Chapter 24 Nadia
NADIA
Sleep drags me under slow, until it feels like slipping beneath the surface of deep water where the light can’t reach. I’m dreaming. I must be. Because why else would Lucian be here?
Lucian Cross.
The man who loved me before the world discovered him.
His name slips through me in the dream like a prayer I once knew by heart but forgot how to recite.
The scent hits me first - oud and sandalwood, threaded with smoke, a scent all his.
I close my eyes and breathe him in like oxygen, greedy, desperate.
His hands cradle my face, rough and strong, thumbs sweeping along my cheekbones as though he’s relearning me, memorizing me piece by fucking piece, afraid I’ll vanish if he doesn’t.
“You never had a choice, little dove,” he murmurs, voice low, reverent, laced with danger. I know the proclamation should terrify me, but it doesn’t. Instead, it soothes me. “You have always been mine.”
He pulls me closer. Lips graze the hollow beneath my ear, the slow path down my throat. Heat curls through me, dizzying, familiar, a hunger I thought I buried with him. His mouth is devotion and hunger all at once, and I melt into it like I never left.
We’re back in our old apartment, windows cracked open to summer air.
The sheets are tangled from hours of forgetting the rest of the world.
His laughter is soft, fleeting, the rarest of sounds, and it spills into my ear.
I remember how his smile softened his whole face, how the sharpness melted until he was just mine, achingly human, achingly alive.
I ache for it now. For the weight of him pressing me into the mattress, the way his body curved into mine like it had been shaped for me. My fingers thread into his dark curls, tugging hard, and he groans into my mouth, deep and raw, the sound vibrating against my chest.
“Lucian…”
The name tastes like love. It tastes like blood. And then it changes.
The light dies. The golden warmth drains away, leaving only shadow. His mouth is still on me, but the heat is gone—it’s cold now, sharp as ice. His hands, once worshipping, grip too tight, bruising where they once cherished. My body goes rigid, dread threading into desire.
And his eyes—God, his eyes. They’re not his anymore. No warmth. No humanity. Just flat, lifeless, black as the night.
In a heartbeat, the man I loved is gone. And what looms over me, devouring me in the dark, isn’t Lucian.
It’s Ghost, the man they branded a serial killer.
I see him the way the cameras showed him, the way the world remembers him. Walking into court in chains, jaw clenched, stare unbroken. His hands are shackled in front of him. He leans over me, breath hot against my ear, and whispers the same word he once made sacred.
“Mine.”
But now it isn’t a vow. It’s a sentence. A life sentence, pressed down on me until my lungs collapse under the weight.
I jerk awake with a gasp, heart a fist pounding wild inside my chest. Sweat slicks every inch of my skin, my sheets twisted like restraints around my legs.
The room is dark, still, ordinary - but my body refuses to believe it.
My pulse riots, screaming that he’s here, that he’s close, that the dream wasn’t just a dream.
I press my palm hard against my sternum, dragging air into my lungs one ragged breath at a time.
It’s been years. Years since I last saw him. Because he sent me away. Because he refused to see me, refused to read my letters or let me play any part in his life.
So I left. As directed, I cut him out of me like a tumor and built something new in the hollow he left behind.
Medical school, trauma wards, endless nights covered in other people’s blood, pretending if I could save enough lives, maybe that would compensate for the lives lost at Lucian’s hands.
Maybe I could scrub clean what I’d abandoned.
I told myself I was fearless. That resilience meant survival. That I’d outrun him.
But tonight proved me wrong. All it took was a dream.
His scent curling through the dark. The ghost of his touch searing my skin.
And suddenly I remember exactly what kind of love we had.
The kind that seared. Consumed. Devoured.
The kind that destroyed everything it touched but blazed beautiful while it lasted, like fire dancing on the edge of ruin.
The kind you never stop belonging to. The kind of love you never outrun.
And maybe the worst part is the truth that I bury beneath years of excuses, beneath the white coats and the antiseptic smell of the hospital. The truth is that I don’t want to.
I tell myself I stopped trying to see him because it was survival.
Because if I stayed, I would’ve gone down with him, and the world would’ve chewed me up too.
But that isn’t the whole truth. The truth is uglier.
The truth is that walking away was the single most violent thing I’ve ever done to myself.
Because leaving him didn’t free me. It only chained me to the ghost of him forever.
Every man I’ve touched since has been a pale imitation, someone that could never measure up.
Every kiss has tasted hollow. Every hand on my body has felt wrong, like an intrusion.
Like an insult. Because there was only ever one, and he was both the sin and the salvation I wasn’t strong enough to hold onto.
Lucian wasn’t just my love. He was the wound I keep clawing open because some part of me can’t let it scar. And even now, with the whole world telling me he’s dead, burned to nothing in that prison fire, part of me clings to him like oxygen.
Maybe that’s what terrifies me most. Not that he’s gone, but that I’d burn with him if he asked. That if he walked through my door tomorrow, blood still dripping from his hands, I’d let him in. I’d let him ruin me all over again.
Because ruin with him was the closest thing I’ve ever had to a home.