Chapter 66 Lucian
LUCIAN
Mason’s words are still ringing in my head.
They sound too reasonable, too calm - the kind of logic only a man with nothing to lose can manage.
“She needs round-the-clock care, Jude. She’s not just detoxing - she’s falling apart. You can’t fix this on your own.”
I don’t answer him. I just stare at Nadia through the glass.
She’s curled on the hospital bed, knees drawn up, IV lines trembling with her shivers. Her hair sticks to her damp forehead. Her lips move soundlessly, whispering ghosts I can’t chase.
She hasn’t eaten in days. She barely sleeps. Sometimes she screams in her dreams, clawing at her stomach until the nurses have to sedate her. And every time she cries, it feels like I’m being ripped open from the inside out.
“I know a clinic,” Mason says. “Private. Quiet. The kind of place where no one will ask questions. They’ll detox her properly, keep her safe, get her head straight again.”
“No.” My voice sounds like gravel. “She stays with me.”
He exhales, exasperated. “You’re too close to it, Jude. You’re her trigger. Every time she looks at you, she remembers everything she’s trying to forget.”
“She needs me,” I snap.
He steps closer, eyes steady. “And maybe that’s the problem.”
I hate him for saying it. Mostly because it’s true.
It’s late when I go back into her room.
The nurses lower their eyes as I pass, like they know something I don’t want to admit.
She’s awake, but barely there. Her eyes are sunken, ringed with exhaustion and something worse - grief that doesn’t end.
Her voice is raw, scraped thin from crying.
Between the slow, brutal process of weaning her off the drugs and the weight of what she’s done to her body, she’s unraveling in pieces.
It’s not loud or sudden - it’s quiet, steady, a kind of dying that happens in degrees. And I can’t stand to watch it.
When she sees me, there’s that flicker of relief - and then suspicion. Like she already senses the betrayal crawling under my skin.
“Hey,” I whisper, sitting on the edge of the bed. “How’s the pain?”
She laughs, hoarse and ugly. “Which one?”
I don’t answer. She knows.
“I spoke to Mason,” I say carefully. “He found a clinic -”
Her head snaps up. “No.”
“They can help you -”
“I said no!” Her voice cracks, sharp as glass. “You think I don’t know what that means? You’re sending me away.”
“It’s not like that.”
She grips the blanket, knuckles white. “It’s exactly like that! You think I’m crazy and weak. What sort of a woman cuts open her own womb, right?”
“Nadia -”
“Don’t!” she screams. The IV pulls taut with the motion. “Don’t you dare say my name like it means anything to you, Jude!”
The sound of her rage is worse than silence. It’s the sound of a heart breaking under its own weight.
I stand, jaw clenched, forcing the words out. “You’re not safe here. You need help, and I can’t -”
My throat closes. “I can’t give you what you need right now.”
Her voice shakes. “You already did. You gave me you. And now you want to undo everything?”
I look at her - this woman made of scars and fire, trembling under hospital lights - and I swear I’ve never hated myself more.
“I’m not undoing anything, Nadia,” I whisper. “It’s the only mercy I can give you.”
She lets out a bitter laugh. “You don’t know the first thing about mercy, Jude. If you did, you wouldn’t be doing this.”
Her words land like a blade between my ribs. I move closer, but she flinches away like I’m the monster she thought she’d escaped.
I force myself to stop. My hands hang uselessly at my sides.
“I’m doing this for your own good,” I say quietly. “You need time and care to heal from this.”
Her tears come fast now, her voice small. “I trusted you.”
“I know.”
“You said you’d never leave me.”
“I didn’t.” My voice cracks. “You’re leaving me.”
That’s when she breaks.
A sound tears out of her - low, raw, wounded - and she collapses forward, sobbing into her hands. I want to hold her. I want to fix it. But all I can do is stand there, watching the one person I’d die for unravel in front of me.
When Mason’s men arrive, I can’t watch them wheel her out. I stay in the corridor, fists clenched, staring at the blood stains still ghosting the tile from the night she almost died.
She doesn’t look back.
But I hear her voice echo down the hall, faint and cracked as she sobs, right before the elevator doors close.
It’s obscene how ordinary the world keeps pretending to be while everything inside me is collapsing.
The streets still hum. The sky still moves. Somewhere, people are laughing, living, breathing - like the earth didn’t just take something from me I’ll never get back.
The silence in the car feels too big. I can’t fill it, no matter how hard I try.
The steering wheel creaks under my grip as I drive, knuckles white, jaw tight.
The city passes in blurs of light and shadow, but nothing registers.
Every street looks wrong without her in it.
Every second stretches, warped by the thought that she’s lying in some sterile room, surrounded by strangers, while I’m out here doing nothing.
Doing nothing.
That’s the part that eats me alive.
I pull over on some nameless street, kill the engine, and sit there in the dark.
The silence swallows me whole.
My hands are shaking from the ache that comes when rage has nowhere to go. The kind that turns inward and starts carving you up from the inside.
I press the heels of my palms to my eyes until I see stars. For a second, I almost pretend it’s her face I’m seeing - her smile, the curve of her cheek when she used to fall asleep on my chest, the way she whispered my name like a secret.
But it isn’t her. It’s just memory pretending to be mercy.
I want to go to the clinic. I want to storm the doors, drag her out, tell her she’s not alone. But that’s selfish. She needs help. She needs peace - something I’ll never be able to give her. Not while her demons are still alive.
The important thing is that Nadia’s heart is still beating. Maybe she’s dreaming. Maybe she’s forgetting me. Either way, I hope she finds a world that’s gentler than the one I’ve built for myself.
As for me — I’m cleaning up what’s left.
Because the world can pretend to be ordinary all it wants. But I know better. I know what’s hiding underneath. And if I can’t have peace, I’ll settle for punishment.