Chapter 39
Killian
The house is a ghost — remote, single-story, and the exact color of the desert around it. It’s an hour from any real civilization and has solar panels and water tanks. I bought it through a shell company five years ago, but I never used it. I never needed it. I never had anyone to hide.
Someone I love.
The thought arrives uninvited and stops me mid-step.
I’ve thought of Ivy as mine. As needed. As protected.
But loved. That word. I’ve never used it — not internally, not out loud, not even in the private architecture of my own mind.
Silas trained the concept out of me before I had the vocabulary for it.
Love is leverage. Love is a blade someone else holds against your throat.
But I’m watching her walk through the front door without waiting for me to clear it first, her fingers trailing along the door frame, cataloguing dimensions and exit angles without being told, and the word is there. Sitting in my chest like a bullet that didn’t exit.
Love. You love her. That’s what this is.
I push the though away. If I look at it too directly it might detonate.
She finds the bedroom. “One bed.”
“Did you expect two?”
“I expected you to sleep in a tactical position by the door with one eye open like a paranoid bastard.”
“I sleep where you sleep. This is the new me.”
“The new you is going to get us killed.”
“You already tried that on the plane.”
She licks her teeth. “I didn’t try. I succeeded.”
She’s not wrong. She killed me on that plane, and I came back to life inside her and I’d die that way every day for the rest of whatever we have left.
Is this love?
She goes to take a shower, and I sit on the edge of the bed, listening to the running water and trying to focus on logistics.
Silas’s compound in Montana is three hundred acres of paranoia and twenty operatives on a permanent rotation. From here, it’s eleven hours by car — fourteen if we take the indirect route. The perimeter has three access points, but only one a two-person team can hit without being seen.
She comes out of the bathroom wearing my shirt, little droplets from her wet hair soaking through the cotton. The bandage on her lower abdomen is visible where the fabric rides up. My initial, carved into her skin by her own hand while I watched from my knees.
Love. The word surfaces again. Different this time. Less like a discovery and more like a diagnosis.
“Your turn.” She smirks. “Unless you need help.”
“I need you to put on pants.”
“Make me.”
My cock stiffens. It’s Pavlovian at this point. I close the space between us and cup her jaw.
“Later.” I kiss her forehead. “Work first.”
Her eyes narrow. “Did you just prioritize work over sex?”
“Silas isn’t going to kill himself.”
“That’s not the flex you think it is.”
“I’ll flex later.”
“Gross.” She smiles.
I shower quickly. The hot water hits the moth on my chest making the carved lines sting. I press my palm against them to feel the raised tissue and think about the woman who put them there. She branded me. Over my heart.
Love. The fourth time. Each time it lands heavier.
She spreads the Ledger on the kitchen table while I add compound layouts, satellite imagery, and security rotations from memory. We’re two people planning an endgame.
She runs her finger down the list. “Seventeen in the States. Eight in Europe. The rest scattered.”
“We start with Silas.”
“Obviously.”
“Remote property in Montana. Three hundred acres. At least twenty operatives on rotation at any time. He’s paranoid.”
While I say this, my mind is running a parallel track. Twenty operatives means forty rounds of ammunition minimum. Means suppressed entry, night operation, thermal imaging. Means one person moving through the compound with the element of surprise. One person, not two.
Don’t.
She looks at me with that clinical expression. “How do you know the rotation schedules?”
“I was there for eight years. Trained half those people.”
“And the other half?”
“Trained by the people I trained.”
“So you’re saying we’re going up against yourself.”
“I’m saying I know how they think.”
“That’s cocky.”
“Accurate.”
She points at a satellite image. “What’s this building?”
“Medical facility. Silas keeps a private surgeon on staff.”
“For what?”
“Interrogations. And the occasional experiment.”
Her eyes flicker. “Experiment?”
“He likes to know what the human body can survive.”
The words leave my mouth, and my brain immediately shows me what Silas would do if he got his hands on her.
The medical facility. The restraint table.
The instruments. He’d take her apart the way she took Harlow apart, except Silas wouldn’t be interested in elegance.
He’d be interested in duration. He’d want to know how long she could last. The image is so vivid my hands clench under the table.
She’s quiet for a moment. “So do I.”
My little monster.
“It’s different.”
“Is it?” Her eyes snap to mine. “Don’t pretend there’s not a part of me that’s excited to put my learning into practice.”
She’s right. And the part of me that wants to lock her in a room and go to Montana alone is the same part that Silas programmed into me. Protect the asset. Control the variables. Eliminate the risk. But she’s not an asset.
“I see you as someone I can’t afford to lose.”
“That’s not the same thing as seeing me as a partner.” She sits back and crosses her arms. “Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Whatever you’re thinking. Planning. I know you’ve been doing it since before the plane.”
She reads me the way she reads anatomy — with the precision of someone who’s studied the subject for years and knows exactly where the hidden structures are.
“We need more intel. I have contacts who might know the current security setup —”
“Contacts you’re going to visit alone?”
“Ivy.”
“Contacts in places where you don’t want me anywhere near. Because it’s too dangerous and because you’re still trying to build a cage around me with good intentions.”
“I’m trying to keep you alive.”
“I survived my entire life without you.” She pushes closer, her gray eyes locked on mine. “I get off on killing people and I carved both of us so that pretty head of yours understands that the only way we’re getting rid of each other is when we die. And even then, I’ll find a way.”
I’ll find a way. She says it like it’s a fact, not a threat. And I believe her.
“I need you to let me live, Killian.”
The words are quiet and they cut deeper than anything she’s said with a blade in her hand. She’s not asking me to let her fight. She’s asking me to stop treating her like something to be preserved behind glass. She’s asking me to see her.
Love. The word again. This time it doesn’t land like a bullet. It lands like a key turning in a lock.
This is what it means. Not protection. Not control. Letting the person you love be dangerous. Letting them walk into the fire beside you instead of hiding them from the heat.
“Promise me again,” she says. “To my face.”
I look at the woman who knows my darkness better than I know it myself. “Together.”
I mean it. I think. The problem is that somewhere in the back of my mind, behind the word and the intention, my training is still running. Calculating exit routes. Travel time to Montana. What I’d need to do alone to guarantee she never sets foot in that compound.
I don’t know if I’m lying. That’s the worst part. I don’t know if I mean together or if I mean together until the moment I have to choose between her safety and my promise.
She studies me, looking for the lie, but I hold her gaze. If I mean it right now, that has to count for something.
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“You get one more chance. But if I find out you’re planning something without me —”
“You’ll dissect me. I know.”
“I’ll do worse.” She sits in my lap, my hands wrapping around her instinctively. Kissing my neck, she keeps her tone conversational. “I’ll leave, Killian.”
The words gut me. These words hit harder than anything she’d ever done to me with a knife. I can survive being cut. I can survive being carved. But I cannot survive a world where she walks away and I never find her.
“You’re not the only person who can disappear.” She traces my jaw with her lips. “I have money and no attachment to anything that isn’t you. So, if you want to keep me, you keep me close. Not safe. Close.”
“Closer,” I murmur, pulling her into me.
“That’s better.”
We kiss slow and soft, almost like two normal people who don’t have a war planned on the table next to them. For a moment it feels like I could do this — trust her with the dangerous parts. Let her walk into the fire beside me.
Then I glance at the satellite image of the interrogation building and I remember what Silas does to people he captures and the feeling evaporates like water on hot stone.
No. Some risks are too high. Even for love.
She gets up without warning and starts pulling pasta and a jar of sauce from the cabinets. I watch her fill a pot with water. She’s more confident in the kitchen now — not afraid of pasta anymore. The woman who can dissect a human hand has finally conquered boiling water.
She glares over her shoulder. “Stop staring.”
“I like watching you.”
“You like watching me all the time.”
“True.”
“It’s unsettling.”
“Also true.”
She throws a dish towel at my head. I catch it before it reaches me. Her laugh fills the small house and my chest cracks.
Love. Again. Different again. Softer this time. The word lands not like a bullet or a diagnosis or a key, but like a sound I’ve been hearing my whole life and only now recognize. Her laugh. That’s what love sounds like.
We could have this. If we survive. This domestic life with the occasional killings and her throwing dish towels and me catching them and her laugh.
But surviving means beating Silas. And beating Silas means walking into a compound with trained operatives and a man who spent twenty years turning me into a weapon and knows exactly how I think.
I look at her profile while she stirs the sauce. The sharp jaw. The perfect nose. Between cooking and heating sauce, she’s memorizing the compound layout from across the room. She’d follow me anywhere. She’d fight beside me and she’d be extraordinary.
And if Silas captured her. If he strapped her to that table. If he did to her what he did to me, except worse, because she’s not his weapon — she’s his weapon’s weakness.
No.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Thinking too loud.” She turns. “Stop. We’re here. Together. Tomorrow, we plan. Tonight we —”
“Rest?”
“I was thinking about fucking, but sure.”
I laugh. It’s so loud and real that it startles me. She smiles.
One more day. I’ll figure it out tomorrow.
But together or alone — the question sits in the back of my skull like a timer I haven’t set yet. And the woman making pasta in the kitchen, with my initial on her skin, is the reason the answer keeps changing every time I look at her.
Love. This is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever felt.