Page 90 of Infamous

Something’s wrong.

I stand and head for the car. By the time I’m behind the wheel, my pulse is a dull roar in my ears. The drive back to the hospital is a blur - the echo of my heartbeat ticking like a countdown.

When I walk into the ER, the usual chaos hits me - nurses shouting, phones ringing, stretchers squeaking down the hall. But one thing’s missing: her.

I head straight for the nurses’ station. The woman behind the counter - looks up as I approach.

“Good evening. You looking for someone?”

“Dr. Nadia Reed,” I say. “I was supposed to meet her more than an hour ago but she never showed up. I was wondering…”

Her brows pinch together. “Dr. Reed? She didn’t clock in today.”

My stomach drops. “Didn’t—what? She called in sick?”

Martha shakes her head. “No call. No text. Just a no-show. Which isn’t like her.”

No. It’s not.

Nadia’s the type who apologizes for being two minutes late because the crosswalk light took too long. She doesn’t just disappear.

I turn away from the counter, trying to think - forcing myself to replay the last time I saw her. This morning. When I left her place, she was in her scrubs, hair tied up, coffee in hand. Completely normal. She was smiling, teasing me about stealing her last clean pair of socks as I headed out her front door. There was nothing -nothing- to suggest she’d skip her shift.

That was this morning. And now fourteen hours have slipped by without a word. Fourteen hours.

My mind starts stitching the timeline together, fast and frantic.

What happened between her leaving her home and arriving at the hospital? Where did her routine break without anyone noticing? How does someone like Nadia - steady, reliable, predictable - just disappear?

My mind starts sprinting through possibilities - accident, family emergency, something with her apartment - but every logical thread hits a wall. The part of me that deals in logic is already losing to the panic clawing its way up my chest.

I start asking around. The orderlies, the interns, the guy who runs the night shift security desk. No one’s seen her. No one’s heard from her. It’s like she vanished into thin air.

By the time I make it back outside, the street’s slick with drizzle and the sky’s gone the color of ash. I lean against the car and drag in a breath that doesn’t quite make it to my lungs.

I just found her again. After years of thinking it was too late - that fate would never give us a second chance - we found each other again, proving that miracles really do happen.

And now she’s gone.

Inside, my mind is screaming - a thousand alarms all going off at once. I tell myself to think, to breathe, to not jump to conclusions. But the truth is simple and merciless:

I know what it feels like when something’s wrong.

And this - this feelsexactlylike that.

54

LUCIAN

Nadia’s phone keeps ringing into nothing, and the silence on the other end is deafening. It feels like someone reached into my chest and ripped out a lung.

I try again. And again. Nothing.

My pulse spikes. The room tilts. The world outside my car window keeps going - cars, people, daylight - all of it indifferent to the fact that mine just stopped.

This is what they don’t tell you about getting out of prison: life moved on without you. You get spat back into a world that doesn’t resemble the one you left.

I’m a fish flopping on concrete - the systems, the tech, the speed of everything - I’m not built for any of it anymore. So I do the only thing I can. I call Mason Ironside.