Page 5 of Infamous
So I confess. Sort of. I tell her as little as possible without crossing that line into complete and total annihilation. I can’t lie when she asks the question, so I tell her only what she needs to know.
Her eyes widen. Horror floods her face like a tidal wave - but underneath it, just for a heartbeat, I see something else. The faintest flicker of understanding. A thread of relief. Because at least I’m not the indiscriminate butcher the headlines have painted me out to be. Perhaps I hunted monsters. Perhaps it was an accident. Self-defence…Her mind conjures up excuses for me that she knows she has to hear.
But it doesn’t matter. The police won’t care. The world won’t care. They’ll hang every corpse on me until the nameGhostis buried with my own - here lies Lucian Cross, mathematician extraordinaire, who rose to prominence then fell from grace because his brand of justice had a different name.
I’ll never drag her into that fire.
But Nadia doesn’t give me a choice.
She grabs me like she can anchor me, nails tearing through my shirt, through my skin, her whole body shaking againstmine. Her voice breaks in pieces as she begs me to run, to vanish with her. She paints it in desperate strokes; a new city, new names, a bed that smells like us and nothing else.
And God, I want it. I want it so bad I can taste it. Her hand in mine. Her smile in the morning. A world where I’m not the monster, where she’s not the girl tied to a killer. Just Nadia and me, free.
But that’s not my story. That’s not mine to have.
I peel her off me finger by finger, her grip fighting me like chains that don’t want to break. My voice is low, but it carries the finality of a coffin lid slamming shut. “I’m not part of your future, Nadia. Forget me and move on.”
Her scream slices the air, raw and violent, and the sound carves through me like a blade. “You’ve already killed me!”
She’s right. God, she’s right. Every breath I take around her, every secret I’ve let come between us, every lie I let her believe - it’s all been killing her by degrees.
And now I stand here, watching her collapse in front of me, her body folding under the weight of everything I’ve destroyed. My chest splits open, but there’s no blood, only the sickening hollow of loss.
And for the first time in my cursed life, I understand what punishment is.
It isn’t prison. It isn’t the needle or the noose. It’s this. Losing her. And knowing I’ll carry her broken voice inside me, echoing through every dark corner, for the rest of my miserable life.
They saywhen the body breaks, pain comes first. When the soul breaks, it’s complete and utter silence. That’s all there is now. Silence.
It follows me into the back of the police van, thick as smoke,settling into my lungs until I can’t tell if I’m breathing or choking on the wreckage of what I’ve done.
Nadia’s scream still rings in my head. It won’t stop. It plays on a loop between the engine’s growl and the siren’s wail, slicing through everything else like the sharpest kind of truth. She begged me to run. And I didn’t.
The cuffs bite into my wrists, but I welcome it. It’s a cleaner, simpler kind of pain. The kind you can measure. Nadia’s? That’s the kind that seeps in, destroys you from the inside out, one heartbeat at a time.
They put me in a room small enough to suffocate in, with a single table and two chairs. I sit there, wrists cuffed to steel, and stare at my reflection in the two way mirror. The man who stares back looks like me but hollowed out. My eyes used to have purpose. Now they’re just two dark holes where purpose used to live.
There are footsteps, then the door opens.
A detective in a cheap suit walks in. He drops a folder on the table. Photos spill out; the same faces that are splashed all over the news outlets. The victims. Their bruises, their eyes glassy, their bodies twisted in death, but not by my hands.
“You did this,” he says. Not a question.
I don’t answer. Because I didn’t kill those women. I did kill. Just not the ones they think I did.
That’s the thing about monsters - the world doesn’t really care which ones you put down. It just likes when someone is held accountable for the ugliness of it.
He keeps talking, but I stop listening. The hum of the lights overhead drowns him out. My mind drifts to her again - her hands, her tears, her voice cracking as she begged me to run. God, I almost did. Almost.
If she’d asked one more time, maybe I would’ve said yes. Maybe we’d be halfway to nowhere right now, her head on myshoulder, both of us pretending the world couldn’t find us. But Nadia deserves better than a life of darkness where she has to look over her shoulder at every turn. I gave her light once. Now I’ll give her peace. Even if it means she has to hate me to find it.
When the detective finally leaves, his questions unanswered, I swear I hear her in the hum of the lights. Soft. Trembling. Angry.
You’ve already killed me.
She’s right.
But what she doesn’t know - what she can never know - is that I would do the same all over again, even knowing the outcome.
