Page 34 of Infamous

The cheekbones are wrong. The brow too smooth. The jaw too sharp. The mouth crueler. Only the eyes are mine.

I clench my teeth. The movement feels foreign, like the muscles don’t yet know the weight of anger. I inhale. The sound comes out wrong. Raw. Mechanical.

“My name is Ghost.”

It scrapes through my throat, gravel dragged over bone.

“I am the ghost.”

It’s not my voice. It’s lower, colder. A weapon forged from silence.

My hands slam the sink. The mirror quivers. The stranger doesn’t. He just watches.

“Who am I?”

I know that under the carved bones and sterilized skin, I’m still here. The dark didn’t get cut out. The fury didn’t fade. The boy who lost his sister is still screaming inside. And yet, I’m no longer that man that I once was.

The scream never leaves my throat. It’s silent, internal, the kind that burns without noise. It coils in my chest, sharp and alive, until I feel it spreading through every nerve, every vein, every corner of this new flesh they stitched me into.

My reflection in the mirror doesn’t fit the sound that begs to leave my soul.

Every violent moment of my past is still stitched into the fabric of who I was before they carved me into something new.

The face staring back at me is someone else’s—clean lines, calm eyes, a stranger’s jaw set in a stranger’s silence.

It’s a face that can walk down the street without being recognized, without women crossing to the other side, without the memory ofGhostshadowing me.

This is what I wanted. Freedom. A new life. A second chance at anonymity. But no one tells you that freedom feels like mourning. No one warns you that erasing your face is the same as dying. That you’ll wake in the middle of the night with your hands clawing for a body that no longer exists.

I start to wonder if they saved me or killed me instead. If the fire that burned Ford to ash freed me, or if it just cremated whatever was left of Lucian Cross.

Freedom at this cost feels like standing in an open grave with a view.

No bars. No chains. Just endless air, and nowhere to belong inside it.

I touch the scar that runs just beneath my jaw. It’s just one of many reminders that I’ve been remade. It should make me feel untouchable. Instead, it just makes me aware of every ghost still living inside my skin. Maybe that’s the cruelest part.

You can take the boy out of the fire. You can strip his name, carve his face, rewrite his voice. But you can’t take the fire out of him. You can’t take the hunger. The guilt. The pulse that saysyou survived, but you’re not really free.

BOOK 2: THE BIRTH OF JUDE MERCER

THE PRESENT

Resurrection

20

LUCIAN

Most people, if asked, would jump at the chance to go back in time and have a do-over. They’d cradle their mistakes like fragile glass and whisperif only.

If only I’d studied harder. If only I’d loved better. If only I’d stayed instead of leaving.

Not me. I don’t believe in do-overs.

The past is carved into me, every scar, every fracture, every scream that still echoes in the hollow places of my head. To take that away would be to takemeaway. Because the truth is simple and brutal: I’m not who I amdespitewhat happened. I’m who I ambecauseof it.

If I hadn’t seen Billie’s body on that cold slab of concrete, I wouldn’t know what it means to hate with every fiber of my being. If the world hadn’t branded me a killer, plastered my face across every headline, I wouldn’t understand what it means to wear a mask you can never take off.