Chapter 70 Nadia
NADIA
Time. It’s both cruel and kind.
It stretches and snaps, mends and ruins - a quiet architect of everything we become. At first, it breaks you clean, sharp as glass. It takes what you love and grinds it down until you forget what whole ever felt like. You curse it for moving forward when you can’t.
But then, without permission, it starts to heal you.
Slowly. Ruthlessly.
Days blur into weeks, and somewhere in the blur, the pain dulls. The memories stop clawing at you. You begin to see things for what they were, not what you needed them to be. The wounds don’t close neatly - they leave ridges, reminders - but you somehow stop bleeding.
Time doesn’t erase. It refines. It forces reflection.
It strips you bare, then rebuilds you in pieces, steadier than before.
And when you finally stand again, you see the world differently - clearer, quieter, as if all that breaking was just the world making room for the person you were meant to become.
Time. It’s all I have in here, and it’s the one thing that’s finally given me the tools to see clearly. To grow sharper. Quieter. Wiser. And with that clarity comes the truth I’ve been circling for years.
Part of me always knew. Something deep and instinctive kept the shape of it alive while the rest of me looked away - who he was, what he could be. My conscience wrapped itself around the truth like a heavy coat, stubborn and useless against the inevitable.
Only now, when everything is raw and exposed, that buried knowing unfurls. It’s not the man sitting across from me I’m seeing. It’s the man beneath the skin. The one made of the same cuts and rage and bone that built me.
Faces flicker at the edges of my vision - Lucian, then Jude, then Lucian again - until the lines dissolve.
Their features slide into one another like images on a broken projector.
The differences peel away, and what’s left is a single shape beating under two names: the same danger, the same gravity, the same terrible pull.
It lands like a stone in my chest and settles cold and steady.
Jude.
The man who found me bleeding and lost. The one who stayed when no one else would. The one who loved me like a sin he was proud to bear.
Lucian Cross. Jude Mercer. The same person.
My pulse staggers. My stomach turns cold.
I don’t know whether to reach for him or crawl away.
How could I have been so blind? The way he held me, the way he touched me like I was something fragile and fierce at once - it was him all along.
The same voice. The same scent. The same quiet protection I mistook for coincidence.
He doesn’t speak. He just watches me, jaw tight, chest rising and falling like each breath is painful, heavy.
“You - ” My voice cracks. “It’s always been you.”
His throat works, but the words don’t come.
And then, like a reel unspooling, memory crashes in.
The hospital. The rain. The blood. The cemetery. The coffee shop. The courthouse.
Billie.
My stomach twists. The name hits harder than the pain. Billie Underwood - his sister. The girl whose death built the monster kneeling before me. The girl I failed to save. The girl I helped destroy.
“Oh, God,” I whisper, tears burning down my face before I even feel them. “Billie was your sister.”
His eyes shutter. Pain carves through him, quiet and violent, and I realize - he’s been carrying this truth alone. All this time. Every lie he told was a form of mercy. Every silence, a shield.
And me? I was the reason that broke him. The reason Ghost was born.
I press a trembling hand to my mouth, and a sound claws out of me - something between a sob and a scream. “I didn’t know,” I say. “I didn’t -”
He catches my wrist before I can hit myself. His fingers are warm and shaking, his voice hoarse when he finally answers.
“I know.”
It’s the kindest thing he could have said. And the cruelest.
Because now I see him clearly - the killer and the savior, the boy and the man, the love and the ruin - and I can’t unsee it.
The drugs still swim in my blood, making the world tilt and shimmer, but the truth cuts through the fog clean as glass. The two of them - Jude and Lucian - merge in the light, faces overlapping like a memory I should’ve recognized long ago.
It was always in the way he loved me.
The way he held me like a man who’d already lost too much.
The protection he wove around me - not out of guilt, but obsession.
A promise he made to the past.
And I hate myself for what that means.
For the blood between us.
For Billie.
The room spins, and I fold forward into him. He catches me like he always has, arms strong and unyielding, his breath ragged against my hair. I can feel his heart hammering against my chest, desperate, uneven, alive.
We stay like that for a long time. Just two broken things stitched together by consequence.
He whispers something into my hair - something that sounds like a prayer, or maybe an apology. I don’t know which. I don’t even care. Because in this moment, there’s no line between love and ruin, between forgiveness and punishment.
There’s only after.
After pain.
After blood.
After revelation.
The world doesn’t end with a scream. It exhales.
And I realize that redemption isn’t found in the saving.
It’s in the aftermath - the breath you take when the monster turns out to be the man who never stopped loving you.