LUCIAN
She’s asleep beside me. One hand curled beneath her cheek. The other resting on my chest like she’s claiming the heart she doesn’t know is still split in two.
Despite the four-pane window, I can hear the hiss of the wind, the occasional hum of tires against snow. The world feels hushed. Gentle. Safe.
She believes the vow I made with my body and breath. And for a moment—just one—I almost believed it, too.
But deep down—where the blood runs colder, where the guilt coils like a living thing—I know better. The darkness inside me isn’t something she can fix.
It isn’t something anyone can. It’s old. Familiar. It’s the part of me that feels alive when I slip through shadows, when I end a threat before it can speak my name.
I love her more than I’ve ever loved anything. More than my own life. More than my brothers. More than the silence I need. But even she can’t fill the hollow that’s been carved inside over the years—ripped open by a world where monsters walk free and the only way to survive is to become worse than them.
It’s not her fault. It’s mine. Because the truth is, killing—the precision, the finality—feeds something inside me that love never could.
And no matter how many promises I make, no matter how much I want to be the man she sees when she looks at me, I don’t know how to stop needing that silence.
I brush a strand of hair from her face, careful not to wake her.
She looks so peaceful. So sure.
She has no idea she’s curled up next to a man still at war with himself. A man who would burn cities for her…and burn himself down, if he must, in the process.
I close my eyes, listening to the rhythm of her breathing, willing myself to stay in this moment.
Even if it’s a lie. Even if it’s borrowed time.
22
LIFE GOES ON
LUCIAN
For three months, I keep my promise to her. Then I break it as I always knew I would.
I don’t even hesitate when the envelope comes, because the truth is, I can’t help it. I am who I am.
A man made for shadows. A man who kills not for money, not for duty, but for the silence it gives him inside.
What will happen if she finds out?
I don’t know.I don’t think about it. Don’t dare.
I’m selfish enough to hold onto her anyway.
She’s with me now.We live together. She moved into my world with nothing but a battered suitcase and her stubborn heart, and somehow, the cold, sterile apartment I used to call home transformed around her.
The first things to change were small. A pair of her boots by the door—muddy, worn, carelessly kicked off after a long day at the shelter. She doesn’t tuck them neatly out of sight as I would.
She lives here, and she leaves her mark as she has every right to.
Plants started appearing next—small, stubborn things in cracked ceramic pots she found at some street market downtown. The plants aren’t delicate or ornamental, they’re hardy, scrappy, fighting for sunlight the way she fought for a life outside the world she was born into.
There’s a knitted throw draped over the back of the leather couch—old, fraying slightly at the edges, defiantly imperfect. She refuses to swap it out for a newer, better one.
“This one’s lived,” she says with a grin, tugging it over her lap.
The kitchen smells different now, too—not sterile like before, but warm, lived-in. A battered ceramic jar stuffed with wooden spoons sits by the stove, and the scent of herbs, lavender, and slow-cooked meals clings to the air like a second skin.
