Chapter 13 Lucian
LUCIAN
Nadia sat across from me in the kitchen, sunlight spilling over her shoulder like it had been made just for her.
Her books were open, pages crowded with notes, little curls of handwriting that looked too gentle for the world we actually lived in.
She stirred her tea without thinking, slow circles, the kind born from muscle memory—years of doing too much, of keeping her hands busy so her mind didn’t fall apart.
The spoon clicked softly against porcelain, steady as a heartbeat.
And somehow, this - this - felt like the strangest thing I’d ever known.
Not the killing, nor the blood. Not the violence I’d built my life on. But this.
A kitchen. A woman. Morning light and the smell of tea instead of iron.
She didn’t know what I was. What I’d done.
She didn’t know that the man sitting across from her, watching her tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear, had once stood over her with the intention of ending her life. She didn’t know that the ghosts I carried had her name written across their faces.
Billie’s brother.
The boy she never recognized from the faces in the crowd that night.
The man who had turned grief into vocation.
She didn’t know that the same hands now wrapped around a mug had once closed over throats until the world went silent.
She smiled absently at her notes, tapping her pen, unaware she was sitting across from the monster that used to haunt her story.
And maybe the cruelest part was how easily she’d folded into my life.
How she’d taken the edge off my world and replaced it with something softer.
Something I didn’t know how to live in but didn’t want to leave.
We were a strange kind of domestic; two survivors pretending the past hadn’t made trauma out of everything we touched.
There were groceries in the fridge. Her shoes by the door. The faint scent of her shampoo clinging to the air. The ordinary had rooted itself so deep into my bones it felt like blasphemy.
Sometimes she’d talk about her patients at the clinic. Small tragedies, ordinary heartbreaks. I’d always listen, nodding, pretending I didn’t know what real ruin looked like. Pretending I hadn’t seen what people looked like right before they died.
She didn’t need to know that part of me. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
I watched her now, her brow furrowed, her lips moving soundlessly as she read. The sunlight touched her hair, gilded her in something too holy for a man like me to touch. My chest felt too full. This peace was a different kind of pain. An illusion.
Once, she’d been prey. Once, I’d been the hunter. Now, she was just mine.
The distance between what we were and what we’d become was dizzying. Somewhere between rage and redemption, I’d started wanting her to stay. To belong here. With me.
I wanted her laughter echoing in these walls for decades. I wanted her toothbrush beside mine. I wanted her bound to me so tightly that even death would have to ask permission to take her.
The thought rose up before I could tame it, violent in its tenderness.
“Marry me,” I said.
The words came out rough, unplanned. They were too raw and too honest. They hung in the air like something dangerous.
Her hand stilled over her tea. The spoon clinked against the cup once, a soft metallic sigh. She looked up, startled, her violet eyes wide and bright, the sunlight catching in them until they looked like fire.
And in that moment, with her breath caught between disbelief and something that might have been hope, I realized I didn’t need redemption.
I just needed her to say yes.
At times, I wondered if I’d always see my sister’s killer when I looked at her.
If love could ever drown out that kind of history.
I told myself I hadn’t spared her because of mercy. Mercy was for saints, and I’d buried that part of myself with Billie. I spared her because I’d learned to measure grief like a debt, one that could only be settled in blood.
But when I tried to end her, the world folded in on itself. My hand shook. My control broke. The plan, once perfect, shattered. And in its place came something far worse than failure.
I fell in love with her.
That love didn’t quiet the hunger; it sharpened it. The urge to close my hands around her throat never left; it just learned how to breathe beside her. I became a man who loved what he once swore to destroy.
So I buried the monster under structure and silence.
I became what the city whispered about - the man who hunted filth and left no traces.
An executioner who didn’t kill for coin or pride, but for balance.
I cleansed the destruction the law refused to touch - traffickers, pedophiles, the kind of parasites that hid behind clean suits and public smiles.
It felt righteous at first. Like every body I left cooling in the dark was a small redemption. But penance curdles when you start to enjoy the quiet after the kill. And I did. I told myself I wasn’t a murderer. I was the cure. A necessary sickness for a world that refused to heal.
It wasn’t mercy that stopped me from killing her. It was something blacker, heavier - the realization that if I took her life, I’d be no better than the world that threw Billie from a window and let others get away with bullying her out of that window.
Every time I imagined pulling the trigger, I saw Billie’s eyes. Not forgiving, not accusing, just tired. And in that look, I saw what I’d become.
So I didn’t kill Nadia. I watched her instead. I learned her rhythms, her silences, her fragility. And somehow, those things became the only language I understood.
It should have been simple enough to hate her, because hate restores balance. But hate didn’t want her smile, or the sound she made when she dreamed. Hate didn’t steady my hands the way she did.
When she cried in her sleep, it broke something in me. When she laughed, I wanted to be a man deserving of that sound. And when she flinched, I wanted to be uglier than fear itself.
That was the sickness love made of me.
I didn’t protect her because I forgave her. I protected her because killing her would have meant killing the only piece of my humanity left.
Sometimes, when she slept, I’d kneel beside her bed and watch her breathe. Her face soft, lashes trembling. I told myself I hadn’t chosen wrong. I’d chosen complication. I’d chosen the wound that kept me human.
Because inside the ruin of what I was, something else had taken root. A small, stubborn mercy. Not for the world. Not even for her. But for the man I used to be, the boy who once believed justice was good.
Maybe love isn’t redemption. Maybe it’s the hardest kind of revenge. Choosing life for the one who destroyed yours, and spending the rest of your days defending that choice.