Page 32 of Infamous

The van moves forward, steady as a heartbeat. Wanda breathes like she’s holding in a scream.

And I sit in the dark with blood drying on my hands, smoke burning in my lungs, free but still haunted.

The city slips past in fragments; factories collapsing into rust, streets slick with rain, neon signs bent like broken halos. I watch it through the window, detached. It’s someone else’s world now.

The safe house waits. We descend into the basement like a tomb. The air is heavy, wet, reeking of iodine and mildew. Fluorescents buzz overhead, their light too white, too cruel. Stainless steel counters. Trays of scalpels and sutures. Tools of precision. Tools of erasure.

In the center of the room, there’s a chair bolted to the floor, cuffs spread wide like open arms. It doesn’t look like salvation. It looks like execution. Because that’s exactly what it is. The execution ofGhost.The monster they turned me into.

Ghost dies here. Cut apart, carved clean until nothing remains but the shell.

I lower myself into the chair. The leather straps bite into my wrists, cold and unyielding. Buckles snap shut, one after another.

Wanda hovers near the wall, pale beneath the lights, her lips trembling with something like pity. But she doesn’t speak. The silence feels sacred. Funeral silence. And I welcome it.

The surgeon enters without a word with his mask on and his gloves snapping. He looks at me once - just once - then looks away. That’s fine. His job isn’t to see me. It’s toendme.

The sting of antiseptic hits the air. Then the needle pierces flesh. Cold fire floods my veins. White, sharp, merciless. The room wavers. Voices blur into static. And through the haze, she appears.

Billie.

Her hair fanned around her head like a halo. Her lips parted, chest still.

The night she died, she buried me with her. She left behind only this curse, this ghost. But tonight, I finish it. Tonight, I buryGhost.

The drugs pull me under, dragging me down through black water. And I welcome them. When I wake, the face staring back won’t be mine. It won’t be anyone’s. A man without a face. A man without a name. A shadow without a past. And the world - the world won’t be ready for what crawls out of this grave.

19

LUCIAN

Pain is different when you choose it.

I’ve felt it before; on the street, in the ring, under fists and knives and promises that never held. But this… this sterile kind of pain makes my skin crawl.

I told them no hospitals. So they dumped me here instead. Safe house. Clean linens. Loaded silence. It smells of bleach and history. The air is thick enough to curdle in your lungs. The walls pretend to be clean, but I can smell what they’ve tried to scrub away. Fear, blood, regret.

I hate it. Hospitals. Healing. Hope. All of it.

I sit up, ribs bandaged too tight, head pounding like war drums. But I’m alive. Unfortunately.

The door creaks. I don’t look up. I don’t have to. That presence carries its own gravity.

Mason Ironside steps inside with his broad shoulders, sleepless eyes, and hands that have ended more lives than he’s confessed. He doesn’t say hello. Doesn’t ask how I’m feeling. He just stands there. Watching. Waiting.

Typical Ironside, built from silence and threat.

“You know, Mason,” I rasp, voice raw from the tube theyshoved down my throat, “most people send flowers when a man wakes up from surgery.”

He doesn’t flinch. “They did a great job on you,” he says, voice gravel and steel. “Marked improvement.”

I smirk. It hurts. But I do it anyway.

“You always this warm and fuzzy with your employees? No muffin basket? No bedside manner?”

“You want a muffin?” he deadpans. “I’ll throw one at your head.”

“Aw. Youdocare.”