Chapter 50
Ivy
I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a scalpel in one hand and an orange in the other.
The blade wobbles. The incision is too deep on the left, uneven on the right. I set the scalpel down and flex my fingers, but the tremor is still there — the same intensity as it was in that Montana motel when I tried to stitch Killian and my hands refused to obey.
I know the anatomy of what’s compromised.
I can name every nerve, every muscle, and every pathway between my brain and my fingertips—and I know exactly which ones aren’t firing the way they used to.
I’ve been doing the same routine since we arrived in New Mexico — hand exercises, grip strengthening, precision drills on fruit.
Not even a flicker of improvement. It could be months before I know if it’s ever coming back.
I hear Killian before I see him. His gait is still uneven from the hyperextended knee, making his footsteps asymmetrical on the tile.
He sets his laptop and a folder on the counter, before leaning against it. I don’t look up because I know he’s watching the tremor, cataloguing it the same way I catalogue his injuries.
I pick up the scalpel and try another cut. The blade shakes. I set it down harder than I mean to.
“It’s not going to heal faster if you’re angry at it.” He has that rough morning voice, even though he’s been awake for hours, circling the perimeter like a wolf.
“I’m not angry.”
“You’ve murdered four oranges this week.”
I look up and give him a faint smile. “Five.”
“My mistake.”
The silence between us is comfortable but charged. A week of proximity without being able to do anything while our bodies heal. A week of watching his mouth and remembering what it does and not being able to have it.
He picks up the folder. “I need to show you something.”
He spreads two sets of documents across the table — passports, residency cards, driver’s licenses. Everything you need to exist as someone new.
I pick up the first passport and open it.
My heart stops.
Elena Trovato.
The name stares back at me next to a photo I don’t remember him taking. Elena. My mother’s name.
I stare at it, letting the weight of the name sink into my bones.
My mother. The woman who told me to fly.
The woman whose pictures Malachi erased, whose clothes he removed, whose name he scrubbed from the estate until I had to sneak into the attic just to make sure she was real.
The woman who hummed in the kitchen and saw what the men at the dinner party were doing and chose to save me the only way she could.
And now her name is on my passport. Next to my photo. On a document that says I exist.
“In Lisbon, you got to choose.” His voice is steady. Prepared. “This time, I did.”
“Why Elena?”
“Because she told you to fly. And you did.” A pause. “Carrying her name now isn’t grief, Ivy. It’s proof.”
My throat closes. I set the passport down and blink fast, pressing the tears back — not because I’m ashamed of them. Because I want to see clearly when I open the next one.
Luca Trovato.
“Luca?”
“Killian is a name you hear once and don’t forget. Luca is a name you hear and let go.”
I study him. The man whose name moves through the underworld like a blade through silk, choosing to be forgettable. Choosing to be ordinary.
“That’s what you want to be? Forgettable?”
He takes a strand of my hair and tucks it behind my ear. “I want to be alive. Forgettable people get to be alive.”
The words land in my chest. Every memorable version of him was built to serve someone else — the soldier, the weapon, the ghost. Luca gets to just live.
“And Trovato?” I say it slowly, testing the syllables.
“Italian.” He holds my gaze. “It means found. They used to give that name to foundlings. Children left at churches or hospitals.” His jaw is tight and his hands on the table are not shaking only because he’s forcing them not to.
“I chose Trovato because —” I place my hand next to his, touching his fingers lightly.
“I was lost for thirty years. And you found me, Ivy.”
The weight lifts off his chest in a loud exhale. I break his gaze because if I keep looking at him, I’m going to cry in a way that I can’t stop, and we haven’t gotten to the bottom of the folder yet.
Something underneath the documents catches my eye. I slide the paper out and my eyes widen.
A marriage certificate.
Official. Our names — our new names — printed in clean type. Elena Trovato. Luca Trovato. Signed, stamped, real.
My eyes snap to his. He’s waiting. “You married us.”
“On paper.”
“Without asking me.”
“Yes.”
I should be furious. Paper has only ever been a cage for me.
Malachi traded me on paper. Owned me on paper.
Controlled every aspect of my existence through documents and signatures and legal structures designed to keep me inside.
I open my mouth to say something sharp — something about institutions being cages with nicer fonts — but the words die.
For me, paper is a shackle. For him — for Killian Doe, the baby left at a fire station with nothing but a name on a scrap of paper — having his name on a document next to someone else’s means he exists.
It means someone claimed him. It means he belongs and it’s written down where it can’t be taken back or denied or erased.
Paper is the one thing he never had.
I look down at the certificate, tracing the names with my fingertips, reading the topography of our new identities. My heart hammers and I try to ignore the tremor in my fingers.
I always knew he wanted me. But I never fully understood how much this means to him. What we mean. What having his name next to mine on a piece of paper, official and permanent and real, costs a man who spent thirty years being nobody’s.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“We’re married.” I look up at him and make sure he understands from my tone that I’m not surrendering. I’m embracing. The same way I’ve embraced every part of him.
He exhales, cups my face, and kisses me. “We’re married.”
I give him an evil smirk and stand up from the table. I walk to the bedroom and come back with a small box.
“Your turn.”
He opens it and stares at the sterile pouch containing a large-gauge syringe and a tiny glass capsule the size of a rice grain — military-grade asset tracking microchip.
“Ivy.” His pupils dilate.
“You left me once. I woke up in a cold bed with a butterfly knife in my hand and your car gone.” My voice is steady. “I have no intention of letting you make the same mistake twice.” I pick up the syringe and load the chip. “Take off your shirt and turn around.”
He doesn’t move. His eyes are darker than I’ve seen them in days. The look he gives me is the same one he had when I carved the K into my skin — like I’m the most terrifying and beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
He pulls his shirt over his head, flinching as his ribs catch. He turns and presents his back to me.
I swab between his shoulder blades and grip the syringe. “This is going to hurt.”
“Everything with you does.” I can hear the smirk.
I position the needle. My hand trembles, but my knowledge is sure. I find the subcutaneous layer by feel, angle, and push. He inhales sharply but doesn’t move. The chip slides under his skin and I pull the needle, pressing the bandage over the insertion point.
My hand stays on his back as I press my lips against his spine.
“This is my version of a wedding ring.”
His breathing goes slow. Deep. His body responds to my words before his brain catches up.
“Say that again.” His voice is almost a growl.
“My version of a wedding ring.” I murmur against the top of his spine. “You’re microchipped, husband. Like a dog. I’ll know where you are at every moment of every day for the rest of your life.”
He turns around. My eyes drop to the hard outline straining against his jeans. The combination of pain and possession has lit something in him that goes beyond want.
“Ivy.” My name sounds like a threat and a prayer fused into one sound.
“You’re hard.”
“Yes.”
“From a needle in your back.”
“From you. Owning me.”
That’s the match — a week of proximity, a week of healing and not touching and watching his mouth and wanting — it ignites.
I step between his knees and grab his jaw, running my fingers over his scar. My hand shakes against his face, but I don’t care. I press my lips to him and open my mouth instantly and the goosebumps that erupt on my skin feel like breathing for the first time since Montana.
His tongue finds mine and the realization hits mid-kiss — we have time. Nobody is bleeding. Nobody is running. Nobody is dying. We’re in a house in the middle of nowhere. Married.
His hands find my waist, pulling me into him. His skin touches mine where my shirt rides up and every nerve lights.
What follows isn’t violence. It’s hunger that finally has permission to be slow.
I drop to my knees and unbuckle his belt with shaking hands. When I take him into my mouth his groan fills the kitchen. I work him with the devotion of a woman who knows exactly what this man is worth because she almost lost him.
His hand fists in my hair, but I pull back before he finishes. “Don’t come yet.”
He pulls me up by my hair and lifts me onto the kitchen table.
The documents scatter to the floor as his mouth moves down my body, leaving wet kisses on my collarbone, my sternum, and the K.
He kneels between my legs, hooks them over his shoulders, and eats me like he’s making up for every day we couldn’t touch.
The orgasm builds from the base of my spine and detonates so hard I scream his name and my thighs clamp around his head. He rides me through it, before pulling back with my wetness on his chin and his eyes black.
“Good girl.”
“Call me that again and I’ll bite next time.”
He smirks. “Promise?”
He enters me with one hard thrust that shifts the table. His forehead drops to mine. “Eyes open.”
I hold his gaze while he moves inside me — deep, slow strokes that build into something brutal. His hand around my throat is narrowing my vision until everything focuses to the point where his body meets mine.
“Harder.”
He gives me harder. Every thrust moves the table. The hand on my throat tightens and loosens in rhythm and the sounds we’re making fill the kitchen. He slides out of me to turn me around and bend me over the table. My cheek rests against the cool wood, while his weight is draping over my back.
His hand finds my clit, syncing with his thrusts, working me from both sides until I shatter so hard my mouth opens and nothing comes out. He comes inside me with my name against my shoulder and stays there, pressed along my back, both of us panting.
After we catch our breaths, I pull him to the chair and straddle him, sinking down onto him for the last time and ride him slow. His hands are all over my body while the orgasm builds slow and neither of us rushes it. We stay in the middle of it. The part we used to skip. The part that kills you.
“Come, Mrs. Trovato.”
My new name — our name — said in that wrecked, dark voice while he’s buried inside me to the hilt, unravels me completely. I come so hard I stop breathing. My body locks around him and I feel him follow, pulsing, filling me. We kiss through the wave — messy and open-mouthed.
I collapse against his chest and we stay like this for a long time. His hand is tracing my spine and my hand is tracing his back, finding the small hard ridge between his shoulder blades where the chip sits under his skin.
Mine.
His heartbeat hammers against my ear. Mine hammers against his chest. Two pulses, offset, finding each other.
I lift my head. He looks wrecked with his split lip reopened — my fault. But he looks peaceful — a word I have never associated with Killian Craw. Not Killian Craw anymore. Luca Trovato.
“When do we leave?”
“Three days.”
“To where?”
“Puglia. Southern Italy. Outside a town called Ostuni.” His lips press against my cheek. “There’s a house. Stone. Old. Land around it.”
My heart flutters. While I was murdering oranges, he was building us a life.
“Is there a kitchen?”
“A big one.”
“I’ll burn it down.”
“I know.”
I sink into his arms as the sun moves through the windows, amber and gold, painting us in warm light.
Found.