Chapter 26
Killian
Zurich is cold and clean and full of glass. The Alps sit in the distance like something watching. Everything here is ordered, precise, controlled — the architecture, the streets, the way the light hits the water. It reminds me of her.
The rental is a top-floor apartment with rooftop access overlooking the Limmat River. Two bedrooms, secure entry, private elevator, and four exits I mapped within twenty minutes. In forty-eight hours Harlow checks into the Baur au Lac. In forty-eight hours the hunt begins.
I haven’t slept. I’m running on coffee and adrenaline and the memory of her fingers on my scars.
I can still feel them. Every ridge she traced, every pause, every scar she read like braille.
I can still hear her voice saying not tonight, a quiet promise that there will be other nights. That she’s keeping what I offered.
We walked the route from Harlow’s hotel to the conference center today.
Identified blind spots, camera positions, security patterns.
She’s different here — sharper, more focused.
I watched her catalogue exit points and sight lines with the same precision she uses on anatomy, and the anticipation of watching this woman kill for the first time is doing something to me, I’m not going to examine.
Neither of us has mentioned last night. It sits between us like a held breath.
The sun is setting over the Alps, bleeding the mountains into shades of amber and violet. She’s been reviewing the conference schedule on the laptop. I’ve been cleaning weapons and failing to stop looking at her mouth.
“There’s roof access.”
She looks up. “You checked?”
“First thing.”
“Security reasons?”
“No. Just… air.”
Something flickers in her eyes. She closes the laptop and follows me to the service stairs. I go first — habit, always first — and the door opens to a flat terrace with the city lights just beginning to glimmer and the mountains becoming dark shapes against the sky.
We stand at the railing. The city hums below us, muffled, distant. Up here the air is cold and thin and empty. She’s looking at the view and somehow that makes it easier to say what I’m about to say.
“Silas took me when I was ten.” She doesn’t react. She just listens. “I told you about the training. What I didn’t tell you is that I was good at it. That’s the part I don’t say.”
The words are harder than I expected. Each one costs something.
“The first time I killed someone, I told you about it briefly. What I didn’t tell you is that after I did it, I felt nothing.
Not guilt. Not horror. Nothing.” I pause.
The city lights blur. “For years, I thought Silas was right. That I’m a machine with flesh.
Because the absence of feeling was confirming it. ”
Silence. Ten seconds or ten minutes. She doesn’t rush me. She never rushes me.
“Then you.” The words come out before I can weigh them.
“You asked me to scar you and I couldn’t.
The man who kills for a living couldn’t bring himself to do something that’s on his job description.
” I look away from her. The Alps are dark now.
“That’s when I knew Silas was wrong. That I wasn’t empty.
I was just… waiting for something that made feeling worth the cost.”
The silence that follows is so long my chest starts to ache.
“Dissociation isn’t absence.” Her voice is quiet, steady. “It’s survival. You felt nothing because feeling would have killed you.”
I turn to look at her. She’s facing me. The city lights catch the silver in her gray eyes.
“I was eleven when I understood what I was.” She’s looking at the city, not at me. “Malachi had a dinner party. One of his associates looked at me like I was a painting he wanted to acquire. I was being appraised.” A pause. “My mother saw it too. I think that’s why she did what she did.”
Her voice is steady, but her hands on the railing are not.
“After she died, I found the original blueprints of the house. That’s how I discovered the room behind my closet.
And I realized I could be a Russian doll — a weapon inside a doll.
So, I created the Ledger. Studied anatomy.
Taught myself everything I’d need.” She turns to face me.
“What I’m saying is that you feel nothing when you kill because it was trained out of you.
I feel nothing when men touch me because I trained it out of myself. We’re the same, Killian.”
The words hit me in a place I didn’t know was exposed.
“You should have been another monster. Another man who saw me as a thing. But you didn’t touch me. Not once.” Her eyes are locked on mine. “You saw a doll and asked to see the person inside.”
The city lights are fully on now. We’re closer than we were when we started talking. I don’t remember moving.
“I don’t know what I want,” she says. “I’ve never been allowed that. Malachi chose everything. Ghost —” I go rigid. She notices but continues. “The guy I told you about. He was the first person who made me feel like wanting was allowed.”
The jealousy that rips through me is irrational, violent, and directed at myself.
“Now there’s you. And you’re possible. And I don’t know how to want something I might have.”
“Why?”
“Because if I lose you, that’s a wound I chose. It won’t be done to me. It’ll be mine.” She exhales. “I’ve planned and dreamed about killing someone for years. In two days, that dream becomes real. I don’t know who I’ll be after.”
“You’ll be the same person.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know you.”
She stops and looks at me. The scar catches the city light, and her eyes trace it the way her fingers did two nights ago.
“But what if I like it?”
“Then you like it.” I shrug. “I like it too. It’s power and adrenaline and something primal. The difference is whether you use the violence or let the violence use you.”
The silence that follows shifts the air between us. I don’t know who moved, but we’re close now. Too close. Our breath is visible in the cold. Our hands are on the railing, almost touching.
“Killian.”
My name in her mouth. It does something to the atmosphere that has nothing to do with temperature.
“Ivy.”
Her name in mine. It sounds like a vow. Like a warning I should listen to and won’t.
Kiss her.
Every cell in my body is screaming it. The cold air, the city lights, her face inches from mine, her gray eyes holding me with gravity, I can’t escape. Kiss her.
But she said Ghost’s name tonight. She said Ghost made her feel like wanting was allowed.
She still thinks he’s a stranger she’ll never see again.
And she doesn’t know — doesn’t know — that the man standing in front of her in the cold is the same man who called her Smoke and took her riding at midnight and told her the road waits.
If I kiss her now, she doesn’t know who she’s kissing.
When I kiss you, I want it to be real. No secrets between us.
My own words. My own promise. Hanging above me like a blade.
I pull back.
“It’s cold. We should go in.”
The words come out wrong. Distant. Mechanical. I watch her face shift — confusion, then disappointment, then something she buries so fast I almost miss it. Hurt.
Better disappointment than a kiss full of lies.
I turn toward the service stairs. She follows in silence.
We descend and I’m hyperaware of everything. Her lily scent, the faint sound of her footsteps behind me on the stairs, the warmth radiating from her body in the cold stairwell. I can hear her breathing. I think I can hear her heartbeat.
The apartment closes around us, and the tension fills every room. She moves through the space without purpose, touching surfaces, adjusting things that don’t need adjusting. She’s trying to find her footing after I knocked it out from under her on the roof.
She said my name like it was a prayer. Like I’m something holy instead of the man who’s been lying to her since the first DM he ever sent.
I could tell her now. Right now. Before anything physical happens that can’t be taken back.
Ivy, I’m Ghost. I’m the messages and the rides and the man who called you Smoke.
I watched you through binoculars and texted you at 3 AM and let you grieve me while I sat ten feet away.
I could say it and let her decide. Give her the choice she’s been begging for her entire life.
But she’s about to kill a man in forty-eight hours. Silas is hunting us. The ground is unstable and if I detonate this bomb now, the shrapnel takes us both.
That’s not the reason and you know it.
She mentioned Ghost tonight and her voice went soft. Reverent. She said Ghost made wanting feel allowed. What if she doesn’t want Killian? What if she wants the ghost of a man who never existed? What if I confess and she looks at me and sees a stranger wearing a dead man’s face?
I should tell her. I know I should tell her.
Tonight.
I look across the room and find her.
She’s standing at the window, looking at the city.
Her hair has fallen loose, dark waves framing her face, catching the light from the buildings across the river.
Her silhouette is lit soft from behind and every curve is visible — the line of her neck, her shoulders, the narrow waist, the hips my hands know the shape of.
She reaches up and tucks a strand behind her ear. The movement exposes the curve of her jaw, the hollow of her throat. Simple. Unconscious. It destroys me.
“Killian?” Soft. Almost a whisper. Her eyes are still on the view.
“Yeah?”
“You went quiet.” She pauses. “Come back.”
Two words.
Two words and days of restraint collapse like a building coming down.
Fuck honesty. Fuck timing. Fuck the Ghost lie and the secrets and the promise I made on a bed in a glass house. She’s right here. She’s asking me to come back, and I’ve been gone my entire life and she’s the only place I’ve ever wanted to arrive.
I cross the room. Slow. Deliberate. The last drops of control spent on making my legs walk instead of run. She turns to face me and the space between us disappears.