Page 114 of The Monster You Made

But victory is never clean. It stains.

They carve my name beside it.

***

At first, the articles praise me.Consultant Turned Journalist Risks Life to Expose Global Network. My face appears in print and on screens, haloed by smoke and backlit fires. They call me fearless. They call me relentless. They do not call me Vera; they call me the woman who followed the Wolf.

But praise burns quickly. By the next cycle, suspicion blooms. How deep was she in? Embedded, or complicit? Sleeping with her source? The words slice deeper than chains ever could. The photos shift: no longer heroic, now guilty,hungry, suspect. My inbox floods, half adoration, half venom. Strangers send flowers. Strangers send threats.

My reputation and all my work to restore it, all turned back to ash in a week.

***

Lucian does not appear in any headline. He does not appear at all.

The day the military compound fell, whispers claimed he died in the fire. Others claimed he was dragged away in chains. Some said he was a phantom, a fever dream built by desperate survivors. Authorities do not ask questions too loudly; they would rather let the myth die than admit a man like him walked through their prisons and tore them open.

I let them bury him in rumor. Better that than let them hunt.

But I know the truth: He is alive. Because I still feel the absence he leaves beside me at night. Because I still hear his voice in the dark. Because when the wind catches me off guard, I smell him, iron, leather, smoke, and my chest knots until I cannot breathe.

We agreed to disappear. Separate trails. False deaths. If I fell, I would take the noise, the cameras, the trials. He would take the silence.

It works. Too well.

***

Months later, I live like a ghost. One-room rentals under false names. Cash from sympathetic hands passed in envelopes, always with the warning look of someone who wants to help but not be remembered. I don’t stay anywhere longer than a few weeks. I don’t call my mother. I don’t answer messages from people who once called me friend. I read the papers and watch myself be dissected, villain, victim, traitor, fool.

The last article I keep folded in my pocket until it falls to shreds. Vera Calloway: Sympathizer or Survivor? The subhead bites: Her testimony remains under seal, her whereabouts unknown. Was she a journalist, or a conspirator?

That word,conspirator, kills what little I had left of my old self. They do not want the truth. They want a body to string up. They cannot find Lucian, so they turn me into the effigy instead.

***

When he finally comes, it is not with fire. Not with thunder. He comes like he always does, silent.

I stand barefoot at the edge of a cliffside on a foreign coast. The sea claws at the rock below, gray and endless, a sound without pause. The article is in my hand, soft from folding, stained with rain. I do not cry anymore. There is nothing left to wring out.

The air shifts. I know it before I hear him. Lucian. He stands behind me, the way he always has, a shadow at my back. His hair is longer now, his beard rough. His eyes carry the ruins of a thousand sleepless nights. He is thinner, but not weaker.The weight he carries has pared him to something sharper, something more dangerous.

He says nothing at first. He only watches the horizon with me, the silence between us heavy with all we lost.

At last, his voice cuts through the surf. “There’s nothing left to take from us now. Just the living.”

The words tear something inside me. Not grief this time. Something else. Something that still dares to hope.

I turn to him. My throat tightens. “Then let’s live.”

He does not smile. Neither do I. We are not children. We are not dreamers. We are not lovers pretending the world is kind. We are two people undone, standing on a cliff with nothing left but each other. And that is enough.

He reaches for my hand. His palm is rough, scarred, familiar. I place mine in his. For the first time in months, I feel solid again, tethered not to hope or to cause, but to him.

We do not kiss. We do not speak further. We simply stand there until the tide shifts, until the wind chills, until the last page of my old life slips from my fingers and drifts into the sea.

***