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 slidesdown 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.”
