Chapter 43
Ivy
I wake up alone, but it’s different from the last time.
The sheets still carry his warmth. His pillow smells like him.
The absence isn’t a wound — it’s a pause.
I shift and my body catalogues everything from last night.
Every bruise, every mark, every place his hands were.
My wrists ache against the sheets. My palms sting.
The soreness between my legs has become so familiar that every time I feel it pulsing, something warm spreads through my chest instead of pain.
I pull on his t-shirt, letting his scent wrap around me like a second skin.
The coffee is made, still hot. His half-empty cup is on the counter. The Ledger is untouched. Our weapons are cleaned and laid out in a row — methodical and precise. He’s been busy while I slept.
The front door is cracked open. Desert morning light is bleeding through.
I push it open and find him on the porch, shirtless. The sun is hitting his scarred skin, making him look like something carved from war itself. The moth on his chest is healing — raised lines that will be silver eventually, permanent and mine.
He’s hunched over something in his lap. His stitched hand works carefully — I can see from the tension in his shoulders that the wound is pulling, hurting him.
I move closer. His other hand holds one of my scalpels. He’s scratching something into metal with slow, precise strokes.
My gun. The same gun I held under his jaw on the highway. The same gun I pressed against my own forehead while he cried.
My breath catches when I see what he’s carving.
An anatomical heart.
Not a Valentine’s heart. Not a symbol. The actual organ.
Four chambers, rendered in thin, exact lines on the gunmetal.
The left ventricle. The pulmonary arteries.
The beginning of the right atrium. He’s working on the aortic arch now, the scalpel moving with a precision that doesn’t belong to his hands — but he’s trying.
Each line is deliberate and each stroke is costing his injured palm something.
He remembers.
He remembers a conversation from weeks ago, a throwaway sentence in a hidden lab, and he woke up this morning and started carving it into the weapon I used to drag him back from the dead.
Something happens inside my chest that I can’t diagnose.
I’ve catalogued every physical response I’ve had to this man.
The elevated heart rate. The pupil dilation.
The chemical cascade of dopamine and oxytocin and norepinephrine that my clinical mind can name and categorize.
But this. This is something the textbooks didn’t cover.
This is the feeling of watching a man who’s never had anything that was his carve your favorite organ into a weapon with his damaged hand, in the desert morning light, because he doesn’t have the vocabulary for the three words he’s trying to say.
He’s not saying ‘I love you’ — he’s building it.
Scratching it into metal the way I scratched his initial into my skin.
Making it permanent. Making it something that can’t be unsaid, because he’s never said it, and maybe he never will, and maybe this is better.
Maybe this is the version of love that belongs to two people who were never taught the word.
My eyes burn. “You’re using the wrong scalpel,” I say quietly.
He frowns. “It’s the sharpest one.”
“It’s the thinnest one.” I sit beside him. I take the scalpel from his hand — our fingers brushing over the stitches I put in and replace it with the sturdier blade. “The 15 is better for smaller incisions, but the 10 works better on metal.”
He looks at me. “Show me.”
I take the gun and examine his work — half finished and rough. The left ventricle and pulmonary arteries and the beginning of the right atrium, all drawn by a killer’s hand trying to be an artist. It’s perfect.
I adjust the angle and deepen the aortic arch with three precise strokes, before passing it back.
We finish it together. Not speaking. Just passing the scalpel back and forth, trading lines like conversation, his rough strokes next to my clean ones. The heart takes shape between our hands — imperfect, scarred into the steel, permanent.
I hold the gun up. The engraving catches the light.
“It’s not exactly anatomically accurate.”
“Neither are we.”
I stare at him. The man who carved my heart into his gun. Not the metaphorical one. The actual pump that keeps you alive without asking permission.
I lean in. He cups my cheek, his thumb tracing my temple.
The kiss is soft. So unlike us. Nothing feral, nothing desperate.
Our lips brushing, barely touching, a conversation conducted in pressure and breath.
It feels the way the heart on the gun feels — imperfect, permanent, and more honest than words.
We pack without speaking. We’ve done this before — we know how to disappear from a place. He wipes surfaces, clears rooms and strips the bed. I pack the Ledger, the weapons, and my scalpel set minus the 10 blade, which is still warm from the engraving.
I tuck the gun into my waistband, and I know he notices it because of the micro-shift in his jaw. He likes that I keep it close.
At the door, I pause. The Ducati is where I left it.
“What do we do with it?”
Something passes across his face that I can’t fully read. This bike is the echo of a man he killed to become who I needed.
“Leave it.”
I nod. We don’t need echoes where we’re going.
He loads the bags. Before we get in, I check his stitches and he checks my palms, applying ointment with the same hands that have killed more people than either of us can count.
Our love language is wound care and weapons.
In the side mirror, the safehouse shrinks and the Ducati stands alone in the dust.
We take the western route. It’s longer, but safer. My bare feet are on the dashboard, which he hates, and the Ledger is open in my lap.
The silence between us is comfortable for the first time in days. Not the heavy silence of secrets or the charged silence of desire. Just two people in a car, heading toward something terrible, choosing not to talk about it yet.
But we have to.
I clear my throat, keeping my eyes on the compound layout. “If one of us dies.” He doesn’t react, but I can see his jaw tighten. “Killian.”
“I heard you.”
“Then answer me.”
“Neither of us is dying, Ivy.”
I close the Ledger and turn in my seat to face his profile.
“Twelve-man rotation. Fortified compound. One entry point that doesn’t involve immediate death. I need to know what the other one does if one of us doesn’t walk out.”
The question costs me more than I expected.
I can feel it in my chest — the tightness, the clinical mind trying to frame this as tactical planning when it’s actually a woman asking the man she loves what happens to the survivor.
Because there will be a survivor. The math says so.
And I need to know if he’ll honor the answer or if he’ll do what he always does — decide for both of us.
“You survive,” he says. Flat. Final.
“No.”
“Ivy.”
“No, Killian. If you die, I don’t survive. I don’t run. If you die in that compound, I die in that compound. That’s the deal.”
“That’s not a deal. That’s a death pact.”
“Yes. That’s exactly what it is.”
He wants to fight me. I can see it in the way his jaw works. Every protective instinct — the same one that drove him into the desert at 2 AM — is screaming at him to argue.
“You already tried the noble sacrifice. I found you and brought you back with a gun under your chin.” My voice is steady, but my heart is not.
Every word costs me something. “You don’t get to die for me, Kill.
You don’t get to be the tragic hero who loves so much he dies. That’s not love. That’s cowardice.”
He flinches.
“We go to Montana. Together. We kill Silas. Together. And if it goes wrong — if it’s a trap or his men are better than your intel — then we fall. Together. Both or neither.”
My chest is aching with the weight of what I just demanded — not just his promise, but his willingness to let me die beside him. To accept that my death is not worse than his. To treat me as an equal in the one arena where equality means we both stop breathing.
“Both or neither,” he murmurs quietly.
I place my feet back on the dashboard. The landscape is changing — the beige desert is fading, hints of green appearing. The death pact settles between us like something heavy that’s been set down.
“After,” I say quietly.
“After what?”
“After Silas. After the compound. After we don’t die.” I take a breath. “What do you want?”
“Functional shower. Steak that isn’t jerky. Twelve hours of sleep.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Have you seen the water pressure in that safehouse?”
I shift to face his profile. “A home. I want a home, Killian.” The word feels foreign in my mouth. Like a new language I’m learning. “Somewhere warm. With windows. And a kitchen I actually learn how to use.” I pause, looking down at my blistered hands. “I’ve never had one. A home that was mine.”
I can feel the vulnerability of what I’m saying. Ivy Vane, who built a ledger of forty-four names and carved a moth into a dead man’s wrist, is sitting in a car with her bare feet on the dashboard asking for a house with windows.
“I want a place where nobody knows our names. Where no one is trying to kill us. I want to be able to leave the front door unlocked if I want to.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Weighing my words the way he weighs everything — carefully, looking for the threat.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Warm. Windows. Kitchen. Unlocked door.” He pauses. “I’d add a garage.”
“Obviously.”
“What about a dog?” His tone is casual, but I can see the tension in his forearm. He wants a dog.
“What kind?”
“Something big. That sleeps on the floor next to the bed.” He exhales. “A rescue.”
Of course. He’s never been rescued until me.
“I want a cat.”
“Cats are psychopaths.”
“That’s why I like them.” He almost smiles. “And a snake.”
His whole body changes. His grip on the steering wheel tightens so fast his knuckles go white. His breathing pattern shifts — shorter, shallower — in under three seconds. His pupils dilate. The tendons in his neck pull, his jaw locks, and I catch the micro-tremor in his right hand.
“Did you just…” I pull my feet off the dashboard again, sitting up. “Your heart rate just spiked.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“Your pulse is visible from here, Killian. You’re tachycardic.” I stare at him. The man who took a gun under his chin without flinching. Who let me hold a knife to his throat and got harder. “You’re afraid of snakes.”
“I’m not —”
“Yes, you are.”
“I have a healthy respect for —”
“You’re terrified.”
“They don’t have legs, Ivy! They’re just moving spines — muscular tubes with venom and no eyelids! It’s not fear, it’s rational and —”
The sound that comes out of me is something I don’t recognize — a real laugh, full and bright and startled out of me like I forgot I had it.
Muscular tubes with no eyelids.
I’m laughing so hard my hand is over my mouth and my eyes are watering. And every time I think I’ve stopped, I look at his face — the genuine offense, the deeply wounded dignity of a lethal assassin whose phobia has been exposed — and it gets worse.
“It’s not funny.”
“It’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“You’ve had a dark life.”
“I have. And you’re afraid of snakes.” I wipe my eyes. “I’m going to need a minute.”
His jaw is doing the thing — the suppressing thing. He’s trying not to smile. He’s trying not to smile because I’m laughing and he’s never heard it like this.
“Oh my God. Are you smiling?”
“No.”
“You are. The snake conversation is making you happy because I’m laughing.”
“I’m plotting revenge.” The scar pulls.
“You’re smiling, Killian.”
“I’m exposing my teeth. It’s a threat display.”
I laugh again, lighter this time.
This is what hope sounds like. A man who’s afraid of snakes and a woman who can’t stop laughing.
The laughter fades into something warmer than silence. I place my feet back on the dashboard. The gun with his anatomical heart sits in the console between us and the Ledger is closed in my lap.
My hand drifts to the console, finding his.
“For the record,” he says, eyes on the road, “if you bring a snake into our home, I’m sleeping in the garage.”
Our home.
My breath catches.
He said it like it already exists. Like it’s waiting for us on the other side of Montana, furnished and warm, with windows and a dog and an unlocked door. He said it like it’s a fact, not a hope.
I turn my face toward the window, so he won’t see my expression.
Our home. I hold onto the two words like the most dangerous thing I’ve ever carried.