Page 21 of Infamous

Then he was gone.

The silence that followed wasn’t peace anymore. It was hollow. Like he’d taken something with him when he left.

I sat down again, hands wrapped around the cooling cup. The ache in my chest spread slow and deep, refusing to fade.

Maybe that was just how it went now; people came close enough to almost know me, then left before they really did.

13

LUCIAN

Nadia sat across from me in the kitchen, sunlight spilling over her shoulder like it had been made just for her. Her books were open, pages crowded with notes, little curls of handwriting that looked too gentle for the world we actually lived in. She stirred her tea without thinking, slow circles, the kind born from muscle memory—years of doing too much, of keeping her hands busy so her mind didn’t fall apart. The spoon clicked softly against porcelain, steady as a heartbeat.

And somehow, this -this- felt like the strangest thing I’d ever known.

Not the killing, nor the blood. Not the violence I’d built my life on. But this.

A kitchen. A woman. Morning light and the smell of tea instead of iron.

She didn’t know what I was. What I’d done.

She didn’t know that the man sitting across from her, watching her tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear, had once stood over her with the intention of ending her life. She didn’tknow that the ghosts I carried had her name written across their faces.

Billie’s brother.

The boy she never recognized from the faces in the crowd that night.

The man who had turned grief into vocation.

She didn’t know that the same hands now wrapped around a mug had once closed over throats until the world went silent.

She smiled absently at her notes, tapping her pen, unaware she was sitting across from the monster that used to haunt her story. And maybe the cruelest part was how easily she’d folded into my life. How she’d taken the edge off my world and replaced it with something softer. Something I didn’t know how to live in but didn’t want to leave.

We were a strange kind of domestic; two survivors pretending the past hadn’t made trauma out of everything we touched.

There were groceries in the fridge. Her shoes by the door. The faint scent of her shampoo clinging to the air. The ordinary had rooted itself so deep into my bones it felt like blasphemy.

Sometimes she’d talk about her patients at the clinic. Small tragedies, ordinary heartbreaks. I’d always listen, nodding, pretending I didn’t know what real ruin looked like. Pretending I hadn’t seen what people looked like right before they died.

She didn’t need to know that part of me. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

I watched her now, her brow furrowed, her lips moving soundlessly as she read. The sunlight touched her hair, gilded her in something too holy for a man like me to touch. My chest felt too full. This peace was a different kind of pain. An illusion.

Once, she’d been prey. Once, I’d been the hunter. Now, she was justmine.

The distance between what we were and what we’d becomewas dizzying. Somewhere between rage and redemption, I’d started wanting her to stay. Tobelonghere. With me.

I wanted her laughter echoing in these walls for decades. I wanted her toothbrush beside mine. I wanted her bound to me so tightly that even death would have to ask permission to take her.

The thought rose up before I could tame it, violent in its tenderness.

“Marry me,” I said.

The words came out rough, unplanned. They were too raw and too honest. They hung in the air like something dangerous.

Her hand stilled over her tea. The spoon clinked against the cup once, a soft metallic sigh. She looked up, startled, her violet eyes wide and bright, the sunlight catching in them until they looked like fire.

And in that moment, with her breath caught between disbelief and something that might have been hope, I realized I didn’t need redemption.