Page 35 of Infamous
Most people want to go back so they can change their endings. I don’t. I want to keep mine. Because the pain made me sharper. The loss made me ruthless. The blood made me a ghost.
And once you’ve crossed that line - once you’ve taken life in your hands and squeezed until there’s nothing left - you stop craving do-overs. You start craving repetition.
The hunt. The fear in their eyes when the game stops being a game. The silence when their bodies finally go still. That’s not a mistake to erase. That’s the only truth that ever mattered to me.
Do-overs are for the weak. I don’t want to go back. I want to keep going. I want to move forward. Because freedom tastes different when the world believes you’re dead.
It isn’t sweet or clean. It burns like acid on the back of my tongue, choking me every time I breathe it in. I should feel lighter now that the chains are gone, the prison walls reduced to ash and memory, the system that caged me nothing but ruin behind me. I should feel like I’ve won.
But the air out here is poisoned.
Everywhere I walk, I see it in the sharp cut of glances, in the way strangers stiffen when they pass by me, as though my very aura is poison. They smell it on me. That sour stench of the grave. The world thinks it buried me, but still I walk, and the air bends wrong around me because of it.
Ghost.
That’s who I was when I died. Not Lucian. Not Billie’s brother. Not the boy who once swore he’d protect her and failed. Not the man Nadia once clung to in the dark, spilling out her guilt like a confession she couldn’t take back.
No, I’m just the myth that crawled out of its own coffin. A cursed name spat like venom. A shadow children whisper about when they talk of monsters. They built me into a beast to fit their narrative, carved me into something inhuman with their headlines, their lies, their fear. And when the picture was painted, they buried me alive in it.
And even now that I’m free, even with blood on my hands toprove the vow wasn’t empty, I can feel the curse clinging. It’s in my pores, under my nails, woven into every scar.
I’ll never scrub it off.
I’ll never be clean again.
Because freedom isn’t freedom when the world only sees your past.
Six weeks after my surgery,I stand in front of the mirror, staring at the reflection that isn’t mine.
The surgeon did good work. Too good. The kind of work that erases a man, strips him down to bones and then builds him back into someone unrecognizable. The jawline is sharper, predatory. The nose straighter, clean, clinical. Cheekbones carved high like the face of a stranger who has never known me, who has never known Billie. Even my voice - Christ, even that - has been altered. When I speak, when I breathe, I don’t hear Lucian anymore. I hear a ghost, a phantom stitched together out of someone else’s flesh.
And maybe that’s all I am now. A stranger in my own skin.
But the eyes - the eyes are still mine. They’re the only thing the scalpel couldn’t touch, the only thing needles and blades couldn’t change. And when I stare into them, I see her. Billie. Every time. Her blood. Her screams. The sound of her body hitting the pavement. And Nadia too, though I don’t want to admit it. The guilt in her gaze, the way she carried Billie’s ghost like it was shackled to her spine.
No surgery can cut those memories out of me. No surgeon alive can excise that grief.
I drag my hand down my face, feeling the foreign angles, the sharp unfamiliar planes, the scars that don’t belong to me but somehow feel like they do now. They’re mine because I’veearned them, because they remind me there’s no going back. This mask isn’t temporary. This mask is permanent.
Lucian Cross is gone. I’ll never see him again. So I make myself two promises.
The first: that I will never, ever see the inside of a prison again.
The system had its chance. It chained me, broke me, caged me like an animal and left me to rot while the real monsters walked free. I spent years staring at concrete walls, listening to the sound of other men clawing at what little sanity they had left. I lived with the stench of piss and blood and despair, waiting for appeals that never came, watching hope die in slow motion.
Never again. I’d rather burn the world to the ground than let it cage me twice.
The second: Nadia.
I turned her away once. I let her slip through my fingers, even as she buckled under the weight of what she thought I was. I don’t blame her. How could I? The world branded me long before she ever had the chance to know the truth. The jury stamped me guilty. The headlines carved me into a monster. Nadia had no choice but to believe what she was told. To believe I was the nightmare the world painted me as.
But none of that matters anymore. Because I’m here. And she’s still mine. She always was, and she always will be.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve been away for more than a decade, that I was the one that told her to walk away. There is no salvation from me. Not for her. Now that I’m free, there’s no escaping it. No escaping me.
Vengeance burns hot in my veins, a fire that never dies, never cools, never fades. But Nadia—Nadia is the obsession that keeps me breathing. The reason my heart still pounds in my chest instead of decaying where it should have stopped with Billie.She is the pulse in the silence. The thorn in my side. The ache that won’t let me go.
I stare into the mirror. A stranger’s face glares back at me, sculpted and unrecognizable. But the man behind it? He knows exactly who he is.
