Chapter 7 Lucian
LUCIAN
What most people don’t tell you is that blood doesn’t define you. It’s not the crimson running through your veins that binds you to someone. No, it’s the small, silent things. The unspoken promises. The way someone chooses to stay when they have every reason to leave.
Billie Underwood wasn’t my sister by blood. But she was my sister in every way that mattered.
I was fourteen when I found her — nine years old, barefoot, filthy, wandering down Jefferson Avenue in a pink nightgown that hung off her shoulders. Her mother had overdosed hours earlier. The kid looked like an empty ghost trying to remember what home felt like.
I brought her home. My mother didn’t ask a single question. Just gave me that tired, gentle look — the one that said she was too used to patching up the world. When I begged her not to let the state take Billie, she sighed and said, “Then she stays.”
And she did. From that night on, Billie was ours. She slept on the pull-out couch. Ate spaghetti with us on Fridays. Started school two days later with braided hair and a second-hand backpack that smelled like mothballs.
Eventually, she smiled again.
By the time I turned twenty and she was fifteen, my mother was dying.
Cancer — slow, cruel, precise. It didn’t just take her; it dismantled her piece by piece.
I worked two jobs to keep the lights on, but Billie…
Billie became her caretaker. She learned to measure morphine doses, to change bandages, to smile through exhaustion.
She sat by her bedside every night, reading those ridiculous romance novels my mom loved, voice cracking but steady.
When I couldn’t be there, Billie was.
She was the one who found a clinical trial — a miracle we’d prayed for. She called every number, argued with every bureaucrat, clung to the idea that the world would give us a break just this once.
It didn’t. The acceptance letter arrived the day after my mother died.
I still remember the sound Billie made when she opened that mailbox. It wasn’t a sob — it was something raw and broken, halfway between rage and disbelief. She dropped to her knees right there on the cracked concrete, clutching that letter like she could rewrite time if she held it hard enough.
She cried harder for my mother than she ever had for her own.
That’s when I understood — blood meant nothing. Not compared to the kind of loyalty that doesn’t need proof.
After that, she was my compass. The only reason I stayed tethered to this world. Until the day she was gone too.
It happened fast. Too fast.
I don’t like to talk about it — not because I forgot, but because I remember too well.
The funeral was empty. Just me, a priest, and the sound of the wind rattling against stained glass. No family. No friends. No one left who knew her laugh or the way she hummed when she cooked.
When I went home, the silence was unbearable. Every room felt hollow. Her shoes still by the door. Her mug still in the sink. The world kept spinning, cruel and unbothered, while I sat surrounded by ghosts.
That night, I broke.
I cried like a kid. Ugly, choking sobs that tore something out of me. I was angry — at the world, at the system, at myself. I’d promised she’d be safe. I’d lied.
Grief doesn’t announce itself.
It seeps in. Quiet. Patient.
It waits.
One day you think you’re standing, the next it crushes your lungs. You reach for something, anything, that’ll make it stop, but there’s nothing. Just the ache.
I stopped working. Stopped eating. Spent eighteen months at the bottom of a bottle. Every shadow looked like her. Every laugh in the distance twisted the knife.
Then one night, I dreamt of her.
She was standing at the foot of my bed — barefoot again, just like that first night I found her. Only now she wasn’t a child. She was older, calm, radiant. Her eyes carried that quiet disappointment that always cut deeper than anger.
“Get up,” she said. Not cruel. Not kind. Just certain.
When I did, I saw it — the bottles, the dust, the wreck I’d become. I realized I hadn’t been living. I’d just been waiting to die.
That was the morning I stopped drinking.
Stopped mourning.
And started getting mad.
Grief had taken everything.
Love had failed.
The system had failed.
But vengeance — vengeance still made sense.
Eighteen months.
That’s how long grief devoured me. It stripped the flesh from my bones and left only rage. When they called Billie’s death an accident, something inside me broke beyond repair.
The sorrow mutated. It grew teeth.
It stopped being mourning — it became survival.
It became purpose.
If grief wanted to kill me, vengeance gave me a reason to live.
I rebuilt myself from the ground up — no softness, no mercy. My body became armor. My mind, a blade. I trained until every nerve burned. Every drop of sweat was a promise: never again.
And while my body hardened, my mind followed.
I learned their habits — those parasites in designer skin. The girls who laughed while Billie cried. The ones who made cruelty fashionable. I memorized everything: who drank what, who locked their doors, who didn’t. The details that made them human. The details I’d use to undo them.
Then there was her — the queen.
The one who went to Billie’s grave every Sunday like she was confessing. Kneeling in silk, crying crocodile tears over the body she helped destroy.
I watched her from the trees. Every word. Every tremor. Every lie.
And for a moment, I almost believed she cared. Almost.
Then I remembered Billie’s last call.
Her voice shaking. Her begging me to come.
And the silence that followed.
The crowd that gathered.
The girls who stood over her body pretending to be heartbroken when they were the reason she was dead.
No — she wasn’t innocent. None of them were.
Every bruise. Every scream. Every broken bone — they did that to her. And one of them had led the pack.
The ringleader.
The one who made destruction look elegant.
The one who taught Billie to doubt herself until she disappeared.
That girl broke her.
So I waited.
And when she slipped, I was ready.
High out of her mind one night, she posted an ad. Some sick little fantasy about being chased — hunted. A game.
She wanted danger.
And I was danger.
I slid into her inbox without hesitation. She thought she was in control. She thought this was play.
When she met me that night in the woods, pupils wide, lips smirking, she actually asked if I was dangerous enough for her.
I smiled. Because she had no idea.
Eighteen months of grief had carved the man I used to be into something unrecognizable. Billie had been the light. The only good thing I ever had.
And when the world took her, it made me what I am now.
Ghosts aren’t born. They’re built. One loss at a time.