Page 45 of Infamous

Because the truth is simple, and it’s not negotiable.

If that man pushes her again - if he so much as breathes wrong in her direction, if he lays one unworthy hand on her - I will not stop. Not for the Gattis. Not for anyone.

They can call me Ghost. Monster. Killer. They can drag my name through every headline until the world chokes on it. But she’ll be safe. Even if it means breaking my oath. Even if itmeans burning every chain they’ve ever tied around my throat before I burn the world to the ground.

28

NADIA

Ithink I must be going crazy.

How else do I explain it - the constant awareness of being watched, the scent of him where he shouldn’t be?

Lucian.

It’s everywhere. In the antiseptic corridors of the hospital. In the corners of my apartment where dust gathers and silence hums. Sometimes it’s just the trace of his cologne, faint and fading. Sometimes it’s the weight of eyes I can’t see. And sometimes… sometimes it feels like he’s standing just behind me, close enough that if I turned, I could breathe him in.

But he’s gone.

It’s been a year since the fire. A year since I had to learn how to live without him all over again. Losing him once was agony. Losing himagain- that was fate’s cruel way of driving another dagger through my heart.

The DNA report confirmed his death, leaving no room for speculation.

Lucian Cross. Deceased.

They told me there was nothing left to bury. Just fragments.Enough to test, enough to destroy me. I begged for something - anything - to hold on to. But the warden said no.

“Men like him don’t get marked graves,” he told me, voice flat. “Too many people looking to dig up those demons and desecrate their final resting place.”

So they put him in the ground with the others, nameless, faceless, erased.

And I was expected to move on. To keep breathing. To keep stitching strangers back together while my own heart disintegrated into pieces.

The trauma bay doors hiss open, cold air spilling out like smoke. Another night. Another body. I shove my sleeves up, let the noise of the ER swallow me whole.

“Lacerations to the jaw, possible orbital fracture,” a nurse says, pushing a gurney toward me.

The man’s face is a mass of blood and bone. His pulse races under the skin, desperate to survive.

I don’t miss the flicker in her eyes when she looks at him - that small, involuntary wince she tries to swallow. His face is a ruin. Swollen, split, mottled with bruises that bloom in every shade of pain. Bone pushes against skin where it shouldn’t, one eye already sealing shut.

“What happened?”

“Car accident.”

The patient is losing so much blood, I wonder if he’s going to bleed out before I get a chance to lay my scalpel against his skin.

“We need to patch him up quickly,” I say quietly, eyes still on the wreckage of him. “But he’s going to need more than just stitches. Reconstructive work. Months of it.”

The words hang heavy in the room, too clinical to mask what we both see - one half of his face will need to be rebuilt from scratch.

My hands are not steady as we start the surgery.

“Clamp,” I say.

The metallic click of instruments fills the air. I work on autopilot - suture, swab, stitch, repeat. My gloves are slick, my shoes tacky with blood. The rhythm should be comforting. It used to be. Now it just feels like drowning in someone else’s agony because it’s easier than listening to my own ghosts.

“Pressure’s dropping,” a nurse warns.