Page 70 of His Orders

ETHAN

Ileave her in the kitchen because if I stay even one second longer, I’m going to kiss her. I’m going to forget everything I promised myself I wouldn’t do, and I’m going to reach for her like she’s mine again, like her body wasn’t once a battlefield and her mouth hasn’t been stained by lies, and I’ll pull her into my lap and press her back against the counter and bury myself in the one place I’ve never stopped craving. And I can’t do that. Not yet. Not when the wound is still fresh and the trust still broken and the truth has only just begun to settle between us like dust we haven’t swept clean. So I turn and walk away, fists clenched, jaw locked, every muscle in my body aching from restraint as I cross the hall to my room and shut the door behind me.

The lights are dim in here, the city stretching wide beneath the windows, a quilt of yellowed light and quiet noise that never really goes still. I roll up my sleeves, unbutton the cuffs, shrug out of the shirt like it’s armor I no longer need, and throw it over the back of a chair. My laptop sits waiting on the desk, charger still plugged in, browser tabs open from earlier research, each one a breadcrumb in the trail Mason and I have been following for days. I sit down, crack my knuckles, and get to work.

We’re going to take Daniel Holt apart piece by piece.

The files Mason pulled go deeper than I thought possible—accounts tied to shell corporations, names shuffled through holding companies like cards in a rigged game, records that were meant to disappear but didn’t quite make it to the incinerator. There’s a pattern, and I’m good at patterns. I’ve spent my life reading vitals and CT scans and bloodwork, learning how to predict failure before it comes. And this? This is the same. The body is just bigger. The cancer spreads wider.

There’s an audio file in one of the folders Mason flagged, a conversation recorded off a private call line, and I listen again as Daniel’s voice—careless, entitled, unmistakably cruel—makes a joke about drugging a clinical subject for “noncompliance”. I pause the playback, stare at the waveform on the screen, and breathe slowly through my nose. This isn’t just about Ivy anymore. It’s about every woman like her. Every victim who thought she was alone. Every voice silenced by power and money and the wrong last name.

I open the secure line Mason set up and ping him with an encrypted message. He responds almost instantly. He’s been doing his own digging—tracking down the nurse who filed the complaint at Valleria General, the one whose signature vanished from the records, the one who hasn’t returned calls in weeks. He found her. She’s in Michigan now, working under a new license, scared out of her skin and barely willing to speak, but she remembers everything. He’s going to get her statement. He says it might be enough to open a case with the state.

We move on to asset trails, digging through Daniel’s known properties. There’s a townhouse outside Montville bought in cash two years ago under the name of a Cayman Islands trust. Inside? A server room. Mason’s contact scoped it out—aparanoid setup, off-grid, running its own internal network. He couldn’t get inside, but he got photos. And the cables match a supplier out of Ohio known for working with private pharma clients who want to keep testing off the radar. The address has been forwarded to someone Mason trusts, someone who doesn’t wear a badge but has plenty of friends who do.

We keep pushing.

There’s another connection Mason doesn’t like. A former judge, now retired, who had a hand in shutting down the first round of complaints when Auralis collapsed. Turns out, that judge just bought a waterfront condo with ties to Holt’s second cousin. There’s no paper trail, but there are enough whispers to make the picture clear. And Mason’s tracing phone records, pulling call logs, building a timeline that shows more than friendship.

I jot it all down, every thread, every name, every timestamp, building the case the way I’d build a diagnosis. Clinical. Cold. Precise.

Because I’m going to destroy Daniel Holt, and I’m going to make it legal.

I reach for my glass, realize I never poured one, and opt for water instead, the kind of small decision that reminds me I’m still trying to be the man Ivy might be able to trust again. But it’s hard. Harder than I expected. I stare at my screen, at the photos of the café where Daniel stalked her, at the transcript of the surveillance report where he circled her rental, and all I want is to find him in the dark and finish what I started in that parking lot.

Instead, I close the laptop, set it aside, and rub the back of my neck with one hand, the muscles stiff and burning from hoursof tension. My body feels tight, restless, full of unspent energy I can’t shake. I glance toward the window. The city glows below. And somewhere down there, Daniel Holt still breathes.

I lean back, let the silence crawl across my skin.

I think of Ivy in that soft cardigan, sitting across from me at the kitchen table, legs curled under her, face pale from everything she’s been through, and yet still looking at me like I’m the only solid thing left in her world. I think of her voice when she said she hadn’t wanted to find out the gender without me. I think of her eyes when I stood to leave. I think of the way she didn’t fight me when I told her to come home.

And then I picture her in the next room, sleeping in a bed that used to be my guest room, now holding something more important than anything I’ve ever known.

I get up, walk to the window, let my hand rest on the cold pane of glass.

She’s here. In my home. Carrying my child.

And I still can’t touch her.

The frustration coils low in my stomach, a slow-burning ache I’ve been pretending I don’t feel. I run a hand through my hair, close my eyes, try to think of anything else, but the image of her—barefoot, belly soft, face flushed with something between fear and want—buries itself behind my ribs.

I can’t help myself.

I cross to the couch, sink down, hand already moving to unfasten my jeans as the weight of everything presses in from all sides—her scent still faint in the air, her presence like gravity tugging at me even through the wall that divides us. I close my eyes, onehand stroking slowly, breath thick, heart pounding with every ghost of a memory I shouldn’t be indulging but do, anyway. I imagine her mouth, her thighs, the soft breath of her voice when she whispers my name, the heat of her body as she arches beneath me, and when I come, it’s not relief. It’s just another reminder of everything I can’t have. Not yet.

I lie back against the cushions, arm flung over my eyes, chest rising and falling in ragged breaths.

The city keeps humming outside. My pulse slows. My skin cools, and sleep finally takes over. The next few days slip into a rhythm that feels almost functional on the surface but pulses with a tension I can’t shake. I bury myself in work. I keep my phone on silent when I’m with patients and stare at my inbox longer than necessary when I’m not. I scrub in for surgeries and take notes on charts I’ve already read twice. But underneath all of it, I am unraveling in pieces no one sees, unraveling in quiet ways—a missed appointment, a snapped reply, a late arrival to rounds I would never have tolerated from a resident.

At night, I return to the penthouse, the space still too silent despite the sound of Ivy’s fingers against her keyboard or the soft flicker of whatever music she listens to when she’s working. She’s always at the kitchen counter or curled into the farthest edge of the couch, hunched over her laptop like it’s the only thing tethering her to the version of herself that existed before all of this. She’s good at it—whatever it is—though I only know fragments. Marketing strategy for ethical skincare brands, remote campaign consulting for nonprofits, something with impact and reach and a kind of quiet integrity that makes sense when you know her.

She never says much when I walk in. Just lifts her eyes, sometimes offers a quiet “hey”, sometimes nothing at all. AndI can’t tell if she’s waiting for me to speak first or if she’s just grateful for the distance. Either way, I let it be.

But I still watch her.

Every night, I find myself listening for sounds in the dark, straining to catch the shift of her footsteps or the creak of floorboards outside her door. The city is quieter this high up, but I still hear things. Once, when something thudded in the kitchen—just a fallen bottle of prenatal vitamins she’d knocked over—I was out of bed and in the hallway before my mind even caught up. She stood barefoot in one of my sweatshirts, hair tangled, eyes wide, and for a moment, she looked so much like the girl I’d fallen for in the softness between battles that I almost reached for her.

Instead, I checked the pantry the next day and filled it with whatever she could stomach. Ginger tea. Protein bars. A ridiculous number of red apples because I remembered her saying once that she craved them during morning sickness. She never mentions any of it, just arranges them in a basket on the counter and keeps working.

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