Chapter 16 Nadia
NADIA
Time doesn’t heal.
It just kills you slowly. It peels you from the inside out until all that’s left is sorrow and regret.
It’s been ten years since they locked Lucian away. Years since his last words forget me cut me to ribbons and shattered my world.
And I tried. I really did. I scrubbed his voice from my head. Drowned the memories in vodka. Built a life out of ashes and pretended to call it living.
But it’s not a life. It’s survival on autopilot.
The silence of my apartment hasn’t softened. I go to work. I smile. I let strangers’ hands touch me like they have a right to me. None of it feels real. Because Lucian buried me with him the day they closed that cell door.
He’s rotting in a cage. And I’m rotting above ground, pretending to breathe.
And then tonight…tonight is the final nail in my coffin.
His name is all over the news again.
Lucian Cross.
In bold type, screaming across the television screen, revisiting the life of the notorious serial killer known as Ghost.
FORD PENITENTIARY IN FLAMES: DOZENS DEAD IN DEADLIEST PRISON RIOT IN STATE HISTORY.
The news anchor’s voice drones over footage of a fire - orange light licking the sky, smoke clawing its way into heaven. I read the crawl at the bottom of the screen:
Among the confirmed dead: Lucian Cross, 38. Known as the prolific serial killler, Ghost.
My heart stutters. Then claws. Then stops.
I can’t look away. Helicopters hover over the inferno, their spotlights cutting through smoke. Sirens wail. Men run. Bodies are covered.
I don’t breathe. I don’t blink.
The words fall like stones:
Body recovered in the wreckage of the South Dock corridor.
His death, if verified, closes the file on one of the state’s most infamous killers.
The screen blurs. My pulse isn’t a rhythm anymore - it’s a scream.
The reporter keeps talking, but I only hear the static between her words.
Lucian Cross…dead.
And just like that - I fall apart all over again.
I tear through every newspaper I can find, the pages trembling in my hands, crumpling under my grip.
Ink stains my skin. Black dust sits in the grooves of my fingers, but I keep going. Headline after headline, each one blurring into the next, screaming the same words in red and black.
I switch between channels on the TV, remote slick in my palm. Every voice I hear, every new piece of information, leaves me drowning in my own despair. I wait for someone - anyone - to falter, to contradict, to tell me this isn’t real. But the news never comes.
Every station. Every face. Every polished anchor who used to spit his name like poison now says it like victory. They’re not reporting the news. They’re celebrating it. They’re dancing on his grave.
The room tilts. Their voices clang like iron bars, reverberating off the walls. I want to throw the papers, smash the television, scream until something gives - but nothing will change what’s already written.
Lucian Cross. Ghost. Dead.
Each repetition buries me a little deeper.
Lucian Cross is dead.
Ghost burned to death in Ford Penitentiary.
The infamous killer is gone.
The words hit like body blows. My chest locks. My lungs refuse to open. The air slices through me, cold and sharp.
I can’t breathe.
I thought I’d prepared for this - for the possibility that someday, the world would end in flames and take him with it. I built walls around my heart, stacked them high, swore I’d be ready.
But hope is a big fat liar. It worms through every crack no matter how tightly you seal it.
I told myself to stop waiting.
He told me to forget him. But I never did.
Somewhere, in the quiet part of me that refused to die, I believed he’d come back. That one day he’d walk out of the dark and find me.
Now that whisper’s gone. Hope shatters - sharp, merciless, final.
And the sound of it breaking inside me is louder than the sirens howling across the news feed.
I close my eyes, but he’s everywhere. His hand at the small of my back. The warmth of his palm steadying me when the world tilted. The silence between us that felt like safety.
The day he told me to let him go - voice steady, eyes betraying him. That’s all I have left. Ghosts. Fragments. The echo of a man the world called a monster, but who, to me, was the only thing that ever felt real.
The television drones on - names, numbers, body counts. Forty-eight dead. Ford Penitentiary in ruins. A chapter closed.
The anchors sound relieved, triumphant, like the world is cleaner now. But I can’t join them. Because whatever was left of me - whatever stubborn flicker still believed he’d return - was buried with him in that fire.
And hope, fragile and foolish, is finally gone.