Chapter 32
Ivy
It’s been three days. Or four. I’ve stopped counting since Killian made me forget my own name.
The cabin feels lived in now. Clothes drape over chairs and dishes pile in the sink, but the bed stays unmade — we keep returning to it too often to bother.
Everything smells like coffee, wood smoke and him.
The ease between us is new and fragile and I’m afraid that too much pressure will tear it open, just like a suture.
I’ve never had mornings like this. Mornings without performances. Mornings where no one is watching me from across a table, calculating my value. Mornings where the man making coffee in the kitchen hums under his breath and doesn’t know he’s doing it.
I’m on the counter, dangling my legs, while my eyes are burning his back.
The muscles flex with each movement — reaching for the pot, pouring water, the scarred tattooed skin pulling and releasing.
He’s gotten comfortable around me. He doesn’t angle his face anymore, hiding the scar.
He doesn’t position himself between me and the door like he’s bracing for an attack.
Something in him has loosened, the way a wire loosens when the tension is finally released.
If I close my eyes I can feel the shape of his scars on my fingertips.
I know his body in ways I’ve never known my own — the ridges, the craters, the places where the ink tried to cover the damage and the texture survived anyway.
I know the sound he makes when my mouth is on him.
I know the way his hands shake when he’s holding back.
He’s teaching me to cook again because apparently my last attempt was, in his words, “a war crime against pasta.”
I pull myself off and stand next to him, staring at the ingredients like they’re a science experiment I’m expected to pass. I pick up the knife and the tomato. He moves behind me, his hands settling over mine.
I lean back into him without thinking. My spine fits against his chest the way it always does — like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know existed before him.
“You’re holding the knife like you’re about to perform surgery.”
“I am about to perform surgery.”
“It’s already dead, Little Moth. You don’t need to be that precise.”
My chest tightens at the nickname. It always does. It reminds me that I’m his — by choice. My choice.
He guides my hands through the chopping, then pulls away, letting me try alone, but he doesn’t step back. His hand finds my stomach, pulling me against him, while he tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
He gestures to the pot and I start stirring with precise hands.
“Gentle, Ivy.”
“I am stirring gently.”
“That’s aggressive stirring. The pasta didn’t do anything to you.” He kisses my shoulder. “Yet.”
I turn to face him and press a short kiss to his lips, but he cups my cheek and I open my mouth instinctively, his tongue finding mine. The way this man kisses me — slow and deep and like he’s memorizing the taste — makes me forget everything, including my own name.
He takes over the cooking when the oil starts smoking and I watch the way he moves in the kitchen like it’s muscle memory, not skill.
His hands look different when they’re stirring sauce instead of assembling a weapon.
He’s not soft — he could never be soft — but he’s unguarded. The walls have windows now.
We sit across from each other when he’s done cooking and eat in comfortable silence.
“This is really good,” I say.
“You made it.”
“I cut the tomatoes and stirred the pasta. You did the rest.” I take another bite. “Careful, Killian. I might think you’re getting soft.”
His hand goes under the table finding my thigh. His fingertips travel upward and my legs widen before my brain can argue.
“Careful, Ivy.” His eyes darken. “Or I might think you’re getting soft.”
He pulls his hand away and continues eating like nothing happened.
I stare at him in disbelief, trying to remember how breathing works.
Is this what a life could look like?
After we finish eating we go back to bed. I curl onto his chest and stare out the window at the hills. The wheat fields are golden in the sunlight, and a bird is singing somewhere in the oaks.
“My mother used to hum when she cooked.” My voice is small enough that I almost think he didn’t hear me, but I feel him go still.
“I don’t remember the song. But I remember the sound of it.
The way the kitchen felt when she was in it.
” I breathe through the tightness. “After she was gone, Malachi removed everything. Her clothes, her photographs, her name. Like she’d never existed.
I used to sneak into the attic to find things she’d touched just to make sure she was real. ”
His arms tighten around me.
“I don’t have memories like that. I was left at a fire station when I was two days old with a note that had my name.
” His voice is detached, like he’s telling someone else’s story.
“I used to imagine she was young and scared. That she left me somewhere safe until she could come back.” He takes a long pause.
“I stopped imagining when Silas found me. He made it clear that whoever she was, she didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was becoming a weapon. ”
I tighten my grip around his neck and let my body say what my words can’t.
“It’s strange,” I say eventually. “Seven years of noise. Malachi, the galas, the performances. I thought the noise was the only thing keeping me alive. I could hear it, so it meant I existed.” I look up at him. “But this quiet… it doesn’t feel like emptiness. It feels like… I don’t have the words.”
“The noise fades. It always does.”
I freeze.
The noise fades.
I’ve heard that before. Those exact words. My brain tries to locate it, scanning memory files with a speed that borders on panic.
Ghost. Ghost said that in a DM, months ago, when I told him I couldn’t hear myself over Malachi’s world.
I shake the thought off. It’s a common phrase. People say things like that. It doesn’t mean anything.
“We’re running low on food. I should make a supply run before dark.”
“How far?”
“An hour each way. Maybe less.”
“I can come with you.”
He shakes his head. “Stay here and rest. I’ll be back before you start missing me.” He kisses my forehead.
“Arrogant.”
“Accurate.”
He rolls off the bed and grabs a t-shirt. “Lock the door behind me.”
My eyes find his phone is on the counter, charging.
The noise fades.
Eleven minutes. I count every heartbeat, every breath. I stand in the kitchen staring at the phone and telling myself it’s nothing.
It’s just a phrase. People say things like that.
But my body refuses to believe my mind. There’s a tingling at the base of my skull. A tightness in my chest that wasn’t there this morning.
He trusts me. He left his phone right here because he trusts me. I’m the woman who stitched him back together. Who slept in his arms. Who came apart under his mouth and whispered his name like a prayer.
I just want to know the time.
My hand moves before my mind gives permission, sliding into a phone that has no passcode because he trusts me.
I hit the home screen — basic apps, nothing out of the ordinary — and I exhale, trying to convince myself there is nothing to find.
I open the photo gallery to find blurry shots of the Portuguese countryside and a single photo of me sleeping, golden light catching my hair. Something warm spreads through me.
I exit and keep swiping passing the preinstalled icons, until I hit a folder.
Smoke.
The air leaves my lungs like someone’s pulled a plug.
It could mean anything. A code name. A contact. A mission file.
I open it and dozens of screenshots flood my vision. It’s my Instagram comments. My username. My words, typed at midnight in my bedroom at the Vane Estate, sent to a man I thought understood me.
I make it to bed. The bed where he held me this morning. Where his mouth was between my thighs days ago. Where I said his name like it was the only word left.
Killian. Ghost. Killian.
My heart is a hammer at 140 beats a minute. The air is too thin, my breathing too fast, and the room is shrinking down to the size of a casket. It’s a textbook acute stress response—and I’m about to scream or vomit my way out of it.
The rage hits first. White-hot, blinding rage, the kind that makes your jaw ache from clenching.
Ghost was my escape. The one person who didn’t want anything from me.
I told him things I never told anyone. I told Ghost about Killian.
I told him about him. And he sat there and typed back and pretended he was a stranger.
The part of me that survived Malachi, that smiled at galas while deciding how every man in the room should die, takes control. My hands stop shaking, not because I’m calm, but because force of will is more powerful than chemistry.
I start scrolling again, methodically. I check every timestamp. He knew about me before the kidnapping. He was already inside my head before his hands ever touched my body.
The rage returns, hotter this time.
I was his prisoner before he came through my balcony. Every word of comfort, every reassurance that I wasn’t alone — all of it was a performance.
I stand and begin to pace. Three steps to the window, three steps back — the exact path he takes when he’s thinking. When did I start moving like him?
Every message. Every confession. Every time I poured my hope into those words, believing I was talking to someone who understood me.
I fell for Ghost online. The cryptic philosopher who saw me through my smoke. I fell for Killian in person. The monster who gave me a pet name like it meant something.
They’re the same person.
Which one was real?
I force myself to think clinically. Timeline.
Motive. Evidence. Ghost knew personal things I only shared with him.
Killian always knew exactly what to say.
He’s been inside my head for months — of course he’d know how to reach me.
Of course he’d know which words would break me open and which would put me back together.
I thought I was the only one with secrets. I thought I was the one playing everyone. But he’s been the one holding the cards the whole time.
A bitter laugh escapes my lips.
I don’t know if I’m angry because he lied, or because he lied better than me.
He’s seen every version of me, and I didn’t even know there were two of him. I thought I was winning, but I was never even in the game.
Was any of it real?
He knew what Ghost meant to me. One person who wasn’t bought, performing, or using me. Ghost was mine. The only person Malachi didn’t control. And it was another performance. Another set of strings pulled by a man who decided who I got to be.
I killed Harlow for touching me wrong. What do I do to a man who touched everything? A man who got inside my head, my heart, my body. A man who made me love him.
Something underneath the rage stirs. He wanted me before he took me. He studied me, obsessed over me, chose me. That’s not just a game.
A mix of hot and cold floods my chest. A smile spreads across my lips that has nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with power.
He wanted a monster. He’s going to get one.
Running is what the old Ivy would do and crying is what he’d expect. Killing him would be too easy — for both of us. And I will die before I act like a betrayed lover sobbing on a kitchen floor.
I’m not going to shatter. I’m not going to listen to explanations. I’m not going to give him the satisfaction of seeing me break.
He manipulated me with tenderness and understanding. He made me feel seen. He made me feel chosen.
I’m going to take him apart the same way he took me apart. With precision. With patience. With the careful, clinical cruelty of a surgeon who knows exactly where to cut.
He wants to play games? Let’s play.
The engine hums outside. He’s back.
I move to the kitchen and stand in the exact spot where we stood this morning, when he was teaching me to chop tomatoes. I set his phone down on the counter, screen down, the same way and place he left it.
I arrange myself against the counter. The mask settles into my face — the soft smile, the warm eyes, the version of me that Malachi trained me into. The butterfly knife is in my back pocket, and the scalpel is in my waistband.
The door opens and his footsteps cross the wood floor. He’s carrying bags of food, and a happy look is plastered on his face.
“Miss me?” A smile spreads on his lips. That voice. The voice that told me I was safe. The voice that whispered against my skin. The voice that typed from behind a screen for six months while I thought I was talking to a stranger.
He sets the bags down. The smile falters.
“Ivy?”
I watch the moment it hits him.
It starts in his eyes — the first flicker of something that isn’t warmth. Then his jaw. The scar pulls as the muscle tightens. His hands go still at his sides. His body shifts — shoulders squaring, weight redistributing — the soldier recognizing a threat he can’t see.
He scans the room — the phone on the counter, my face, then back to the phone. I watch the light in his eyes shift as he does the math.
His expression doesn’t crumble. It empties. Like someone reaching inside his face and pulling out everything that makes it human. What’s left is the raw — the exposed architecture of a man who has just realized that the woman standing in front of him knows everything.
His lips part, but no sound comes out.
I smile and the fear that floods his obsidian eyes is the most satisfying thing I’ve ever felt.