Page 117 of Infamous

A sound tears out of her - low, raw, wounded - and she collapses forward, sobbing into her hands. I want to hold her. I want to fix it. But all I can do is stand there, watching the one person I’d die for unravel in front of me.

When Mason’s men arrive, I can’t watch them wheel her out. I stay in the corridor, fists clenched, staring at the blood stains still ghosting the tile from the night she almost died.

She doesn’t look back.

But I hear her voice echo down the hall, faint and cracked as she sobs, right before the elevator doors close.

It’sobscene how ordinary the world keeps pretending to be while everything inside me is collapsing.

The streets still hum. The sky still moves. Somewhere, people are laughing, living, breathing - like the earth didn’t just take something from me I’ll never get back.

The silence in the car feels too big. I can’t fill it, no matter how hard I try.

The steering wheel creaks under my grip as I drive, knuckles white, jaw tight. The city passes in blurs of light and shadow, but nothing registers. Every street looks wrong without her in it. Every second stretches, warped by the thought that she’s lying in some sterile room, surrounded by strangers, while I’m out here doing nothing.

Doingnothing.

That’s the part that eats me alive.

I pull over on some nameless street, kill the engine, and sit there in the dark.

The silence swallows me whole.

My hands are shaking from the ache that comes when rage has nowhere to go. The kind that turns inward and starts carving you up from the inside.

I press the heels of my palms to my eyes until I see stars. For a second, I almost pretend it’s her face I’m seeing - her smile, the curve of her cheek when she used to fall asleep on my chest, the way she whispered my name like a secret.

But it isn’t her. It’s just memory pretending to be mercy.

I want to go to the clinic. I want to storm the doors, drag herout, tell her she’s not alone. But that’s selfish. She needs help. She needs peace - something I’ll never be able to give her. Not while her demons are still alive.

The important thing is that Nadia’s heart is still beating. Maybe she’s dreaming. Maybe she’s forgetting me. Either way, I hope she finds a world that’s gentler than the one I’ve built for myself.

As for me — I’m cleaning up what’s left.

Because the world can pretend to be ordinary all it wants. But I know better. I know what’s hiding underneath. And if I can’t have peace, I’ll settle for punishment.

67

LUCIAN

The motel looks like a place where hope goes to die, with a buzzing yellow light over the door, peeling paint on the numbers, mildew and cheap sex seeping through the walls.

He takes the same room at the same time every Thursday, without fail. While his wife gets a facial uptown, the senator comes here to sweat out his sins.

I’ve watched him for weeks from the dark, through blinds that barely close. He likes routine. Monsters usually do. They hide in habit and call it control.

He thinks he’s invisible here. He thinks the world forgets him once he undoes his tie.

Tonight, I remind him it doesn’t.

My boots sound loud on the cheap carpet in the hallway. I wear gloves. My pulse is flat and cold. There’s no rush - only purpose.

Behind the thin door I hear him: panting, flesh hitting flesh. The sound turns my stomach, not with disgust but with a hot, sharp anger, because beneath it I can still catch the echo ofNadia’s voice - the way she was forced to beg for her life, the way she clung to hope where she thought there was none.

That memory carries me through the door.

One kick. The lock splinters. The frame cracks like old bone.