Chapter 4 Nadia
NADIA
“Guilty.”
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
The word detonates inside me. My ears ring like I’ve stepped too close to an explosion. My lungs seize, refusing air. My head swims, heavy and disoriented, as though I’ve been shoved under water and left to drown.
“On all counts,” the judge drones, his voice flat, merciless, as if he’s announcing the weather and not destroying my world.
The courtroom erupts. The sound is instant, violent; reporters scribbling like madmen, cameras strobing with blinding light, a swell of voices rising in a frenzy I can’t untangle. Laughter, gasps, shouts - they all blur together into one monstrous roar.
I grip the edge of the bench, my fingers clawing into the wood until my knuckles bleach bone white. It isn’t enough. The floor tilts, the walls lean inward, the air thickens until it’s choking me. My body betrays me, my knees buckling, my bones hollowing out until I collapse.
Hands swarm me. Cold, rough, greedy hands. Strangers, ushers, journalists with badges swinging against their chests as they descend like vultures on a carcass. Microphones stab toward my face, angry mouths demanding I bleed for them.
“Nadia! Nadia, did you know?”
“Was he always violent?”
“What’s it like to love a monster?”
Questions cut through me like glass. Lights burn into my eyes. Voices overlap, scrape, claw. My body convulses under their weight, and still they press closer, closer, feeding off the ruin of me.
My head pounds, my chest heaves, and I can’t breathe. I shove through the swarming crowd, stumble through the aisle, forcing myself toward the doors.
I am no longer a woman. I am a headline. A soundbite. A spectacle they can take home and replay over dinner.
Outside is worse.
The courtroom was a storm, but this - this is a plague. A wall of people crowds the courthouse steps, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, faces fever-bright with fascination. Onlookers. Gawkers. Groupies waving cardboard signs like they’re at a concert.
FREE GHOST.
BEAUTIFUL BUTCHER.
OUR ANGEL OF DEATH.
Lipstick red, jagged scrawls that drip across white cardboard like smeared blood.
They scream his name like he’s a rock star, not a convicted killer. Like this is a performance and I’m the opening act, stumbling out shattered for their amusement.
I shove past them, tears pouring hot down my cheeks. My palms slam against strangers’ shoulders, my elbows jab into ribs, my body carving space through the crush. They don’t move for me. They don’t see me. They’re too busy worshipping the ghost of a man who destroyed me.
My chest seizes, breath strangled, panic bubbling sharp in my throat. I claw forward, fighting for air, until finally, I get my space.
Air.
Cold. Sharp. Clean.
I stagger into it, dragging my back against the courthouse wall, stone biting through my blouse.
My lungs gasp like they’ve been starved, sucking down salvation that doesn’t save me.
The sky spins above me, blue turning black at the edges.
My hands won’t stop shaking. My knees fold, and I slide down until I’m crouched on the ground, arms locked around myself like I can hold in what’s left.
But there’s nothing left to hold. Because he’s gone.
The future we promised each other is dead, scattered across courtrooms and headlines and rabid crowds chanting his name.
And I don’t know how to breathe in a world where Lucian Cross wears the name Ghost like a shroud, and the world cheers for it.
A shadow falls over me, stretching long across the courthouse steps. I look up through blurred eyes, my back still pressed to the stone wall.
His attorney stands there. Tall, sharp suit, jaw like granite. Except for his eyes, he is a man carved from stone. His eyes softer than I expect, almost pitying, and that cuts me deeper because it’s the only mercy I’ve been shown in the months since Lucian was incarcerated.
“He wants to see you,” he says.
My head shakes before my brain even catches up.
“No. He’s refused. Every time. He said…” My voice falters, dies.
He said what he always says. Forget me. Move on.
Leave me and get on with your life. He knew, even then, before the first cell clamped shut to hold him in, that he would never see the light of day again.
“Not this time.”
Three words. And my heart stutters, misfires, slamming against my ribs like it’s trying to break free.
I force myself upright, legs unsteady, trembling as if the earth itself is shaking beneath me. My palms drag against the rough wall for balance. Somehow, I follow him - step after step, as though caught in a current too strong to fight.
Inside, the air changes. Corridors stretch long and narrow, humming with the faint buzz of fluorescent lights. The silence is deafening, worse than the noise outside. Doors line the passage, all of them locked, iron bolts heavy as judgment.
My pulse pounds in my throat. Every step closer to Lucian echoes like a countdown. It feels like walking toward an execution. And maybe it is.
They put me in a room divided by glass.
He’s on the other side, chains biting into his wrists, guards stationed behind him with guns. But it isn’t the restraints that gut me. It isn’t the iron or the uniformed muscle.
It’s his eyes.
The same eyes that once drank me in like I was his salvation. Eyes that used to soften when I laughed, darken when he touched me, burn when he whispered my name in the dark.
Now they’re hollow. Cold. Like the man I knew has already been buried, and what’s left is just the corpse of who he was.
He lifts the phone. I force myself to do the same. My hand shakes so badly against the receiver I can barely keep it to my ear.
“This is the last time,” he says. His voice is steady. Detached. Like he’s already rehearsed this goodbye a thousand times. “After today, we don’t see each other ever again.”
The word rips out of me, raw and jagged: “No.” My throat tears with it, pain shredding down to my chest. “Don’t say that—don’t you dare say that to me.”
He leans forward, chain clinking at his wrist, the sound small and merciless. His face is carved from stone, but the faint tremor in his lip betrays him.
“You have a long life ahead of you,” he says. “A good life. Better than this. I won’t drag you into my grave. Move on, Nadia. Forget me.”
My hand slams against the glass, the crack of flesh against cold surface reverberating in the sterile room. Tears blur my vision, turn his outline into a smear of chains and grief.
“Forget you?” My voice shatters into pieces. “You’re all I’ve ever loved. How am I supposed to forget you?”
His jaw tightens, his gaze locked on me, cruel in its determination. He hardens his face into something brutal, something unbreakable - even as his lip trembles like it might split.
“You’ll do it because I’m telling you to,” he says, voice dropping low, final, lethal. “Because it’s the only way you’ll survive me.”
Tears streak hot down my cheeks, carving rivers of salt I can’t wipe away. I don’t try. Let the whole world see me undone. Let him see what he’s done to me.
“You don’t understand,” I rasp, my voice shaking so violently it scrapes raw.
“When they read the verdict. When they said guilty—they weren’t just condemning you.
They condemned me too. Because you…” My words break, shatter in my throat.
“You’ve already killed me, Lucian. Every day I live without you, every breath I take that doesn’t have you in it, it’s another way you’ll keep killing me. ”
His knuckles whiten around the receiver, skin stretched tight over bone. His eyes shine wet - tears threatening, unshed, but his voice doesn’t waver. It doesn’t crack. He refuses to back down.
“Then let me bury us here,” he says. “Let me be the end of us. So you can go on and live.”
The sob that rips out of me makes my chest seize, my ribs ache like they might snap. I press my forehead against the glass, hard enough that I swear I can feel it splintering under my skin. I want to claw through, to crawl into his arms, to scream until they drag me out kicking and bloody.
But I can’t. I can only watch as he lowers the phone, slow and deliberate, like a priest giving last rites. All I do is watch as the guards close in, hands on his chains, tugging him up from the chair.
His back straightens and his shoulders lock. His silhouette shrinks as he walks toward the door.
He doesn’t turn. Not once. Not even one final glance.
And then he’s gone.
The door slams shut, metal on metal, final and cold. The sound reverberates through the hollow of my chest until it feels like it’s my heart that’s bolted shut, my life that’s sealed away.
And I know with a clarity so sharp it slices me open - this was the last time I’ll ever see him.
And I know this isn’t just the end of us.
It’s the execution of everything we ever were.