Page 111 of Infamous

“I do.” My voice shatters on the last word. “I belong with you. There’s nothing left out there for me.”

He presses his forehead to mine. The contact steals the air from my lungs. He smells like smoke and storm rain, like the nights he used to pull me out of nightmares just by breathing beside me.

“You think this is peace?” he whispers. “It’s not. It’s just the pause before the heartbreak starts again.”

“I don’t care.” I clutch at him, fingers digging into his shoulders. “If it means being with you, then let it break me.”

He exhales, a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “You always were a stubborn little saint.”

“I’m not a saint.”

“No,” he says softly, brushing his thumb over my cheek. “You’re the reason I believed they still existed.”

The world trembles. The mist thickens. Somewhere far away, I hear the faint beeping of a monitor.

Lucian looks past me, his jaw tight. “They’re calling you back.”

“Don’t make me go.” I grab his wrist. “Please. You promised you’d never leave me again.”

His gaze burns through me - fierce, impossible, final. “And I won’t. But this isn’t our ending. You still have pages left to write.”

“I’m tired,” I whisper. “I’m so tired.”

He leans in, his lips ghosting over my ear. “Then rest. But not here. Not yet.”

The light shifts - growing harsh, searing, white as a blade. He starts to fade, dissolving like smoke in sunlight.

“Lucian-!” I reach out, panic clawing up my throat. My hand passes through his chest, through the heart I once held together with my own.

“Live, Nadia,” he says, voice breaking, desperate and low. “Live for me. For what I couldn’t. That’s how you keep me with you.”

Tears burn down my face as the light swallows him. “Don’t you dare leave me alone in this world!”

He smiles one last time, soft and wrecked and infinite. “You were never alone, angel. You just forgot to look up.”

Then he’s gone.

The world collapses into noise - alarms, shouts, a voice screaming my name.

My body convulses. My chest seizes. The pain returns all at once, brutal and real. The beeping spikes, and I choke on air like it’s fire.

The first breath back in the world of the living feels like drowning.

And somewhere in the echo of my skull, I still hear him -

Live.

Something dragsme up through the dark.

Through water, through static, through pain.

The first sound that finds me is a machine - steady, sharp, merciless.Beep. Beep. Beep.

Each one is a command.

Stay.

Stay.