Chapter 29 Lucian
Lucian
Four hours in, the silence stops being silence.
It becomes a living thing in the SUV as it presses against my ribs like it wants to crack them open.
Celeste hasn’t said a word since we left her rig this morning.
She’s curled against the passenger door with her knees pulled up to her chest, staring out the window like she’s afraid that if she blinks, the world will shift again.
I keep glancing at her, but she doesn’t look back.
And I get it. God, I get it. What happened to her… There aren’t words for that kind of violation. There shouldn’t have to be.
But watching her fold in on herself like this is making me feel like a failure for not being able to reach her.
I grip the wheel tighter as the highway stretches out ahead of us, and I realize if I don’t say something soon, I’m going to lose my damn mind.
I clear my throat and cringe when it sounds too loud between us.
My pulse is hammering, but I try to keep my face neutral and my eyes on the road. I don’t want her to know how terrifying it is to let her in like this and show her what I’ve kept locked down for months. Only my therapist has heard this story.
“Orion and I were working a serial killer case through the Pacific Northwest. We had been chasing this guy for so fucking long that the entire task force was running on fumes. The thing about this particular serial killer is that he was always two steps ahead of us. Every time we thought we had him cornered, he’d already slipped out the back door.
Every lead we chased turned to smoke. Then we got word he was about to leave town again.
We had gotten so close that we were afraid that if he left, he would just…
vanish. Slip right through our fingers after everything we’d put into finding him.
The intel we got that night… it was too good to pass up.
We didn’t wait for backup; we didn’t even think we had enough time to run it up the chain.
We just went. We needed to catch him before he disappeared again. ”
The words hang there, quiet but heavy, and I let them. I don’t look over at her. I’m telling her my story because of the silence swallowing her whole. If I have to crack myself open to pull her back from that edge, then that’s what I’m going to do.
I take a deep breath and remind myself that this is in the past. “Orion and I rushed out to the parking lot. We didn’t even talk about it—we just moved.
He grabbed the bike so he could get there fast and cut the guy off if he tried to run.
I took the SUV so we’d have a way to bring him in.
Or at least I tried to. I got in, closed the door, started the engine, and that’s the last thing I remember. ”
“My therapist says…” I swallow, the words catching for a second before I push them out.
“He says the brain protects you from what you’re not ready to carry yet.
That forgetting isn’t a weakness; sometimes it’s survival.
He likes to remind me that what happened to me wasn’t my fault, and sometimes you can do everything right and still get blindsided. ”
My jaw works once, a small, controlled movement.
“Healing isn’t about being fearless; it’s about not letting the fear decide who you are.”
I just keep my eyes on the road, pretending my heart isn’t beating hard enough to shake the steering column.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, and the words come out small, almost swallowed.
“About how I was when you came to see me. I was in shock. Everything after waking up was… scrambled. They told me pieces later–what the med team did, what Orion said–but in the moment, it was like my head was full of cotton and glass. I couldn’t make the pieces fit together.
I was trying to come to terms with the fact that I’d made a stupid decision, and that decision cost me my leg.
I was so fucking scared. Scared to let you see me as anything less than…
whole. Embarrassed, too. It’s humiliating to be reduced to a wound, and to have people look at the missing part before they look at the rest of you.
I didn’t want you to have to carry that.
So I put up a face and had the nurses make you leave.
I was petrified at the thought I might fall apart in front of you.
“I pushed you away because I couldn’t bear the thought of you staying with me out of pity.
If you stayed because you felt sorry or obligated, you’d be giving up something you’d fought for, and I couldn’t carry that on my conscience.
When Orion told me you were Ara at the hotel, I meant it when I said it would not have changed anything.
Your loyalty is to the band first, and I couldn’t ask you to choose me over that.
I knew if I pushed you away, you’d keep going and not have to look back at what I’d become. ”
“No,” she says, and the single word is softer than I expected.
“Nothing changes the fact that I wouldn’t have left the tour for you.
Not because I didn’t care or I didn’t have feelings for you, but because at that point we’d just decided to be in a relationship.
We were both still building something. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I couldn’t put my entire career on hold for you.
There wouldn’t have been anything I could have done for you then that would have helped more than the professionals already were.
I couldn’t let down the band or the people who count on us to keep going.
If this had happened and we’d been in a more serious place—if we’d been farther along in our relationship or engaged—maybe I would’ve made a different choice.
But as it was, I wouldn’t have left the tour. ”
My facade thins, but I try to keep it in place.
Her words land like a clean strike; she wasn’t malicious, but just stating a fact, and it stings my ego more than I expected.
I nod to what she’s saying because, as much as it hurts, I do understand it.
I let the silence sit long enough to breathe through the sting, then I pick up where I left off.
I say the next things out loud, not because I need her to answer, but because I want her to hear them.
Hearing someone else say it makes it less like an order and more like an option.
“Physical therapy is a grind. It’s a calendar of small humiliations that add up to something that eventually looks like progress.
You go to appointments, you do the exercises, you learn how to trust a body that doesn’t always answer when you call it.
It’s boring, and it’s brutal, but it’s what I have been working toward for months.
My therapist says healing is incremental, and patience is like a prescription.
I would always roll my eyes at that, but after a while, I realized it’s true.
I wish I’d started sooner. My parents died when I was fourteen, from drug overdoses.
It was around that time I decided not to have kids of my own.
“The decision didn’t come in a single moment of clarity.
It wasn’t a neat moral stance so much as a survival plan.
If I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t turn into the people who made me, then I wasn’t going to risk making someone who had to survive me.
I’d already spent enough time wondering if addiction lived in my blood or if the anger did.
If the things that ruined them were waiting in me, too.
I kept thinking about what it felt like to be fourteen and realize the people who were supposed to keep you safe… couldn’t.
“When I turned eighteen, I scheduled my vasectomy. If I ever became a parent, it would be the way my adoptive parents did it. I bounced around foster care for a bit until they took me in when I was sixteen. They took in teenagers. The kids nobody else wanted because they were too old, too angry, too ‘damaged’ for most families. And they didn’t try to fix us.
They just… stayed. Turns out that’s the most radical thing you can do for a kid who’s been bounced around long enough.
They tried to get me into therapy then; they kept bringing it up, but I refused.
I was too proud, too angry, and too convinced I could fix myself if I just worked harder. ”
I let the sentence sit and fully sink in, then keep going.
I feel like I’m trauma dumping, but I’m trying to create space, so Celeste might feel safe to share what happened.
“When I was seventeen, they asked if they could adopt me. I said yes, they were the only ones who pushed me toward making a future for myself. I used the foster scholarship to get through school. I got a bachelor’s in criminal justice, then I went to the FBI Academy at Quantico.
That was the plan: school, fieldwork, keep moving forward.
It was practical and what I thought I needed.
“After I got out of the hospital, I was required to go to therapy. I hated every second of it in the beginning. I thought it was for people who couldn’t handle themselves. I thought I could go back to compartmentalizing the things that hurt and keep functioning. Turns out compartments leak.”
I force a small, humorless smile and let a little of the old defensiveness show before I push it down.
“I wish I’d started sooner. Physical therapy taught me how to trust a body that had been betrayed.
Psychotherapy is teaching me how to trust a mind that’s been doing the same.
It’s slow and fucking boring, and sometimes it’s humiliating.
If I could go back and talk to sixteen-year-old Lucian, I would tell him therapy doesn’t make you weak.
It gives you tools to stop the memory from running the show.
It doesn’t erase what happened, but it makes the days after it livable.
If you decide you want to do it, start sooner than I did, and no matter what, remember that you are not alone. ”