Chapter 21
Ivy
I’m counting the coffee drips. Sixty-three per minute. My brain does this automatically now — counts, catalogues, measures — because if it’s busy with numbers it can’t be busy with the man on the deck.
Killian is doing combat training. Shirtless. In the Caribbean morning light.
His movements are controlled and precise, each strike flowing into the next with a fluidity that shouldn’t be possible for someone his size.
The muscles in his back roll under the tattooed skin and I can see everything — the whip marks between his shoulder blades, the cigar burns the ink doesn’t fully hide, the way his body moves like a weapon that’s been sharpened for twenty years.
I’m staring. I know I’m staring. I tell myself it’s tactical assessment — understanding his combat style, noting the old injuries that affect his range of motion.
But that’s not why I’m staring. I’m staring because the sweat is tracking down his spine and pooling at the waistband of his tactical pants and my body is doing something that has nothing to do with tactical assessment.
My pulse is elevated. My skin is flushed.
And there’s a warmth spreading through my lower abdomen that I can explain clinically — increased blood flow to the pelvic region, vasocongestion of the —
Stop. Stop diagnosing yourself.
I pour two cups of coffee without thinking.
Black, no sugar for him. I know how he takes his coffee.
I know he doesn’t eat breakfast but drinks coffee until noon.
I know he checks the perimeter three times a day and positions himself between me and every door.
I know his sleep is restless, full of sharp breaths, like he’s fighting something in his nightmares that his body can’t let go of even when his mind does.
I know too much about this man. And my body knows things about him that my brain hasn’t authorized.
He comes inside and I slide his coffee across the counter. Our fingers don’t touch. The space where they could have touched burns anyway.
“Do you want me to teach you basic self-defense?”
My eyes widen. I nod, because it’s useful, because I might need it, because I’m not going to say only if you put a shirt on first.
We go to the deck. The humidity wraps around both of us and his skin is still damp from the training. He stands in front of me and the sun is behind him. He looks like something carved out of shadow and scar tissue.
“Wrist grab.” His voice is flat.
His fingers wrap around my wrist. The same grip he used the night he took me off the balcony, but everything about it is different now.
His palm is hot against my skin, calluses rough, and the pressure sends a current from the contact point straight through my arm, into my chest, and lower. Significantly lower.
My pulse spikes so hard I’m certain he can feel it under his fingers.
“You’re applying pressure to my radial artery,” I say, because if I’m clinical, I’m safe. “My hand is going numb.”
He loosens his grip immediately. His obsidian eyes flicker with something dangerous, and my thighs press together involuntarily. Oh.
“Again. Twist toward the thumb — that’s the weak point. Rotate your wrist up and out against it, then pull sharp at ninety degrees.”
I do it. I escape. But his touch stays on my skin like a handprint, radiating heat.
“Now from behind.”
He moves behind me. His chest is inches from my back, and I can feel the heat of him through my thin top. His arms come around me and he grabs both wrists, crossing them at my front.
“Drop your weight. Centre of gravity low. Then —”
I’m not hearing the instructions. I’m feeling his breath on the back of my neck.
The vibration of his voice through his chest into my shoulder blades.
The size of his hands around both my wrists, making them look like they belong to a child.
He smells like sweat and leather and the metallic undertone that’s always there, and the combination goes straight to a place between my legs that’s been dormant for twenty-two years.
I’m wet. I can feel it — undeniable, physical, a slickness that has nothing to do with the humidity and everything to do with a man’s arms around me and his breath on my neck. I’ve read about arousal in textbooks. I studied the physiology.
But the clinical language crumbles. It’s not a textbook response. It’s a full-body revolt against years of numbness and it’s happening because his forearms are pressed against mine and I can feel every scar.
“Ivy.”
I flinch. “What?”
“You’re not listening.”
“I’m listening.” I’m dying.
“Then escape.”
I drop my weight, twist, break free. I stand three feet from him, breathing like I’ve run a mile. He looks at me with his head tilted, reading my face the way he reads threat assessments.
“Again?”
“No.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “I think that’s enough for today.”
I need a task. Something to do with my hands that isn’t touching him or touching myself or reaching for a phone to message a ghost who doesn’t exist anymore.
Cooking. I’ll cook. I was never allowed to cook — Malachi had staff for that, because cooking was beneath a Vane, the same way medical school was beneath a Vane, the same way having a personality was beneath a Vane. But I’ve watched Killian do it and pasta seems achievable.
The water takes forever to boil, so I crank the heat.
The garlic hits the hot oil and splashes everywhere, speckling my arms with tiny burns that I catalogue automatically — first-degree, superficial, no treatment needed.
The pasta clumps into a sticky mass. The tomatoes go in after the garlic is alarmingly crispy and the whole thing becomes a mushy red sludge that smells like ambition and failure.
I plate it anyway and carry it to the small kitchen table where he’s waiting. We take a bite at the same time. It tastes like salt, char, and regret. I look at him, bracing for the verdict.
“It’s not inedible.”
“Oh, it is.”
“I’ve eaten worse.” He takes another bite. “In training, Silas made me eat things that were still moving.”
The ghost of a smile appears on his lips. My own mouth twitches.
He finishes the plate. Every bite, no complaint, no face.
He eats my disaster like its regular food, and something warm spreads through my chest that has nothing to do with the arousal from earlier and everything to do with the fact that nobody has ever let me fail without making me feel small for it.
I watch him chew, and my eyes track the movement of his jaw, the scar pulling with each bite, his throat working when he swallows.
My gaze follows the line of his neck down to his chest — he put a shirt on, but it’s tight enough that it doesn’t matter — and I feel the pulse between my legs return, steady and insistent.
You’re watching a man eat pasta. Get a grip.
After lunch, I go to the kitchen to make more coffee — my self-appointed task, since it’s safer than cooking and gives me something to do with my hands. I reach for the mugs behind him.
The blade is at my throat before I can say his name.
Cold steel against my carotid, the pressure just enough to dimple the skin.
His body is behind mine, rigid, massive, and his arm locked.
For one and a half second I am held against a man with a knife to my throat and my brain runs the scenario at lightning speed — trachea intact, blade angle suggests lateral approach, carotid not severed, pressure consistent with a trained reflex rather than intent to —
He recognizes me. The knife drops and he staggers back.
“Ivy. Fuck. I —”
He’s pale. The horror on his face is visceral — not performed, not controlled. His hand is shaking and the knife clatters on the counter.
“Don’t come up behind me.” His voice is wrecked. “Please. Don’t ever come up behind me.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I forgot.”
He turns away, gripping the counter with both hands, his shoulders tight, his breathing ragged. The guilt on his face is so raw it looks like an open wound.
And me? My throat is tingling where the blade was. My pulse is hammering. My skin is covered in goosebumps from hairline to ankles. I should be afraid. A man just held a knife to my throat. The appropriate response is fear, shaking, distance.
But I’m soaking wet.
The realization lands like a slap. His blade against my skin, the weight of his body behind mine, the split second where I was completely in his power — and my body’s response wasn’t flight.
It wasn’t freeze. It was more. My thighs are clenched so tight my muscles ache.
The wetness between my legs is undeniable, embarrassing, and has absolutely no clinical explanation that I’m willing to accept.
I don’t move away from him. I pour the coffee with hands that are steadier than they should be and slide his mug across the counter.
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. I could’ve —”
“You didn’t.” I meet his eyes. “It’s okay, Killian.”
He looks at me like he’s searching for the fear he expects to find. He won’t find it. What he’ll find instead — if he looks closely enough — is something that would scare him far more than fear.
I keep that secret tucked behind my ribs all afternoon, watching him move through the house like a storm that hasn't broken yet.
The villa is warm and golden with the last light, but the space feels smaller than it is. It was designed for people who know how to be close, and we are not those people.
He’s at the counter, methodically cleaning a gun while I start another pot of coffee.
We drink it like water, or maybe we just need the noise of the machine to fill the gaps between us.
I move to grab the pot just as he shifts to reach for the solvent.
His hand brushes my hip—a brief, accidental friction that feels like a spark in a room full of gas.
Everything stops.
His fingers are on me — barely, through the thin cotton of my shorts, but I can feel each callus, each ridge of scarred skin, the heat of his palm radiating through the fabric like a brand.
My entire nervous system detonates. Not short-circuits — detonates.
A full-body shockwave that starts at the point of contact and spreads outward in every direction, up through my ribs, down through my thighs, settling between my legs with a pulse so strong I have to lock my knees to stay standing.
Neither of us moves.
His hand stays on my hip. My breath has stopped. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, in my throat, in the space between my legs where the pulsing is so insistent it’s almost painful. I stare at the counter because if I look at his face right now, I’m going to do something I can’t take back.
I count heartbeats. One. Two. Three. His thumb shifts — a fraction of a millimeter, involuntary maybe, or maybe not — and the friction through the cotton sends a bolt of sensation straight to my clit that makes my vision blur. Four. Five.
His hand drops and steps back.
“Coffee’s done.” His voice is rough. Rougher than usual.
I pour the coffee with hands that are shaking badly enough to spill. I slide his mug across the counter and grip the edge with both hands because my legs are not reliable.
I’ve spent seven years feeling nothing. Seven years of deliberate numbness, of turning my body into a machine that performs without sensation. I trained myself into ice and marble and clinical detachment because that was survival.
And now some scarred, broken, beautiful hitman brushes my hip in a kitchen and I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can’t make my body stop wanting what it’s wanting because what it’s wanting is his hand back on my hip, lower, harder, and not through fabric.
He’s not just waking me up. He’s waking my body up. Every nerve ending, every dormant receptor, every inch of skin that Malachi kept pristine and numb. Killian is reversing it all without even trying. Without even knowing.
I take my coffee to the couch and sit down and try to read the Ledger and fail. The words swim. My body is still humming. I can still feel his hand on my hip like a ghost touch.
Forty-four names on a page and I can’t focus on a single one of them because my underwear is wet and my hands are trembling and the man responsible is ten feet away, reassembling a gun with the same fingers that just touched me.
Something is waking up inside me that I don’t know how to name. And it terrifies me.