Chapter 44 Lucian
LUCIAN
Guilty men have manners, too. Sometimes.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.
I came here with good intentions - if such a thing still exists in the hollowed-out mess that used to be my soul. I just wanted to make sure Nadia was okay after her bastard ex shoved her around. That was it. A simple check-in. A decent act. A man trying to right a wrong.
But good intentions are a funny thing. The path they pave always seems to lead straight to hell.
I thought she wouldn’t open the door. I half-hoped she wouldn’t. But when the lock clicked and her face appeared - soft, wary, beautiful in the dim light - it was over for me. Game. Set. Match.
I stepped inside - invited - and that’s the worst part. You can’t blame a monster for entering if you ask him in, can you?
Now I’m sitting on her sofa, too close to her, not close enough, my palms pressed hard against my thighs just to keep them occupied.
My hands have memory. They remember the weight of her body, the warmth of her skin, the taste of her breath against my mouth.
I can’t let them remember too much. Not now.
So I sit there, silent, fists unclenching and clenching against my jeans, pretending to be something I’m not - a man with restraint.
I tell myself I’ll leave soon. I’ll say something polite. Make sure she’s fine. Walk out the door. But I know I’m lying. Because the truth is, I don’t want to leave.
There’s a kind of madness that comes with proximity.
That slow, electric pull between two bodies that remember each other before the mind dares to catch up.
She’s talking about something, but her voice fades under the drumbeat in my chest. Every movement she makes is a distraction: the way she tucks her hair behind her ear, the way her lip is split but she doesn’t seem to notice it, the way the pulse in her throat trembles when she catches me looking.
She rises without a word. I watch her do it - those few steps that close the impossible distance between us - and I know I should stop her. I should say don’t. I should stand, make some excuse, walk out that damn door before this goes where I know it will.
But I don’t.
She sits beside me.
And for a heartbeat, everything in me stills.
The sofa is small. She’s small. I am not. There’s barely a whisper of air between us, and I can feel the warmth of her body through the fabric of my jeans. My thighs tense instinctively, a slow surge of heat building low in my stomach.
My hands - traitorous things - move before I can stop them. I run my palms down the length of my thighs, a useless attempt to release the static buzzing through me. Then they still. Every muscle in my body locks tight. I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t even breathe properly.
She’s close enough that I can smell her shampoo - something faintly floral, clean, heartbreakingly familiar. It’s just her, and it’s intoxicating. It takes everything in me not to tilt my head and bury my face against her neck, to inhale the years I’ve lost.
Her hand slides onto mine.
It’s such a small, human gesture - soft, innocent - but it detonates through me like a bullet to the spine.
Her fingers are smaller than I remember. Or maybe mine just feel larger, heavier, wrong from all the guilt I carry. But the moment her skin touches mine, the world narrows to a single point.
Every memory I buried claws its way up through the dark.
The cell walls. The dark. The feeling of forever and despair in the same sentence.
And her. Always the memory of her.
I shouldn’t let her do this. I shouldn’t let her touch me. But my body won’t obey me anymore.
I look at her hand resting over mine and a strange calm settles over me, deep and terrifying. It feels too familiar. Too right.
This isn’t the first time we’ve done this.
I’ve sat beside her before - in another lifetime, another body - and we’ve had this same moment. The same pull. The same quiet, aching gravity.
The thought is insane. But so am I.
She’s staring at our hands, not looking at me. Her brows furrow slightly, as if she’s trying to make sense of something impossible. I can almost hear her thoughts chasing themselves into circles.
And when she finally looks up, her eyes are full of that same confusion - hope and disbelief tangled together. It’s too much.
“I don’t want you to leave,” she says quietly.
My breath catches. She doesn’t know what she’s asking for.
The irony is cruel - she thinks she’s inviting a man to stay, when I’m no civilised man. I’m darker, crueler, mayhem and chaos, and I probably never should have been resurrected.
“You don’t know what you want,” I manage, voice low, careful. I have to make sure she knows what she’s asking.
“Usually,” she says, the corner of her mouth twitching faintly. “But right now, I don’t want you to go.”
She doesn’t realize the weight her words carry.
“You want me to stay,” I say, needing to confirm it, to make sure I’m not imagining this, not conjuring it out of some fever dream I’ve been living in since the day I met her.
“I want you to stay,” she whispers, steady this time.
“Can you tell me why?”
“I can’t. It just is.”
And that’s when she leans toward me.
Slowly. Softly. Like she’s moving through water.
I can feel the hesitation trembling through her, but I can also feel her resolve - the quiet kind that doesn’t come from impulse, but from inevitability.
My every instinct screams to move, to get up, to flee before I do something I can’t undo. But I’m frozen, caught in her orbit.
She’s the one who closes the distance between us, not me. Her face inches closer, her breath mingling with mine, warm and uneven. My pulse kicks hard against my ribs.
For years I’ve dreamed of this - of her - but I never imagined she’d be the one reaching for me again.
And as her lips hover a breath away, all I can think is this:
She doesn’t know who I am. But some part of her must. The part that remembers me from before I died. And if this is the sin that finally damns me, then so be it.