Chapter 57
NADIA
My chest heaves, shallow and uneven, and whatever fragile hope I had left dissolves into the sterile air. I’m alone. Still strapped down. Still at the mercy of a man who’s traded reason for obsession.
Kellerman turns the syringe between his fingers like it’s something precious, holding it up to the light, watching the liquid shimmer before he taps the plunger.
A single drop swells at the tip - delicate, deadly.
His calm is absolute, unnerving. The kind of calm that only belongs to men who are evil to their very core.
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper, my voice cracked and paper-thin. My lips are dry, my tongue heavy in my mouth. He doesn’t answer right away, and maybe that’s worse. The silence stretches, thick and deliberate.
He’ll kill me with what he’s pumping into my veins - or he’ll leave me hooked on it, hollow and dependent. I don’t know which is worse. I don’t even know why. All I know is that whatever he’s trying to create, I’m the experiment he’s willing to destroy to get there.
“Do you know what I hate most about people like you?” he asks, conversational, as though this is a lecture hall and I’m just another student in the front row.
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Idealists. Always believing there’s some grand difference between good men and bad.
There isn’t. There are only useful men. And useful women. ”
His hand comes down on my shoulder, firm, anchoring me in place. The cold kiss of the needle hovers at my throat again.
Tears sting, but I grit my teeth, refusing to give him the sob he’s waiting for. “I’m not afraid of you,” I whisper, though my voice trembles.
His smile cuts razor-thin. “Oh, you should be terrified.”
The needle presses, just enough to break the skin. A sharp fire blooms down my neck. My heart jerks.
I thrash, the straps ripping new burns into my wrists. Blood slicks the leather. The bed creaks under the violence of my panic. “Don’t touch me!”
Kellerman sighs like I’m being dramatic. “Fighting wastes energy you don’t have, Nadia.”
The room tilts, slow at first, then violently.
The edges blur and collapse inward until my vision narrows to a tunnel of shifting light.
My pulse hammers in my ears - too fast, too hard - every beat a warning, a countdown to something I can’t stop.
Heat licks beneath my skin, spreading through my veins until it feels like I’m burning from the inside out.
The air thickens, heavy and wrong. I can’t tell if I’m shivering or sweating. The ceiling ripples, bending like water. My thoughts slide out of reach, slipping through fingers that no longer feel attached to me.
Somewhere beneath the fever, I think I hear a voice - low, familiar, impossibly far away. Lucian.
And just like that, my world unravels.
The shadows move.
I think it’s my mind playing tricks again, my blood-starved brain clawing for hope where there is none. But then - he’s there. Stepping into the light like he owns it. Like he was carved from the very darkness that suffocates this room.
Tall. Broad. Silent.
A mask hides half his face, molded close like a second skin. It’s matte black, smooth, covering everything but his beautiful eyes. Eyes that pin me like a blade through the heart.
For a breathless second, I don’t recognize him. My panic spikes, a scream caught in my throat.
And then he speaks.
“Get away from her.”
The cadence guts me. That low curling around each word like a secret I’d buried years ago. My body knows it before my mind can catch up.
Lucian.
The name detonates inside me, ripping through denial, scattering every fragile defense I’ve built.
“No…” My voice shreds. “No, you -”
Kellerman startles, fury breaking across his features, but I barely see him anymore. The mask. The man. The monster who has haunted my every dream.
“Lucian?” I whisper, and the sound of it cracks me wide open.
He doesn’t answer. Just stands there, staring, his chest rising and falling like every breath costs a piece of him.
The mask shifts under his hand.
He peels it off inch by inch, the silence stretching unbearable. First the jawline - it’s sharper, harder than I remember. Then the mouth - stern, unsmiling, lips pressed like he’s holding back a confession. And finally, the eyes.
God, the eyes.
I know them. I’ve always known them. Dark as midnight, lit with something wild and broken, something that’s been caged too long. The years have carved them deeper, colder, but they’re his. They’re his.
Lucian Cross.
My fiancé.
The man I love more than life itself.
The man the world calls Ghost.
Terror slams into me, cold and suffocating. I thrash against the straps, panic ripping through me like fire. “No - no, it can’t be you, it can’t -”
But underneath the terror, something else coils, hot and vicious. Fury. At him. At myself. At the universe for putting his face back in front of me.
“You,” I spit, my voice breaking. “You destroyed everything. Our future. My life. You-”
The words collapse. My throat burns. My vision blurs.
Because attraction pulses beneath the fury, treacherous and undeniable. My body remembers what my heart tries to bury - the way his hands once worshiped me, the way his voice once soothed every wound, the way his love consumed me until there was nothing left.
I hate him. I want him. I’m terrified of him.
All at once.
Ghost steps closer, mask dangling from his hand. His voice cuts the air, softer now, but it slices me open all the same.
“You always were mine, Nadia.”
The monster wears the face of the man I loved. And God help me, my heart still aches for him.
Lucian.
Ghost.
My love.
My nightmare.
The room spins. My chest feels like it’s caving in, ribs grinding against each other as I struggle to breathe. He’s right here, so close I can taste the memory of his mouth on mine, and yet he’s miles away. A stranger wearing the face of the man that once promised me forever.
“Lucian…” The name cracks out of me, raw, unsteady. It sounds foreign now, like I’ve stolen it from another woman’s lips.
His eyes - God, those eyes. They flicker, just for a heartbeat, with something that looks like pain. Then it’s gone, buried under the steel that makes him who he is.
“Don’t say my name like that,” he murmurs. Low. Dangerous. Almost reverent.
“I shouldn’t have to say it at all,” I spit back, my voice trembling as much as my hands strapped to the chair. “You were supposed to be gone. I mourned you. I hated you. I-” My voice breaks. “I loved you.”
The confession rips me open, every nerve exposed.
He steps closer, the floor groaning under his weight. I recoil as far as the straps allow, my body torn between terror and the aching betrayal of desire.
“You destroyed me,” I whisper. My throat burns, my vision hot with tears. “Do you know what it’s been like? My whole life… my whole goddamn life has been ruined because of you.”
He flinches, but still his voice stays steady, a blade against my skin. “Better ruined than dead, Nadia.”
The fury boils over. “Don’t you dare act like this was to protect me.
Don’t you dare stand there and pretend you didn’t choose to become a monster.
” My eyes rake over him, over the man who was my safe place.
“You didn’t just kill them, Lucian. You killed me, too.
And you’ve been killing me every day since. ”
Kellerman’s laugh snaps me out of my feverish dream.
It’s a soft, poisonous sound that slides over my skin like oil.
“How ironic,” he drawls, adjusting the syringe still glinting in his hand.
“That even as you lay here dying, all you can think and dream about is that monster you shared your life with. The tragic story of two lovers divided by death. Now you’ll finally be reunited in the darkness. ”