Page 79 of Infamous

It had to.

You either harden up or die in there. You learn to become stone, to let every shred of humanity bleed out until you can’t tell the difference between surviving and decomposing. I was both. A breathing corpse.

Every day behind those walls, I told myself to forget her. To bury her the way the world buried me.

And yet, every night, she came back.

Her voice. Her hands. Her eyes - those violet orbs that I could not erase from my memory. They haunted me through the clanging bars and the stench of survival. I survived on that memory alone.

Because Nadia Reed wasn’t a woman you forget. She wan’tjust any woman to me. She was a pulse. The only reminder of my history.

When you’re on death row, you start thinking about impossible things. About freak occurrences - pardons, riots, miracles. You start believing that maybe fate still owes you one last act of mercy.

And somehow, mine came wrapped in fire and chaos.

Mason Ironside and the Gattis threw me a lifeline, and I took it with both blood-stained hands.

Now here I am. Faceless. Nameless. Free. And yet - right back where I started.

Because my life didn’t begin when I was born. It began the moment I met her.

When she smiled at me over that damn cup of coffee and I forgot how to breathe.

When her laugh wrapped itself around my heart and squeezed until it hurt.

That was my first breath.

And I know, without a doubt, my last will be taken in her arms.

Nothing less will ever be enough.

She’s lying beside me now, her breath soft against the pillow, her skin pale under the low light. The world outside ceases to exist. For the first time in years, I feel something close to peace - and it terrifies me.

I splay my hand across her stomach, my palm covering the faint tremor of her breath. Her skin is warm, alive. My fingers move higher, tracing slow, reverent circles, gliding up until they brush against the swell of her breasts.

I shouldn’t touch her with hands that have broken men and carried death. But I’m a starving thing when it comes to her. A lonely wreck trying to remember what tenderness feels like.

She stirs beneath my touch, her lips parting in a soft sighthat wrecks me completely. Her eyes open - sleepy, unsure - and she looks at me like she’s seeing someone she’s known forever.

“Luc… ” she starts, but the name dies on her lips and her eyes drop in shame.

So I silence her thoughts with a kiss.

It’s not the rough, desperate kind I’ve known my whole life. It’s slower, reverent. My lips move against hers like I’m relearning what it means to be human.

Her fingers curl against my chest, tracing the outline of the scars she doesn’t know she’s already touched before. My heart pounds hard enough to bruise the inside of my ribs.

Every touch, every breath feels like sin and salvation rolled into one.

She sighs into my mouth, and I taste the quiet surrender in it. That soft, breaking thing inside her that mirrors everything broken in me.

I pull back, resting my forehead against hers. Her breath trembles against my lips.

I want to tell her everything - that I never stopped loving her, that I never stopped being hers even when the world forgot my name.

But the words stick in my throat.

They’re too dangerous. Too final.