Chapter 64
NADIA
The world slips sideways.
The light dissolves.
And I am floating.
Weightless.
Wordless.
Suspended in a silence that hums like the inside of a shell pressed to the ear.
For the first time in forever, there’s no pain.
No machines.
No pressure in my chest.
Just him.
Lucian stands in the mist ahead, half-shadow, half-memory. His white shirt is open at the collar, stained with the same blood that stains my dreams. His eyes - those eyes that once looked at me like I was both the sin and the salvation - find me through the fog.
“Lucian,” I breathe, and the sound cracks, because saying his name feels like breaking a promise I already broke a thousand times.
He smiles - small, sad, devastating. “You weren’t supposed to come here, angel.”
My throat tightens. “Where is here?”
He glances around the endless nothing. The sky bleeds gray into silver, and the ground is mist that moves like water. “Between,” he says softly. “It’s the space between breaths. Between the living and the gone.”
“I’m dead?” My voice trembles, the words scattering like glass.
“Not yet.”
I take a step toward him, and the mist swirls around my feet. “Then why are you here?”
He looks away. The light flickers around him like he’s made of smoke. “Because you wanted me to be.”
My chest cracks open. I reach for him. “Then don’t leave me again. Please, Lucian. I can’t - ”
He closes the distance in two steps. His hands frame my face, calloused and warm, solid enough to make me believe he’s real. “You don’t belong here, Nadia.”
“I do.” My voice shatters on the last word. “I belong with you. There’s nothing left out there for me.”
He presses his forehead to mine. The contact steals the air from my lungs. He smells like smoke and storm rain, like the nights he used to pull me out of nightmares just by breathing beside me.
“You think this is peace?” he whispers. “It’s not. It’s just the pause before the heartbreak starts again.”
“I don’t care.” I clutch at him, fingers digging into his shoulders. “If it means being with you, then let it break me.”
He exhales, a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “You always were a stubborn little saint.”
“I’m not a saint.”
“No,” he says softly, brushing his thumb over my cheek. “You’re the reason I believed they still existed.”
The world trembles. The mist thickens. Somewhere far away, I hear the faint beeping of a monitor.
Lucian looks past me, his jaw tight. “They’re calling you back.”
“Don’t make me go.” I grab his wrist. “Please. You promised you’d never leave me again.”
His gaze burns through me - fierce, impossible, final. “And I won’t. But this isn’t our ending. You still have pages left to write.”
“I’m tired,” I whisper. “I’m so tired.”
He leans in, his lips ghosting over my ear. “Then rest. But not here. Not yet.”
The light shifts - growing harsh, searing, white as a blade. He starts to fade, dissolving like smoke in sunlight.
“Lucian-!” I reach out, panic clawing up my throat. My hand passes through his chest, through the heart I once held together with my own.
“Live, Nadia,” he says, voice breaking, desperate and low. “Live for me. For what I couldn’t. That’s how you keep me with you.”
Tears burn down my face as the light swallows him. “Don’t you dare leave me alone in this world!”
He smiles one last time, soft and wrecked and infinite. “You were never alone, angel. You just forgot to look up.”
Then he’s gone.
The world collapses into noise - alarms, shouts, a voice screaming my name.
My body convulses. My chest seizes. The pain returns all at once, brutal and real. The beeping spikes, and I choke on air like it’s fire.
The first breath back in the world of the living feels like drowning.
And somewhere in the echo of my skull, I still hear him -
Live.
Something drags me up through the dark.
Through water, through static, through pain.
The first sound that finds me is a machine - steady, sharp, merciless. Beep. Beep. Beep.
Each one is a command.
Stay.
Stay.
Stay.
My eyelids are heavy, sanded down to nothing. I try to open them, but the light knifes through my skull. My throat burns; there’s something in it, something choking me. My body feels stitched together wrong, like it remembers dying and hasn’t decided to forgive me for ruining it.
And then I hear it - a voice I’d know even in the grave.
“Breathe for me, baby.”
Lucian.
It can’t be him. He was only in the dream, standing in the fog telling me to live. But his voice - God, his voice - is real now. Rough as gravel, soft as sin.
I fight the weight pulling me down, try to move my head. The effort rips a sound out of me, small and broken.
His hand finds mine instantly. Big, warm, trembling. “Hey,” he says, his voice cracking around the edges. “You’re here. You came back.”
I force my eyes open. Everything blurs - the ceiling, the lights, the shadow leaning over me. And then he comes into focus.
Lucian Cross.
Pale. Hollow-eyed. Shirt torn open, stained in old blood and new. He looks like a man halfway to madness, and somehow the sight of him is the first thing that feels real.
“Hey,” he whispers again, brushing hair from my forehead with a tenderness that guts me. “You scared the shit out of me.”
I try to speak, but the words die in my throat. A tear slides down my cheek instead. He catches it with his thumb, shaking his head like he’s the one who might break.
“Don’t do that,” he murmurs. “Don’t you cry, Nadia. You’ve done enough bleeding for both of us.”
I blink hard. My chest stutters around the ventilator. He leans closer, his face inches from mine, and the weight of his gaze pins me to the world.
“I saw you,” I rasp, voice cracked and dry as dust. “You were there.”
His eyes darken. “Where?”
“In the fog. You told me to live.”
For a heartbeat, he stops breathing. His jaw tightens. Then he exhales shakily, his forehead dropping to my hand.
“Guess I wasn’t ready to let you go,” he says, voice trembling against my skin. “Guess I never will be.”
Tears spill hot down my cheeks. I lift my fingers - weak, clumsy - and trace the scar that runs along his jaw. “You’re real?”
He gives a broken laugh that sounds like it hurts. “Unfortunately.”
“You’re… bleeding,” I whisper.
He glances at his hands, at the crusted blood still caked under his nails. “Not mine.”
I know what that means. And I don’t ask. Because I don’t want to know.
The silence stretches between us, humming with everything we never said. The monitors fill it, the rhythm of my heart tapping out the fragile truth - we’re still here. Somehow. Against every odd and fate that tried to end us.
He leans closer until his breath ghosts my cheek. “You can’t scare me like that again, angel.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I breathe.
He lifts his head, meets my eyes. They’re wild and wet and beautiful. “Next time you feel like dying, you call me first.”
A sound slips out of me, half sob, half laugh. “You’re insane.”
“Yeah,” he says softly. “But I’m yours.”
My body aches. My chest burns. But the warmth of his hand in mine is enough to make it all worth surviving.
I close my eyes again, and he presses a kiss to my knuckles. It lingers there like a promise.
“Sleep,” he whispers. “I’ve got you.”
The beeping slows, steady as a heartbeat.
And before the dark takes me again, I hear him say the thing that breaks me in two:
“I would’ve followed you anywhere, Nadia. Even into the fog. But this time - this time, you found your way back to me on your own.”