Infamous

Chapter 1

NADIA

People always talk about it. How they can remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, what they were wearing when their world cracked open. When history split itself into before and after. Some story on the news. Some headline that guts you.

For me, it isn’t just a story. It’s my story—and it’s unfolding live on TV as I walk straight into the storm that will become my future life.

I’m at uni, tray in hand, cutting through the cafeteria at noon.

The room buzzes the way cafeterias do; voices, laughter, the clatter of plates.

But then it all… stops. Not slowly, not in pieces.

All at once. The noise drops into a silence so sharp that it makes my skin prickle.

And above all the silence, one sombre voice rises.

Every head is turned toward the wall-mounted TV at the far end of the room. Even the cafeteria ladies, normally too busy slapping pasta onto trays and arguing over who gets to take the first break, stand frozen behind the counter, aprons matted with grease, eyes wide.

My stomach clenches, dread coiling tight, before I even look.

I follow their stares.

And there he is.

His face. His beautiful, beautiful face. The one I kissed this morning. The one I traced with my fingertips under the sheets, whispering plans for the weekend.

Lucian Cross.

My fiance. My world. Staring back at me from the screen—his name paired with something monstrous.

“Prime suspect,” the news anchor says. The words shatter like glass exploding in my ears.

A string of murders.

A serial killer the media dubs Ghost, because he never leaves a trace, never leaves a clue. Like a phantom slipping through walls.

And now his face - my face by extension - is plastered all over the midday news.

My tray slips from my hands, food crashing onto the floor, but no one even looks at me. They are too busy watching. Too busy seeing him.

I can’t move. Can’t breathe. I want to scream No. Not him. Not Lucian. Not my Lucian. There must be some sort of mistake. But my voice lodges somewhere in my chest, strangled by disbelief.

Everything around me blurs; the smell of grease and coffee, the hum of the vending machine, the scrape of a chair leg. But the TV stays sharp, merciless. His smiling photo. His name. The word killer scrolling beneath in bold white letters.

And this is the moment. The moment that cuts my life clean in two.

Before, I am just Nadia Reed, a girl in love, a medical student walking through the cafeteria in her favourite boots, planning her weekend.

After, I am the girl whose fiance’s face is on every screen in the country.

The girl who can’t walk through campus without hearing whispers, without feeling the pressure of curious eyes on her.

I am now the girl tethered forever to a serial killer.

It takes every ounce of strength I have just to keep moving, to force my legs to carry me out of that cafeteria without collapsing.

My tray is still on the floor, food smeared across the tiles like a crime scene, but no one even notices.

Their eyes are on me now. Not openly, because no one’s brave enough for that, but I feel it in the hush that follows me, in the way conversations pause the second I pass.

I don’t walk. I flee.

Every step is an effort, every breath a blade slicing through my chest. Because in the span of a single news report, my life has been rewritten.

I’m not Nadia Reed anymore. I’m not the girl in boots with a bright future and a boyfriend who makes her laugh in bed.

Now I’m the partner of a killer. The one tied by love and name and memory to the bogeyman who stalked the city.

And the strangest thing - the ugliest thing - is the way they look at me.

Not with pity or disgust. But with awe. Their eyes gleam like I’ve been touched by something infamous, like I’m standing on the edge of legend.

As though at any moment someone might step forward, shove a phone in my face, and ask for a selfie.

An autograph. A scrap of the horror they can tuck away and tell stories about later.

What is it with people and their obsession with killers?

It’s as if the blood spilled doesn’t matter, as long as the name attached to it shines bright enough.

As if the brutality, the women dead in alleyways, the families gutted by loss, are just background noise to the drama of it all.

They want to be close to it. To brush shoulders with the darkness, so they can say I was there. I knew her. I saw him once.

And me? I’m the closest they can get.

So they stare. They whisper. They marvel. And I want to scream.

The walk home feels like crossing a minefield I didn’t know existed.

Every shadow moves wrong. Every whisper feels aimed.

My body moves on autopilot. My keys are in my hand, my breath is shallow, eyes darting to every passing car. I can still hear the anchor’s voice looping in my head, crisp and calm like she’s announcing the weather: Prime suspect in the Ghost killings identified as Lucian Cross.

The words brand themselves into me in a way that I can never scrape off.

By the time I reach my building, I’m trembling. I can’t tell if it’s from the cold or the kind of fear that burns from the inside out. My hands fumble with the keys. The lock resists, like it knows I don’t belong here anymore.

When the door finally gives, I slam it shut behind me.

The echo feels too loud, like a detonation in an empty room.

I lean against the door and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor, knees to my chest. My phone buzzes on the counter, again and again and again.

But I don’t even pick it up to see who it is.

My mind keeps playing reels of us. His hands in my hair, his sleepy smile, his warmth pressed against me, and I keep searching those moments for something off.

Some flicker in his eyes, some tremor in his voice that might’ve warned me.

But there’s nothing. Just love. Or whatever version of love a man like him is capable of.

I crawl to the TV and turn it on.

His face fills the screen again, only this time it’s paired with footage of police cars and yellow tape. Around a crime scene in the forest.

“Lucian Cross, a 28 year old stock trader, has been identified as the serial killer known as Ghost…” I mute the television before I break something. The silence that follows feels like punishment.

I don’t remember how long I sit there, watching his frozen image stare back at me. Replaying private moments, digging for a moment in time when I should have see what was happening right underneath my nose.

The apartment smells like him - soap, cedar, the faint trace of his aftershave clinging to the pillowcase. I grab it and press it to my face until my throat burns.

I ask myself how someone’s scent can still be so gentle when their name has become a headline.

The world outside has already decided he’s guilty. Which means I’m guilty by association.

Guilty of loving him.

Guilty of not knowing.

Guilty of breathing in a world that now sees me as a side note in someone else’s nightmare.

They’ll never understand what it’s like to love someone who becomes a headline. Because pain like this doesn’t bleed where people can see it.

It festers in the quiet. It gnaws. And it whispers the one question I can’t silence…if the world is right about him…then what does that make me?