Chapter 48
LUCIAN
It’s been more than a decade since I last touched her, but my body still remembers the shape of her - like it was carved into me, branded beneath my skin.
Eleven years, and still, my hands ache with the ghost of her warmth.
The way her fingers used to slide across my jaw, tentative, reverent, like she was touching something fragile when I was anything but.
Prison burned everything soft out of me.
It had to.
You either harden up or die in there. You learn to become stone, to let every shred of humanity bleed out until you can’t tell the difference between surviving and decomposing. I was both. A breathing corpse.
Every day behind those walls, I told myself to forget her. To bury her the way the world buried me.
And yet, every night, she came back.
Her voice. Her hands. Her eyes - those violet orbs that I could not erase from my memory. They haunted me through the clanging bars and the stench of survival. I survived on that memory alone.
Because Nadia Reed wasn’t a woman you forget. She wan’t just any woman to me. She was a pulse. The only reminder of my history.
When you’re on death row, you start thinking about impossible things. About freak occurrences - pardons, riots, miracles. You start believing that maybe fate still owes you one last act of mercy.
And somehow, mine came wrapped in fire and chaos.
Mason Ironside and the Gattis threw me a lifeline, and I took it with both blood-stained hands.
Now here I am. Faceless. Nameless. Free. And yet - right back where I started.
Because my life didn’t begin when I was born. It began the moment I met her.
When she smiled at me over that damn cup of coffee and I forgot how to breathe.
When her laugh wrapped itself around my heart and squeezed until it hurt.
That was my first breath.
And I know, without a doubt, my last will be taken in her arms.
Nothing less will ever be enough.
She’s lying beside me now, her breath soft against the pillow, her skin pale under the low light. The world outside ceases to exist. For the first time in years, I feel something close to peace - and it terrifies me.
I splay my hand across her stomach, my palm covering the faint tremor of her breath. Her skin is warm, alive. My fingers move higher, tracing slow, reverent circles, gliding up until they brush against the swell of her breasts.
I shouldn’t touch her with hands that have broken men and carried death. But I’m a starving thing when it comes to her. A lonely wreck trying to remember what tenderness feels like.
She stirs beneath my touch, her lips parting in a soft sigh that wrecks me completely. Her eyes open - sleepy, unsure - and she looks at me like she’s seeing someone she’s known forever.
“Luc… ” she starts, but the name dies on her lips and her eyes drop in shame.
So I silence her thoughts with a kiss.
It’s not the rough, desperate kind I’ve known my whole life. It’s slower, reverent. My lips move against hers like I’m relearning what it means to be human.
Her fingers curl against my chest, tracing the outline of the scars she doesn’t know she’s already touched before. My heart pounds hard enough to bruise the inside of my ribs.
Every touch, every breath feels like sin and salvation rolled into one.
She sighs into my mouth, and I taste the quiet surrender in it. That soft, breaking thing inside her that mirrors everything broken in me.
I pull back, resting my forehead against hers. Her breath trembles against my lips.
I want to tell her everything - that I never stopped loving her, that I never stopped being hers even when the world forgot my name.
But the words stick in my throat.
They’re too dangerous. Too final.
So instead, I whisper the only truth that matters.
“I’ll never hurt you, Nadia.”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, her hand finds mine, resting over her heart. And I realize, for the first time in years, that maybe I don’t have to be a ghost forever.
Maybe she’s the only thing that can bring me back to life.
No-one tells you what years of absence does to a thirsty man.
How it etches itself into your bones. How it rewires the way you breathe.
I wake slowly, like a man surfacing from a dream I’m terrified to leave.
The room is still dim, washed in that soft, early light that makes everything look fragile.
But nothing feels fragile - not the weight of her against me, not the way her body fits along my side like she was carved to fill that space, not the warmth she’s left on my skin.
My hand moves before my mind does, tracing the line of her spine, relearning her shape. I inhale her - sweet, familiar, ruinous in the best way possible - and something inside me loosens with a relief that borders on pain.
Years apart.
Years of pretending I didn’t miss her, didn’t want her, didn’t ache in ways I couldn’t name.
No one warns you how silence can starve you. How distance can become a living thing, chewing through your memories until you’re not sure what was real. But lying here with her, breathing the same air, I remember every damn thing.
The way she used to laugh with her whole body.
The way her eyes softened right before she kissed me.
The way I ruined us.
The way I’ve been trying to stitch himself back together ever since.
I look at her now - hair spilled across my chest, lips a little swollen from my mouth, fingers curled like she’s still holding onto me even in sleep - and the years feel like a cruel joke.
Because the second I touched her again, it’s like no time has passed at all.
Like the universe hit un-pause the moment she whispered my name last night.
A dark, hungry heat pulses through me. It’s not just lust, but something that’s been waiting in the ashes of every bad decision I’ve made since I exiled her out of my life.
I shift, slow enough not to wake her, but too far gone to stop the way my body reacts to hers. My hand slides down, cupping her hip, pulling her closer. I feel her breath catch, her lashes flutter, her body instinctively nuzzle into me like she’s been searching for him even in sleep.
Absence does things to a person. But so does reunion.
I press my mouth to her shoulder, then lower, tasting her warm skin. I feel her stir, a soft sound escaping her throat - one I’m starved for, one I’ve killed a thousand memories to remember clearly.
“Morning,” she whispers, voice thick with sleep.
“Not yet,” I breathe against her skin, my lips brushing her shoulder as my hand drifts down, finding the heat between her thighs. She shifts onto her back, slow, trusting, still half-dreaming. She’s soft like this. Unguarded, tender, completely bare to me, and the sight alone almost undoes me.
My fingers skim the curve of her inner thigh before I reach the place I’ve been aching for.
I tap lightly over her slick center, a silent question, a request instead of a demand.
She lifts her gaze to mine, eyes hazy and heavy-lidded, her lashes fluttering like she’s waking into a world she doesn’t mind belonging to.
That’s all the permission I need.
My thumb presses against her clit - firm, steady, the kind of pressure that makes her breath hitch.
I keep it there, holding her in that delicate balance between sleep and need as my other fingers glide down her folds, slick and warm, sliding into her like she was waiting for me.
One finger at first, slow, deliberate, feeling her body welcome the intrusion like it remembers the shape of me.
Her pussy fits perfectly in the cradle of my palm, like she was built to be held this way. I work her with all of my fingers - pressing my thumb, stroking, circling, thrusting deeper until her hips start to move, until her breath turns into a soft, desperate sound.
The room is quiet, the world still asleep, and her moans spill into the dawn like a confession - raw, broken, beautiful, as she explodes all over my fingers.