Chapter 29
Hunger with a Pulse
Elara
The monkshood lies on the table like a warning dressed as a gift.
Its deep violet petals curl inward, poisonous even in their beauty, so like the man who brought them.
My pencil glides across the page, tracing the sharp edges of the stem, the hooded blooms, the subtle lethal tilt of each petal. I try to focus, but the memory of his confession still bleeds into everything. Every breath. Every heartbeat.
I hunger for you like a wild animal.
The words echo through me more deeply than they should. I never should’ve let him speak them. I never should’ve wanted them.
Glass clinks.
I glance up.
Lucan stands at the counter, pouring a pale-gold liquid into two small, square glasses. The bottle looks old, its label worn, its letters Icelandic. His shoulders are still tight from what he admitted, still taut like something restrained by sheer will.
He catches me looking.
For a second, we just… stare.
His eyes drag over my face, slow and unreadable, then drop deliberately to the drawing beneath my hands. Something like approval flickers across his features—dark, warm, dangerous.
I clear my throat. “What is that?”
“Aealblanda,” he replies, voice low. “Old Icelandic drink. Strong. Not particularly friendly.”
I snort under my breath. “So… like you.”
His mouth curves, slowly, wickedly, as he brings the glass to me.
I take a cautious sip.
It burns like fire and pine, sharp and ancient and absolutely not meant for anyone under the age of eighty. My face twists.
Lucan’s chuckle vibrates through the quiet.
“It’s an old-man drink,” I mutter, wiping my lips with the back of my hand.
“You say that,” he counteroffers, sliding the second glass toward me, “yet you want more.”
I do. God help me, I do.
So I take the glass.
“Age gap humor,” he adds, picking up a cigarette. “Bold of you.”
“Well,” I say, lifting my chin, “I’m drinking what you drink. That should age me at least ten years.”
His smile turns predatory again as he lights the cigarette. Smoke coils around his face, softening the edges of his brutality, sharpening the edges of mine.
“I’ve scars older than you, darling.”
The alcohol relaxes something in me; not my mind, not my judgment… just the borders. The places where my fear and curiosity meet. The drink doesn’t make me drunk; it just mutes the alarm bells already flickering in me since the moment he said:
I want you like something I intend to own.
He sits again, the chair groaning quietly beneath him as if sharing some private protest of its own, the wooden legs shifting under the weight of a man who rarely allows himself to relax into anything.
His shoulders remain tight—impossibly so—still shaped by the confession he offered minutes ago, shaped by truths that seemed torn from him rather than spoken.
Smoke drifts from the cigarette between his fingers in a slow, spectral thread, curling upward as if it wants to escape the tension filling the room but is too heavy with it to rise.
The hazy glow from the lamp coats him in warm gold that does nothing to soften the underlying hardness carved into him.
If anything, it makes the depths of his expression more pronounced, the shadows beneath his cheekbones more striking, the faint tremor in his hand more heartbreaking.
I swallow, the alcohol warming my throat, the courage it lends pressing against the inside of my ribs like a small, insistent hand.
My fingers tighten around my glass because I need something to hold onto, something that isn’t him.
Something that isn’t the knowledge of what he just admitted wanting from me.
“Lucan,” I say softly, the word barely escaping my lips, “what kind of experiments were done on you?”
His jaw ticks in a sharp, mechanical motion.
It is the only sign that the question hits somewhere unguarded.
He doesn’t look away, but he also doesn’t answer.
He inhales from the cigarette, the ember flaring for a brief second, and when he exhales through his nose, the smoke uncurls like warning signals; subtle, instinctive, almost animalistic.
I know instantly that I’ve reached into a part of him people are not meant to touch, but I also know that if I don’t ask now, while the heat of his confession still clings to the air, I never will.
“I was injected,” he says finally, each word sounding dragged out of a place he keeps sealed off from everyone, including himself. His voice is lower now, quieter, the edges sanded by something that feels dangerously close to vulnerability.
“What… with?” I press, because if he is going to give me even a fraction of truth, I can’t let him retreat halfway through.
He shrugs one shoulder; not carelessly, not casually, but as if the muscles themselves are resisting the memory. “Liquids. Compounds. Vials he kept locked away. I was a child. I didn’t know what any of them were.”
His gaze drifts toward the monkshood drawing, holding onto it like an anchor. It hits me then—how familiar the sight must be to him. Pretty things masking poison. Beauty overlaid on death. Innocence twisted into something lethal. His entire childhood could be summed up by that plant.
“He exposed me to certain gasses too,” he continues in a voice that has gone flatter, more distant, as if he is reporting on someone else’s life. “He said it was to measure reactive neurological pathways. I didn’t understand the purpose. Only the aftermath.”
My stomach knots so sharply it feels like something tearing. “And the aftermath was…?”
Lucan pauses, tapping the cigarette once—twice—against the glass ashtray with a carefulness that suggests he’s not sure his hands will obey him if he lets the movement continue. His gaze darkens with memory, but not the kind that flickers. This is the kind that sits heavy in the bones.
“There was one serum,” he says eventually, his voice dropping lower, as if the name alone carries weight. “One he used more consistently than the others. They called it Ghost—something. Ghostline. Ghostcell. Ghost… I don’t remember. The name comes in fragments. The rest is missing.”
I lean closer, feeling a heaviness form in my chest. “Ghost. Because of… the effects it had?”
His mouth curves in a humorless echo of a smile. “Because everything it touched faded,” he murmurs. “Including things that were supposed to stay alive.”
My breath stutters. “Lucan, what did it do to you?”
“It gave me side effects,” he says. There is no emotion in the words, but the absence of emotion is somehow worse.
“What kind of side effects?”
His stare locks onto mine, and the coldness in it isn’t detachment; it’s the absence of memory where a childhood should have been.
“Micro-damage in the temporal lobe,” he says. “It impaired certain emotional circuits. Fear. Empathy. The amygdala regulates those responses. Mine never developed the way it should have.”
The room shifts around me, tilting under the weight of what he’s saying. I force my voice steady. “That’s why you—”
“Feel nothing,” he finishes, not sharply, not defensively, but with the quiet resignation of someone who has accepted this truth far too young. “Or almost nothing. Except impulses. Instinct. Predatory responses.”
My heart thuds with a heavy, stolen beat. This is not a confession meant for gentle evenings and dim lights. This is the anatomy of a man carved wrong by the hands meant to protect him.
“And the tremor?” I whisper, unable to look away from his hands.
“Nerve conduction damage,” he says simply, as if describing something mundane. “Permanent.”
His hand twitches again—a small, involuntary flicker that feels more intimate than anything else he has shown me.
“And the scars?” My voice threatens to crack. “The tissue problems? Your heartbeat?”
“The Ghost-serum interfered with cellular repair,” he explains. “It slowed regeneration. It slowed everything. Including my pulse.”
A child should never have had to learn words like cellular repair. A child should never have had to understand why their own heartbeat did not respond correctly to fear. A child shouldn’t have grown up inside a laboratory their father designed around them.
I try to see him as that child—small, restrained, catalogued, gasping chemical-laced air under fluorescent lights. And the image is so wrong, so violently incompatible with the man before me, that something tightens around my heart in a way I can’t name.
“And… why?” I whisper, my voice barely steady. “Why would he do that to you?”
Lucan inhales sharply, but it’s not a breath—it’s recoil. His body tenses in a way that feels less like anger and more like pain.
“That,” he says, each word a clean cut of finality, “is enough interrogation.”
The wall rises between us instantly, a cold, impenetrable barrier that tells me I’ve reached the end of the part he’s willing to expose. Maybe he doesn’t know the answer. Maybe he does and refuses to share it. Maybe the truth is uglier than the experiments themselves.
I nod slowly, forcing air into my lungs, feeling the faint throb of the alcohol in my bloodstream, not muddling my mind, but numbing something inside me just enough to keep me brave.
I rise from my seat.
Lucan’s eyes follow the movement immediately, his attention narrowing with a predator’s precision. The shift in his posture is subtle but unmistakable, heightened awareness, silent tracking, instinct sharpened to a point.
I step closer to him.
He doesn’t move, but the tension in his body changes direction, drawn up toward me like a wire pulled taut.
The cigarette hangs loosely between his fingers now, the smoke rising in soft spirals between us. Without breaking eye contact, I reach out and take it from him.
His brows lift, not with annoyance, but with an interest edged in something darker, a fascination that reads as both warning and invitation.
I inhale, letting the smoke fill my lungs, harsh and acrid and strangely grounding. The taste lingers on my tongue, bitter and smoky.
Lucan watches me with a heat that settles on my skin like a touch.
“I didn’t take you for a woman who smokes,” he murmurs, voice low enough to vibrate through something in me.
I release a slow stream of smoke into the air between us, letting it drift toward him like a challenge.
“And if I ever saw you doing something normal,” I reply softly, “like grocery shopping… I wouldn’t take you for a notorious serial killer.”
His nostrils flare—so slight I might have missed it if I weren’t watching him so closely. It isn’t offense. It isn’t anger. It’s activation. Something inside him responds to that remark like a struck chord, humming low and dangerous.
The room shifts again—almost imperceptibly—as if the balance between us tilts one degree at a time.
I lower my voice. “Can I… touch you?”
Lucan goes utterly, perfectly still. Not tense.
Not relaxed. Suspended. His expression becomes unreadable, his breathing shallow, his eyes focused on me with a concentration that feels as if he’s decoding the question at a molecular level.
He doesn’t say yes. He doesn’t say no. He simply watches, and the absence of refusal is its own form of permission.
I start with his arm, my fingers brushing along the curve of his forearm where muscle knots beneath skin that is too warm for someone with a slowed pulse.
The scars there feel raised under my touch, not grotesque but strangely humanizing.
His breath stutters, soft, barely audible, but unmistakably real.
My hand trails downward until it reaches his. He allows it, his fingers relaxing beneath mine even though his posture stays rigid. There is something profoundly intimate about the way he lets me touch him, as if no one has done this—not freely, not gently—in years, maybe ever.
With my other hand, I reach for his face. The moment my fingertips graze the line of his cheekbone, his eyes half-close. Not in softness, but in something deeper. Something starved. Something that feels like yearning sharpened by deprivation.
He doesn’t move.
He doesn’t breathe.
He allows the contact, and the permission feels more dangerous than any refusal he could give.
Slowly, carefully, I shift my body, lifting one leg over him and lowering myself onto his lap.
His palms close around my thighs almost instantly, gripping with a careful firmness, not pulling me closer but anchoring me, as though he fears any sudden movement, his or mine, might break the moment open into something neither of us can take back.
The roles we thought we were playing—predator and prey—blur into something indistinguishable.