the other side, the clinical side, the side that collects and analyses. Now I’m the specimen.
Dr. Chen’s hands are gentle taking the swabs and I let her, because letting people do things to my body is what I’m built for. Hold still. Don’t react. Be pristine.
Time does something strange. It stops being linear.
The camera flash blends into the fluorescent tube which blends into the light from the broken warehouse windows where my father’s blood was catching the dawn.
I blink and I’m back in the examination room, but for a moment I was on the factory cot, and Killian was feeding me dumplings with steady hands and the world made sense.
Dr. Chen returns. Her mouth moves and the words arrive a beat later, like a badly synced film.
“…remarkably well. Minor bruising on the wrists from restraints. Mild dehydration. The sexual assault examination was negative.”
She leaves. I catch my reflection in the metal paper towel dispenser — warped, distorted, a fun house version of myself. I touch my forehead. He kissed me there. Ninety minutes ago, or nine hours ago. I can’t tell anymore.
I don’t remember the drive to the FBI office. One set of fluorescent lights replaced by another, a metal table, a one-way mirror, recording equipment, three chairs with two of them facing me.
Three faces. Webb — forties, sympathetic, with a soft approach. Park — early thirties, observational, taking notes. And Reeves. Late thirties. Sharp jaw, sharper eyes. She watches me the way I watch pulse points — looking for what’s hidden underneath.
Webb talks, his voice cotton wool. “…just need to understand… not in any danger… take your time…”
I nod and clasp my hands on the table and make sure they tremble.
“I was taken from my bedroom around 2 AM.” My voice cracks on taken. “I was held in some kind of warehouse or factory. I never saw outside. I had minimal contact with my captor. He fed me sometimes.” A long pause. “Then this morning he just… left me on the bench.”
Reeves hasn’t blinked.
Webb asks for his description. I’ve rehearsed this.
“Height?” “Maybe six feet? I’m not sure. I was terrified.”
Six-two.
“Build?” “Average, I think.”
Two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle.
“Hair?” “Blonde. I only saw his eyebrows.”
Black. Raven black.
“Eyes?” “Blue. Cold.”
Obsidian. The kind that pull you in.
“Face?” “He wore a tactical mask. The whole time. Never removed it.”
He took it off for me. His scar in the morning light looked like molten silver.
“Voice?” “Some kind of device. Made him sound robotic.”
His real voice is deep and rough, like gravel. It vibrates in your chest.
“Distinguishing marks?” “Nothing. Covered head to toe.”
Blackout tattoos hiding cigar burns. A scar from lip to jaw to neck. Hands that have killed more people than I can count, and trembled when I touched them.
Park asks if he ever removed the mask. I shake my head.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No. He was cold. Efficient. But not violent.” That one’s true. Technically.
Reeves speaks for the first time. Her voice cuts through the room like a scalpel through the soft approach.
“Miss Vane. Why did he let you go?”
“I don’t know. He took me to the park this morning without a word.” Pause. “Maybe he got scared.”
“Your father was reported missing this morning. We found his body at the warehouse district.” Her eyes don’t leave mine. “Were you there?”
My pulse spikes. Genuine, not performed. She’s good.
I slap my palm over my mouth. “I don’t — I don’t know where I was. I told you, I never saw outside.” My voice cracks, follow by a sob, and I can’t tell if it’s the act or real fear.
“The ransom was paid. Fifty million dollars. Then your captor kills your father and lets you walk away.” She tilts her head. “Doesn’t that seem unusual to you?”
Webb puts a hand on her shoulder. “Detective, Miss Vane is the victim here.”
“Of course. I apologize.” But her eyes never leave my face. She doesn’t believe me — I can feel it the way you feel a blade hovering above skin. Not touching yet, but the pressure is there.
After they wrap the interrogation up, an escort is assigned to drive me home. I stare at the Vane Estate through the window, and the glass walls stare back. With a sigh, I get out of the car and stand alone in front of forty thousand square feet of bad memories.
It looks different. Not because anything has changed — the architecture is identical, the landscaping immaculate, the ocean still crashing against the cliffs below.
It looks different because the man who owned it is dead on a warehouse floor and the air doesn’t know it yet.
The house is still holding its breath, waiting for Malachi to walk through the door.
He’s not coming. And the house doesn’t know it yet.
I step inside. The silence is enormous. Not the comfortable silence of the factory, where two people breathe in the same room and it’s enough. This is the silence of absence. Of rooms built to contain power that are now just… rooms.
I stand in the doorway of his office and wait for something to hit me — anger, grief, satisfaction. Nothing arrives. The room just looks smaller than I remember.
Turning around, I glance at the dining room. My chair was always to his left during the Sunday dinners with investors, close enough to touch and to steer. I’d sit with my hands folded and my smile fixed, counting heartbeats until I was allowed to leave.
Every room is a wound. I keep expecting to feel free. I keep waiting for the relief that hit me in the warehouse when I checked his pulse and found nothing. It was there, on the concrete floor next to his body. It’s not here.
This house ate the relief. The glass walls swallowed it. Because the cage is still standing — the man who built it is dead, but the cage is still standing, and I’m still inside it.
My bedroom has the same absence of evidence that anyone lives here. I walk to the closet and press the latch. The pivot wall opens and the lab lights flicker on and the sterile air hits me, and this — this — is the first thing that feels like mine since Killian’s lips left my forehead.
I sit at the table and pull out my phone. Hundreds of messages on Instagram flood my inbox from people who never cared and suddenly do because my name is on the news. I ignore all of them and open Ghost’s account.
His newest post is a black and white photo of his Ducati in the rain with the city lights smeared in the background. Some roads only make sense in the rearview. Always so cryptic. Always saying something I didn’t know I needed to hear.
I miss Ghost. I miss his words, the way he understood me without explanations, the way his messages felt like someone reaching through the screen and saying I see you. I haven’t spoken to him since before the kidnapping. He doesn’t know what happened. He doesn’t know I’m different now.
I open the DM and type fast before I can stop myself.
I’m back. Everything’s different. Wish I could ride away from all of it.
I stare at the screen, not expecting a reply, just needing someone to know some version of the truth.
What feels like a lifetime passes, then the screen lights up.
The road’s still there, Smoke. It waits.
My chest constricts. It shouldn’t make me feel this much — a stranger on the internet calling me by a name he made up months ago — but it does.
It makes me feel like two different people are holding me up right now.
Killian, wherever he is, with his forehead kiss and his two-week promise.
And Ghost, through a screen, telling me the road waits.
Two men. Both making me feel like I exist. Both reaching for me in the dark.
I lock the phone, close the lab behind me, and go into the bathroom.
Hot water hits my skin and it’s the first warmth I’m feeling since Killian’s thumb on my cheek.
The lily shower gel fills the bathroom and I breathe it in, but it’s wrong.
Everything smells wrong. The factory smelled like motor oil, concrete, coffee, and him.
This smells like money, performance, and a girl who doesn’t exist anymore.
The face looking back at me in the mirror is mine, but it doesn’t match. The woman who checked her father’s pulse on a warehouse floor is not the woman who lived in this bathroom for seven years. I can’t find the seam where one becomes the other.
I pull a black silk nightgown over my head and crash on the bed. Even the gray sheets smell wrong.
I touch my forehead. The place where his lips were. It doesn’t burn anymore. It aches — a slow, deep ache, like a bruise you keep pressing because the pain reminds you it happened.
I wonder if he’s safe. If he’s cleaning his guns, checking his monitors, or touching his scar the way he does when he’s thinking.
I wonder if he’s thinking about me. I wonder if the space between us feels as wrong to him as it does to me — like a limb that’s been removed and the nerves haven’t gotten the message yet.
I squeeze my eyes shut. The silk sheets feel like chains. The glass house still feels like a prison. But the cage door is open now, even if I can’t walk through it yet.
I keep my fingers on my forehead and try to fall asleep by remembering the exact pressure of his lips. The warmth. The way he said Little Moth like it was something fragile he was placing in my hands for safekeeping.
Sleep doesn’t come. But I keep trying, because tomorrow there will be more lights, more questions, more performing, and I need to save enough of myself to be real when he comes back.
He’ll come back.
The ceiling stares at me and I stare at the ceiling and somewhere in the city a man with a scar on his beautiful face is counting the same days I’m counting.
I have to believe that. It’s the only thing holding me together.