Page 27 of Infamous

Each repetition buries me a little deeper.

Lucian Cross is dead.

Ghost burned to death in Ford Penitentiary.

The infamous killer is gone.

The words hit like body blows. My chest locks. My lungs refuse to open. The air slices through me, cold and sharp.

I can’t breathe.

I thought I’d prepared for this - for the possibility that someday, the world would end in flames and take him with it. I built walls around my heart, stacked them high, swore I’d be ready.

But hope is a big fat liar. It worms through every crack no matter how tightly you seal it.

I told myself to stop waiting.

He told me to forget him. But I never did.

Somewhere, in the quiet part of me that refused to die, I believed he’d come back. That one day he’d walk out of the dark and find me.

Now that whisper’s gone. Hope shatters - sharp, merciless, final.

And the sound of it breaking inside me is louder than the sirens howling across the news feed.

I close my eyes, but he’s everywhere. His hand at the small of my back. The warmth of his palm steadying me when the world tilted. The silence between us that felt like safety.

The day he told me to let him go - voice steady, eyes betraying him. That’s all I have left. Ghosts. Fragments. The echo of a man the world called a monster, but who, to me, was the only thing that ever felt real.

The television drones on - names, numbers, body counts. Forty-eight dead. Ford Penitentiary in ruins. A chapter closed.

The anchors sound relieved, triumphant, like the world is cleaner now. But I can’t join them. Because whatever was left of me - whatever stubborn flicker still believed he’d return - was buried with him in that fire.

And hope, fragile and foolish, is finally gone.

17

LUCIAN

There are strange comforts to being caged.

When everything’s stripped away, you learn what really matters.

The itch of grass under your feet. The smell of apple pie cooling on a chipped plate. The sacred freedom of choice; doing what you want, when you want.

I don’t have that anymore. What I do have is time.

Time’s a cruel lover. She gives you nothing but herself and demands everything in return. I spend hours dissecting the past, bleeding over every mistake. Days building blueprints for the future. The system branded menever to be released.But I don’t buy it. One day these walls will crack. And when they do, the world won’t know what hit it.

Twenty minutes. That’s how long it takes before he finally walks across the yard.

Mason Ironside.

The name’s a warning - heavy, deliberate. He doesn’t move like prey, doesn’t posture like a predator either. He’s something else. Confidence stitched into every quiet step. Underboss of the Moreno family. Right hand to Kanyan De Scarzi.

If De Scarzi is the storm, Ironside is the lightning. He’s precise, lethal, inevitable.

He’s part of thenew mafia.Not thugs with guns and gold chains, but boardroom wolves in thousand-dollar suits. They don’t spill blood, theyownit.