Chapter 61
The One Who Didn’t DIE
Elara
Six months is enough time for the world to decide what to do with you.
Not enough to heal. Not enough to forget. But enough to be repurposed.
The article detonates slowly at first. A ripple, not an explosion.
Shares in Scandinavian circles. Think pieces.
Podcast invitations I decline because hearing my own voice talk about him feels like reopening a wound with a microphone pressed to it.
Then it jumps borders the way good monsters do—quietly, efficiently, without asking permission.
Germany. The UK. The US.
People don’t just read it. They dissect it. Argue over it. Teach it. They underline sentences like being seen by a monster is its own kind of violence and debate whether I am brave or broken for writing about him.
A senior editor from a major Scandinavian paper emails me three days after the international pickup. He doesn’t ask if I’m interested. He asks when I can start.
I read the email three times before it registers that my life has just shifted tracks.
My mother cries when I tell her, but these tears are different.
They’re proud. Loud. Relieved. She hugs me and says something about how my father would have, then stops herself like she touched a hot stove.
We don’t talk about him much anymore. Some absences are cleaner when they’re allowed to stay hollow. Some truths are better never told.
The job changes everything and nothing.
I move into a brighter house closer to the harbor. Bigger windows. Real sunlight. Floors that creak in a way that feels alive instead of threatening. I still map exits without thinking. Still flinch at certain tones of voice. Still wake some nights with the taste of metal in my mouth.
But now my days have structure that belongs to me.
I write investigative pieces that don’t involve my own blood. I cover corruption, organized crime, quiet systems of violence that wear suits instead of a gas mask. Editors stop hovering over me like I’m fragile glass and start treating me like a weapon they know how to aim.
It’s intoxicating.
So is the money.
I don’t spend much of it at first. Trauma has a way of turning abundance into suspicion. But then, slowly, I start buying things that don’t make sense on paper.
Better coffee beans. Heavy art books. Quality paper.
I start drawing again.
Not the way I used to, scribbling flowers in the margins of notebooks like a habit I couldn’t break. This is different. Intentional. Focused. I sit for hours with charcoal and ink and graphite and let my hands work without asking my mind for permission.
Poisonous flowers keep appearing.
Monkshood, of course. Belladonna. Foxglove.
Hemlock. I draw them the way they actually are; not romanticized, not softened.
Veins sharp. Petals heavy. Roots tangled like secrets that refuse to stay buried.
I have accepted it’s part of me, the darkness, the interest to it.
Nature elements creep in too. Bones beneath soil.
Thorns breaking through skin. Water swallowing stone.
My therapist calls it integration.
I call it survival with better lighting.
I cut my hair two weeks ago. It’s impulsive and dramatic and deeply satisfying. I walk into a salon and tell the stylist I want it gone. She blinks at me like she’s trying to decide if this is a cry for help.
“It grows back,” I say.
That seems to convince her.
When I leave, my hair sits just above my shoulders, all light curls and sharp edges. It changes my face completely. Makes me look older. Stranger. Like someone who doesn’t belong to the girl who went missing.
My colleagues say it suits me. My mother says I look like I’m having a midlife crisis in my twenties.
“I was kidnapped by a serial killer,” I tell her dryly. “I think I’m allowed a haircut.”
She laughs despite herself.
The art sneaks up on me in the best way. A small gallery owner I met through a colleague asks if I’d like to submit three pieces for a weekend auction; local artists, nothing serious, just exposure. I almost say no out of reflex. Exposure is a word that still makes my skin prickle.
But I say yes.
I spend months on the three drawings.
They’re the most precise things I’ve ever made.
Three poisonous flowers. Three stages of decay and endurance. Each one layered with charcoal, ink, pressed pigment, faint traces of gold leaf embedded so subtly they only catch light if you move.
I don’t tell anyone what they mean.
I hang them on the gallery wall and walk away before the auction starts, convinced no one will touch them.
When I come back the next morning, all three are gone.
Sold.
To the same buyer.
The price covers more than I expected. Enough for financial freedom. Enough to loosen the knot that’s lived between my ribs since the bunker.
I stare at the empty wall for a long time, unsettled.
Something about it feels deliberate. I don’t ask who bought them, maybe I should have.
Life keeps moving, fast now.
I travel more for work. I’m recognized sometimes, quietly, respectfully. People stop me after panels and say my article helped them name something they couldn’t articulate before. That monsters don’t always look like monsters, and that surviving them doesn’t always feel like triumph.
I nod. I thank them. I don’t tell them that sometimes survival feels like exile.
And then, without knowing it, one ordinary Thursday afternoon when I’m back home, the past decides to stop being polite.
I’m on my way to the flower shop.
The local one, where I’ve been before, countless times.
I don’t know why I always go there. Habit, maybe. Muscle memory. Or something darker. The shop smells the way all flower shops do; wet soil, green life, sweetness edged with decay. I need supplies. Soil. Fertilizer. A new pot for a plant I keep forgetting to water.
And inspiration.
I step inside and freeze.
Because I know that silhouette; broad shoulders. Stillness that doesn’t belong to civilians. Dark hair threaded with a silver streak that catches the light like a blade. A scar at his lip I’ve traced with my eyes more times than I admit to myself.
He’s standing with his back to me, his side profile visible as he’s studying a selection of flowers.
Poisonous ones, of course.
My heart drops so fast it feels like it leaves my body.
It’s absurd how quickly my nervous system recognizes him. Seven months and my body still knows his shape better than it knows peace.
He tilts his head slightly, as if sensing pressure in the room. As if feeling watched has become second nature.
I fumble the bag of soil in my hands.
It hits the floor with a dull thud, splitting slightly at the corner, dark earth spilling out like a confession.
“Lucan?” I hear myself say.
The word leaves my mouth before I can stop it.
He turns.
Fully.
And the world does something strange and quiet, like it’s holding its breath.
“Yes, little scribe?” he says.
The sound of his voice lands exactly where it always has. Low. Controlled. Familiar in a way that makes my knees weak and my mind sharp.
I stare at him.
At the tattoos climbing his neck, darker now, denser. At the lines carved deeper into his face. At the calm in his eyes that has nothing to do with mercy and everything to do with certainty.
At the fact that he is real.
“You—” I stop. Restart. “You’re here.”
“So are you,” he replies mildly.
My gaze flicks to the flowers in his basket. Monkshood. Belladonna. Foxglove.
My mouth goes dry. “Poisonous flowers?”
“For kinder purposes,” he says, glancing down at them. “Irony doesn’t die easily.”
I swallow.
He looks at me more openly now, eyes scanning in a way that makes me painfully aware of the changes; my hair, my posture, the way I hold myself like someone who has learned how to occupy space without asking permission.
“You cut your hair,” he observes.
“You retired from kidnapping journalists,” I shoot back.
The corner of his mouth lifts. Not a smile. Something sharper. “Touché.”
We stand there, suspended between past and present, the smell of soil and flowers wrapping around us like a lie we used to live inside.
“Fame suits you,” he says casually. “Your article travels well.”
Heat crawls up my neck. “You read it.”
“Of course I did,” he replies. “I’m your biggest fan.”
I snort despite myself. “You traumatized me.”
“Yes,” he agrees calmly. “But I also appreciate good writing.”
I glance down at the soil on the floor, suddenly hyperaware of my hands shaking. “I didn’t expect to ever see you again.”
“I didn’t expect to be seen,” he counters. “We’re both disappointed.”
Silence stretches.
Then something clicks with him being my biggest fan.
“Did you buy them?” I ask slowly.
He tilts his head. “Bought what.”
“My drawings,” I continue, heart pounding. “The auction.”
A beat.
Then: “I have three pieces hanging in my bunker now.”
The world tilts.
“You—” I stare at him. “You bought all three.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
His gaze doesn’t waver. “Because I wanted them.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one that matters.”
The irony almost makes me laugh hysterically.
“Have you been busy?” I ask instead, because my brain goes there automatically.
He watches me for a long moment, then answers honestly. “No.”
I blink. “No?”
“I stopped taking contracts,” he says. “Kollbein has it covered for me.”
My chest tightens. “You… retired?”
I swallow.
The word retired hangs between us like a lie that wants to be believed.
“In a way,” he says again, because he always says things twice when they matter. Like he’s testing the shape of them in the air. “Level Three didn’t satisfy me.”