Chapter 19 #2
The villa has white walls, a terracotta roof, and lots of greenery. It’s smaller than the Vane Estate, which is the point. There are no glass walls and no floor-to-ceiling windows designed to make the owner visible. This looks like a place where people live, not perform.
I clear each room before I let her inside. She waits at the door without being asked, which means she’s been paying attention. When I gesture her in, she walks through the space the way she walks through everything — touching surfaces to learn the layout with her hands.
The living room and kitchen spill into one another, airy and open, leading her toward the sliding glass doors and the ocean beyond.
Her fingers trail over rattan furniture and cool white linen.
Above us, the slow whir of ceiling fans fights the humidity.
I watch her reach the hallway, where two bedrooms sit like bookends on opposite ends of the house.
She stops in the middle of the house, drops the bag at her feet, and wraps her arms around herself. She looks small and lost. Ivy’s free for the first time in her life and she has no idea what to do with it.
“What do we do now?” Her voice is barely a whisper.
“Whatever you want.”
The words hit her physically. I watch her flinch — not from fear, but from the foreign weight of choice. Nobody has ever said that to her. Nobody has ever said it to me, either.
Without a word or a plan, we both start moving. She opens the cupboards, inventorying supplies. I check the locks and stash weapons in accessible locations. We move around each other without colliding. It feels like a choreography neither of us rehearsed.
“We need food,” she says.
“I’ll go. You stay inside today.”
She knows Silas’s people could be anywhere.
“And Killian? Get real coffee. Whatever’s in those cupboards is an insult.”
Something close to a smile touches my mouth. I nod and leave, trading the air-conditioned quiet of the house for the aggressive, humid roar of the island. I spend the next hour moving through the tourist crowds, my eyes scanning every face for a threat that hasn't found us yet.
When I come back with supplies, she’s on the back deck, staring at the ocean. Her phone is in her hand, but the screen is dark. She’s been looking at it — I can tell by the way she’s holding it, defeated, like something she checked and found empty.
She checked Ghost’s profile. The ghost is gone, and the silence is killing her.
I stand in the kitchen doorway watching her and the guilt is so heavy it changes the way I breathe. She’s mourning me. Sitting on a deck in the Caribbean, surrounded by turquoise water and plumeria flowers, mourning a man who’s standing ten feet behind her carrying grocery bags.
Tell her.
Not yet.
When?
I don’t have an answer. I just have the groceries, the lie, and the view of her small frame against the ocean.
The silence stretches until the plastic handles of the grocery bags start to bite into my fingers. I turn toward the counter, the crinkle of paper breaking the spell, and start pulling out bread and meat.
We eat the sandwiches standing up, propped against the kitchen tile while we talk logistics. Tomorrow’s bank appointment. Laptop security. Account access protocols. We cling to the immediate, practical things — anything to keep us from discussing the conversations that actually matter.
Ghost. Silas. The almost-kiss. The “no secrets” promise that’s sitting between us like an unexploded device.
The exhaustion is showing on both of us.
The last three days are catching up — the Ghost ride, the reunion, the shared bed, Silas’s threat, the flight, the heat, and the disorientation of being somewhere safe for the first time and not knowing what to do with safety.
We both sigh at the same time and look at each other.
“There are two bedrooms,” I say.
“I saw.” Her voice flattens.
“I’ll take the one by the back entrance.”
I watch the disappointment cross her face before she can hide it.
She wanted me to ask. She wanted me to say same bed, like last night, because we both sleep better when we’re not alone.
And I want to say it. The memory of her weight on my chest is still warm and real.
Those were the best four hours of sleep I’ve ever had.
But I can’t. Because last night I made a promise I haven’t kept and every time I get closer to her, the lie gets closer too.
“Goodnight,” she says, and turns before I can see anything else on her face.
“Goodnight. I’ll be awake for a while. In case you need anything.”
She stops but doesn’t turn around. Something in her posture says you. I need you. Then she walks to her room and closes the door, before opening it again, and leaving it cracked.
I sit in the living room with my back against the wall and a weapon in my hand. The villa is quiet — the only sounds are the ocean waves, insects buzzing, and the low hum of ceiling fans.
Her door is cracked. She left it open for me.
She trusts me. After everything — the kidnapping, the killing, the lies she doesn’t know about yet — she trusts me enough to leave her door open while she sleeps. And I’m sitting here in the dark, guarding it like a dog, because that’s the only version of care I know how to perform.
I check my phone. By now Silas knows we’re gone. His team hit the estate at sundown and found empty rooms and the ghost of an empire Ivy dismantled in three days. The clock is ticking. We have weeks, maybe. A month if we’re lucky.
If I focus, I can hear her breathing through the crack in the door. She’s awake, lying in the dark in a strange bed in a strange country, staring at the ceiling the same way I’m staring at her door.
I took her from her balcony and now I’m in a Caribbean villa, unable to sleep, watching the gap in her door, wanting to cross the hallway so badly my legs ache with it.
I wasn’t trained for this. I was trained for extraction, elimination, and surveillance.
Not for this — this thing where my chest hurts when she’s in the next room and my hands remember the shape of her waist and my brain replays the sound of her breathing against my chest on an endless loop.
I don’t know what this is. I don’t know what we are. I know what I want us to be, but there’s a lie standing between here and there, and every day I don’t tell her is another day the lie grows roots.
Tomorrow, she’ll access the accounts and she’ll be brilliant and terrifying. Tomorrow, we start building whatever comes next. And maybe — maybe — her mourning for Ghost will ease. Maybe Killian will be enough on his own. Maybe she’ll stop reaching for her phone and start reaching for me.
Or maybe I’ll stop being a coward and tell her the truth.
The cracked door glows faintly with moonlight. Behind it, the woman who thinks she’s mourning a stranger is breathing in the dark, twenty feet from the man who was that stranger all along.
I should cross the hallway. I should open the door. I should lie down beside her and tell her everything — the screenshots, the binoculars, the Panigale, the midnight rides, the messages that kept her alive when she thought she was alone.
Instead, I sit in the dark with the gun in my hand and the lie in my chest and I watch the crack in her door until the Caribbean dawn starts bleeding through the windows.
I was a ghost and now I’m just a man who doesn’t deserve the woman sleeping in the next room but can’t bring himself to leave.