Chapter 49
Ivy
I pull off the highway when his breathing changes. The labored rhythm he’s maintained for an hour shifts — shorter, shallower, the pattern of a body reaching the limit of what it can hold silently.
The motel has a flickering sign and three cars in the lot. The clerk doesn’t look up from his phone — he just takes my money and slides over a key, refusing to comment on the blood-crusted woman limping through his lobby.
I get Killian inside and ease him onto the edge of the bed. The controlled exhale he lets out when his knee finally buckles tells me more than any examination could.
The fluorescent light is unforgiving. This is the first time I’m seeing the full detail of what Silas did.
Nasal fracture with lateral displacement.
Left periorbital hematoma, extensive. Intercostal guarding between ribs four and five.
Deep cuts on his torso, patterned — not the random marks of rage but the methodical work of a man who beats the way a teacher grades papers.
He did this to a child. He did this for years.
The clinical language is the only thing between me and the scream building in my chest.
His good eye tracks my injuries, assessing me the same way I’m assessing him. “You look like shit.” His voice is wrecked.
“You should see the other guy. I opened his face with a scalpel.” The ghost of a smile spreads on his lips, while I open the first aid kit beside his thigh. “Shirt off. Let me see.”
He pulls the shirt over his head. It sticks — blood dried into the fabric. I reach for the hem to help and what’s underneath is worse than I estimated.
I reach for the antiseptic, my fingers brushing his side, just above the lowest cut, where the ribs meet the obliques and he flinches.
I know his pain response — the jaw clench, the muscle lock, the body absorbing impact.
This is different. His body pulling away from my touch like my fingers are the thing that hurts.
I stop and look at him. His good eye isn’t meeting mine. His jaw is locked so tight I can see the masseter jumping beneath the bruised skin. I’ve seen this exact expression in my own mirror after every gala — the look of someone whose skin is crawling from a touch that isn’t there anymore.
Someone put something on you that isn’t a bruise.
I lower the gauze and kneel in front of him. “What did he say to you?”
“Your shoulder —”
“Killian.” The way I say his name leaves no room. “What did Silas say to you in that room?”
He doesn’t look at me when he starts. He looks at the faded wallpaper.
“She came back.” His voice is raw. “My mother. When I was fifteen. She came looking for me.” His hands grip the edge of the mattress.
“I don’t know anything about her. Never did.
Just that she couldn’t —” He stops, picking his words.
“I told myself she was scared. That giving me up was the only choice she had. I made peace with that. I made peace with being the thing someone had to let go. I forgave her before I even knew what forgiveness was.”
I don’t move. I give him the only thing he needs right now — total attention.
“And then he tells me she came back. Asking questions. Looking for her son.” His grip tightens until his knuckles go white. “She came back for me, Ivy.”
The room changes temperature.
“Silas says he took care of it.”
Took care of it. The same euphemism men like Silas and Malachi use when they destroy something that threatens their control. The same language. The same casual brutality dressed up as efficiency.
“He didn’t say how. Didn’t give me her name.
Didn’t say if she’s dead or if he scared her off or —” His jaw tightens.
“He just smiled. Like it was a gift. Like he was giving me some kind of sick closure.” He pauses.
“The story I told myself for twenty years — that she didn’t want me—that was the thing I built everything on. And he just —”
He can’t finish. He shakes his head.
Something inside me breaks. Not the clinical break of a system failing. The break of watching the person you love unravel from a wound you can’t stitch.
“I believe you, Killian. That she came back.”
He looks at me for the first time since he started. His good eye is red-rimmed. The boy he locked away is looking out at me through that eye.
“I don’t know what Silas did to her. I don’t know if she’s alive. But I believe she wanted you. That part — the part where you were worth coming back for — I believe that.”
I don’t do comfort. I do truth. And sometimes the truth is the kindest thing you can offer a man who’s been lied to his entire life.
But there’s more — the revelation is devastating, but it’s not what made him flinch when I touched him. “What else?”
His body tightens. The soldier is coming back online.
“Don’t do that. Don’t protect me from it.”
“Ivy —”
“I walked through that compound alone. I killed men and took a bullet. I put a scalpel through Silas’s eye. Whatever he said to you, I can carry it.”
The silence is so long I think he’ll refuse.
“He talked about you.” The air shifts. “He described —” His hand covers his face.
“He told me what he was going to do to you. While I watched. He was clinical about it. Like he was describing a procedure.” I go very still.
“He used your name. Talked about you like you were something he’d already bought. Like testing you was just logistics.”
Testing. The same word Silas used when he was standing in front of me. I got the appetizer and Killian got the full meal.
I understand the flinch now. He can’t let me touch him because Silas described touching me and now his hands feel contaminated. Silas never laid a finger on me, but he got between us anyway — by putting himself in the space where our skin meets.
The rage that builds inside me is not hot — it’s steel-cold, the kind that cuts.
“Look at me.” He doesn’t move his hand. “Killian. Look at me.” His hand lowers. “He didn’t touch me.”
“I know, but —”
“He put words in a room. That’s what men like him do. Malachi did it for twenty-two years. Told me what I was, what I was for, what I was worth.” I hold his gaze. “Words are air. They only have power if you breathe them in.” I pause. “Stop breathing him in, Killian.”
The silence stretches between us, heavy and thick with everything he just let go.
We stay like that for a long time, just two heartbeats slowing down in the dark.
Eventually, I move. My hands are steady despite the shaking in my chest as I clean the grime from his skin, tending to his wounds with a quiet, practiced focus.
When the last of the blood is wiped away from his frame, I sit back and meet his eyes.
“Okay. My turn.” I pull the soaked dressing from my shoulder. “I need you to take the round out and stitch this.”
“I’m not a surgeon.”
“No. You’re a man with two hands and I can’t reach my own shoulder. If that bullet stays in, I go septic within forty-eight hours.”
His hands are already trembling when he pulls out the forceps. This man — who has stitched his own wounds, who has patched himself together a hundred times because there was never anyone else to do it — can’t hold a pair of forceps steady because the body on the table is mine.
The specific weight of being someone’s exception.
I walk him through it. The round, the angle, the tissue density. He pushes through the deltoid, and I exhale through my nose. “It’s migrated lower. Angle down slightly. Feel for it.”
The metal moving inside me creates a deep pressure that’s somehow worse than pain because it’s intimate.
“There.” I feel it before he does. “Close the forceps. Pull straight back. Don’t angle.”
The round comes out. He sets it on the gauze and stares at the single bullet that’s been inside me for hours.
His fingers tremble, taking him three tries to thread the needle. I sit there, waiting, not pushing. I walk him through every stitch with a calm voice, giving him what I’m giving myself — the structure of competence while everything else falls apart.
His work is ugly. I can feel the uneven tension, the irregular spacing, the places where the needle went too deep or not deep enough. These stitches will leave a scar that looks nothing like my own work on him. It will be jagged and imprecise and completely his.
I’ll carry this scar forever. A piece of him on my skin that wasn’t carved in rage.
“Last one. Tie it off. Loop twice. Pull snug.”
He ties it and he lets his forehead drop on my good shoulder. I can feel his breath coming out in a rush.
“Ugly.” His voice comes out muffled against my skin. “Those are the ugliest stitches I’ve ever seen.”
“They’ll hold. That’s what matters.”
I lift his face to mine and place my thumbs on either side of the bridge of his nose. He goes still. “This is going to hurt.”
“What —”
I push. The cartilage shifts under my hands with a wet sound. His hand shoots up, grabbing my wrist. “Breathe.”
“Fuck.”
“Breathe through it. It’s done.” I hold his face, assessing. He’ll have a bump.
He breathes through his nose for the first time in hours. Wet, painful, but possible.
“You could have warned me.”
“I said it was going to hurt.”
“That’s not a warning. That’s a headline.”
I let go and pick up the suture kit for his torso, positioning the curved needle between my thumb and forefinger. It’s the same grip I’ve had since my first cadaver.
My hand shakes.
It’s a tremor — the kind that could be exhaustion or the adrenaline crash. I adjust my grip, but it only shakes worse. I stare at my hand like it belongs to someone else. Ten seconds ago, these fingers reset a broken nose without hesitation. Now they can’t even hold a needle.
He sees it before I can name it. He’s been watching my hands for months. He knows exactly what my steady looks like.
“Your hands.” His voice comes out broken.