Page 122 of Infamous

My pulse staggers. My stomach turns cold. I don’t know whether to reach for him or crawl away. How could I have been so blind? The way he held me, the way he touched me like I was something fragile and fierce at once - it washimall along. The same voice. The same scent. The same quiet protection I mistook for coincidence.

He doesn’t speak. He just watches me, jaw tight, chest rising and falling like each breath is painful, heavy.

“You - ” My voice cracks. “It’s always been you.”

His throat works, but the words don’t come.

And then, like a reel unspooling, memory crashes in.

The hospital. The rain. The blood. The cemetery. The coffee shop. The courthouse.

Billie.

My stomach twists. The name hits harder than the pain. Billie Underwood - his sister. The girl whose death built the monster kneeling before me. The girl I failed to save. The girl I helped destroy.

“Oh, God,” I whisper, tears burning down my face before I even feel them. “Billie was your sister.”

His eyes shutter. Pain carves through him, quiet and violent, and I realize - he’s been carrying this truth alone. All this time. Every lie he told was a form of mercy. Every silence, a shield.

And me? I was the reason that broke him. The reasonGhostwas born.

I press a trembling hand to my mouth, and a sound claws out of me - something between a sob and a scream. “I didn’t know,” I say. “I didn’t -”

He catches my wrist before I can hit myself. His fingers are warm and shaking, his voice hoarse when he finally answers.

“I know.”

It’s the kindest thing he could have said. And the cruelest.

Because now I see him clearly - the killer and the savior, the boy and the man, the love and the ruin - and I can’t unsee it.

The drugs still swim in my blood, making the world tilt and shimmer, but the truth cuts through the fog clean as glass. The two of them - Jude and Lucian - merge in the light, faces overlapping like a memory I should’ve recognized long ago.

It was always in the way he loved me.

The way he held me like a man who’d already lost too much.

The protection he wove around me - not out of guilt, but obsession.

A promise he made to the past.

And I hate myself for what that means.

For the blood between us.

For Billie.

The room spins, and I fold forward into him. He catches me like he always has, arms strong and unyielding, his breath ragged against my hair. I can feel his heart hammering against my chest, desperate, uneven, alive.

We stay like that for a long time. Just two broken things stitched together by consequence.

He whispers something into my hair - something that sounds like a prayer, or maybe an apology. I don’t know which. I don’t even care. Because in this moment, there’s no line between love and ruin, between forgiveness and punishment.

There’s onlyafter.

After pain.

After blood.