Chapter 35
Killian
The blade breaks her skin.
No.
The word doesn’t make it past my throat. She told me not to speak, and even now I obey her.
A thin red line appears on the skin above her pubic bone.
Her hand is steady and she has the same focus she had when she carved the moth into my chest. But this is different, this is her skin.
This is the surface I couldn’t bring myself to damage in Lisbon, no matter how much she begged, no matter how many words she threw at me that cut deeper than any blade — and now she’s doing it herself.
My cock is so hard I might burn alive. Every muscle screams at me to cross the space between us and take the knife from her hands. But she doesn’t want to be stopped. She wants me to watch. She wants me to see what my lies cost.
Blood runs down her skin, dark against the pale, sliding toward the waistband of her underwear and a sound tears from my chest — raw, guttural, the noise a wounded animal makes when it can’t reach the thing that’s hurting it.
I move. One second I’m against the wall, the next I’m crossing the room, hands reaching for the blade, for her wrist, for anything that stops this.
“I said don’t fucking move.”
Her voice freezes me mid-stride.
“Ivy, you don’t have to —”
“I don’t have to do anything.” She tilts her head, studying me like I’m a specimen pinned to a board. “Except finish what I started.”
Her hand reaches behind her. My instincts fire but too late — by the time I focus, she’s holding zip-ties. My zip-ties.
“You really think I didn’t prepare for this?” The smile on her blood-smeared lips is the most terrifying and beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. “Sit down, Killian.”
I could overpower her. Even with the knife, I have a hundred pounds and twenty years of combat training on her.
I could disarm her in two seconds. But the look in her eyes isn’t anger anymore.
It’s ownership. And some part of me — the part that’s been waiting its entire life for someone to claim it, the part Silas tried to kill with cigarettes and straight razors — that part doesn’t want to fight.
“On your knees, Killian.”
I bow my head and kneel.
She moves behind me with the patience of someone who’s rehearsed this. The zip-ties tighten around my wrists with the exact tension I taught her — tight enough to hold, loose enough to feel like a choice.
“Too tight?” The tenderness in her voice is devastating. As if she didn’t just carve my flesh ten minutes ago.
“No.” I don’t recognize my own voice. It’s broken. Raw.
“Good.”
She comes back around. I’m on my knees, hands bound behind my back, eye-level with her stomach. Eye-level with the two red lines she’s already carved. Eye-level with my initial being written into her skin.
I torture people for a living and I’m not this cruel.
The K stares at me, incomplete, waiting for her to finish. Below it, the damp spot on her underwear is visible. I can smell her — blood and arousal, copper and salt and something sweet underneath. She’s so close that if I leaned forward, I could press my lips to the wound.
“Now.” She brings the blade back to her skin. “Where were we?”
My cock is going to tear through my jeans. Every heartbeat is a throb of pressure that borders on pain. I’ve been hard since she pinned me to the wall. Everything since — the moth, the blood, the kiss, the zip-ties — has built it so high to the point where I’m not aroused, I’m in agony.
She draws the top diagonal of the K to the center. The blade breaks her skin, and her face is composed, beautiful and focused.
“You know what the best part is?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She knows I can’t speak. “I can feel it. Every nerve ending. Every millimeter of depth.” She draws the second diagonal. “I know exactly how much pressure it takes to scar without damaging the muscle. Two millimeters. Scalpel depth.”
I’m close enough to see every detail. The precision of the cuts — identical depth, identical width.
The way the blood pools in the lines before spilling over, soaking into her underwear.
The slight tremor in her stomach muscles when the blade goes deep.
She’s not numb. She feels it. And she’s doing it anyway.
“You’re shaking.”
I am. My body is convulsing with the effort of staying still — the arousal, the horror, the worship — all of it hitting at once.
“Are you hard, Killian?”
“Yes.” My answer is breathless.
“Good. I want you to remember this. Every time you see this scar, I want you to remember that you couldn’t do it. You couldn’t mark me when I begged you to.” She steps back and looks down at her work. “Remember that I had to do it myself.”
The K is small. An inch and a half. Elegant and clean, made by a surgeon’s hand.
My initial. On her skin. Forever.
Something shatters inside me. She marked herself with me and it’s the most devastating thing I’ve ever seen.
“Beautiful.” The word leaves me before I can stop it.
“What did you just say?”
“It’s beautiful.” My voice is damaged, but I mean every syllable. “You’re beautiful. The blood. The scar. All of it. You’re fucking beautiful, Ivy.”
Her mask slips just for a second. I see the girl who begged me to mark her and was told no. The woman who took what she wanted anyway. Then the mask returns, but something in the air between us has shifted permanently.
She looks down at her stomach, before pressing two fingers into the fresh cuts, scooping up her own blood. My eyes are locked on hers as she slides her bloodied fingers into her mouth. Her cheeks hollow, sucking them clean, never breaking eye contact. When she pulls them free, they’re glistening.
My brain goes blank. My cock throbs so hard my vision whites out.
She kneels in front of me. “When I killed Harlow.” She pauses. “When I watched him bleed out. When I carved the moth into his wrist. When I dissected his hand and he couldn’t stop me.” Her voice drops to something barely audible. “I was wet.”
The words detonate.
“Not scared. Not sick. Not horrified.” She leans closer, close enough that I can smell our blood on her breath.
“My panties were soaked by the time his soul left his body. I thought something was wrong with me. That Malachi broke something fundamental. That whatever he did to me all those years wired me for the dark, twisted things instead of the normal ones.”
Her fingers trace my scar. The fingers she just licked clean.
“I almost came, Killian. Watching him die took me so close I had to dig my nails into my palms to stop myself.” She holds my gaze.
“And when it was over, when I walked out of there and finished saving your life — when you were asleep next to me with my hand on your chest — I touched myself.” Absolute silence rings in the cabin. “Do you think I’m a monster?”
Do you think I’m a monster?
I think about every person I’ve killed. The bodies. The blood. The dark satisfaction that flooded my veins when a target went down. I think about how I watched her carve herself just now and the way my cock throbbed with every cut.
“No. I think you’re the only person who’s ever told me the truth about who they are.” My breath catches. “I think you’re exactly what I spent thirty years looking for and didn’t think existed.”
I lean forward, my forehead almost touching hers, my bound hands straining behind my back.
“You told me you almost came watching a man die. You want to know what I didn’t tell you about my first kill?” Her eyes search mine. “I got hard watching the light leave his eyes. Fourteen years old. My first job. And I was hard.”
The recognition on her face is instantaneous.
“We’re the same, Ivy. We’ve always been the same.
That’s why I couldn’t look away from your account.
That’s why I came back for you. That’s why I let you carve your moth into my chest and thanked you for the privilege.
” My voice drops. “That’s why I’m on my knees right now.
Not because you ordered me. Because I chose to kneel for you.
Because no one in thirty years of being alive has ever been worth kneeling for until you. ”
Her lips part. Her eyes are wet, but the tears don’t fall.
“We’re both monsters. Both broken. Both exactly where we belong. With each other.”
She’s looking at me the way she’s been waiting her entire life to look at someone — like she just said the unspeakable thing and the person hearing it didn’t run.
I’m never running, Little Moth.
The zip-ties snap with one explosive burst. I was always capable of breaking them. She knew that. I knew that. The ties were never the restraint. She was.
Her eyes widen with the insatiable hunger of a woman who just watched a man break his chains for her.
“Killian —”
I don’t let her finish. One hand grips her hair, fisting at the base, pulling her head back and the other wraps around her throat, yanking her body against mine.
My mouth crashes into hers and I taste everything — her blood, my blood, the copper, and salt and the sweet dark underneath that’s just us.
She gasps against my lips and I swallow the sound.
My tongue finds hers and I kiss her like I’m trying to consume her from the inside.
Mine. Fucking mine. Forever.
Her legs wrap around my waist and her hands are in my hair. She bites my lip hard enough to make it bleed again and I groan into her mouth so loudly it echoes off the stone.
“Bed.” Her voice against my lip is broken and desperate. “Now.”
She pulls me backward, her nails sinking into my skin. We’re both bleeding and desperate. Her knees hit the mattress and she falls back.
“Kneel.” So she’s not done giving orders.
The command hits me and my body drops before my mind can process it. I’m on my knees at the edge of the bed, between her legs, while she props herself on her elbows and looks down at me.
“You wanted to worship me?” That voice — the doll and the monster and the woman I’d die for, all in one throat. “Then worship.”
The K is inches from my face, still bleeding. My initial carved into her forever. Below it, the soaked fabric of her underwear, and the scent of her — blood and arousal mixed into something that rewires my brain.
I lean forward and press my lips to the fresh wound. She hisses as I press my mouth harder against the carving, my tongue tracing each line she made, tasting her blood, tasting my name on her skin.
“Fuck.” The word escapes her and the mask drops.
Her hand finds my head, pushing me lower. My tongue is tracing from the K downward, over the cotton, my breath hot between her thighs. She makes a sound that’s half command and half plea.
“Take them off.”
I hook my fingers in the waistband and pull them down her legs. She lifts her leg and hooks it over my shoulder opening herself to me with the authority of a woman who just carved herself open and watched a man break his chains.
My mouth finds her and the last coherent thought I have before the world narrows to just her — her taste, her sounds, her thighs tightening around my head, the K bleeding — shatters me.
This is where I belong. Between her thighs, with my initial carved into her skin. On my knees for the only person who ever deserved it.
For the rest of my life.
And beyond.