Page 23 of Infamous
I tell myself they’ll never measure up to him. But it doesn’t matter. Because they all leave eventually.
Friends too. They fade, one by one. Messages stop. Invitations dry up. Smiles turn brittle. No one wants the woman who slept beside a monster.
I don’t blame them. But I hate them anyway.
College isn’t better. Professors avoid my gaze like my eyes carry contagion. Classmates whisper when I walk in.
“How could she not have known?”
Like love should have had a specific smell or feeling when it’s with a monster.
If my parents hadn’t pulled strings, I’d have been expelled. Universities didn’t want the scandal of a serial killer’s fiancée crossing their graduation stage.
As though my diploma carried his fingerprints. As though I don’t already carry him in my bones.
I didn’t choose this. But no one believes that. To the world, I’m the woman too stupid to see the knife pressed to her throat.
So I survive. Scrape through exams. Keep my head down. Not because I care, but because I refuse to disappear quietly.
Still, when the world goes still, when silence presses too close - the doubt starts gnawing again.
What if they’re right? What if something broken in me realised what he was andwantedhim anyway?
That thought eats through everything.
And then there are the flashes. The ambushes. The vultures who smell weakness and wait for me to step outside.
It happens again outside the hospital one day.
Sixteen hours without sleep. My scrubs smell like antiseptic and sweat. My fingers still tremble from the last patient’s pulse. I just want my bed. My home. Silence.
But the second the doors hiss open, chaos hits me like a brick.
The air erupts. Voices crashing, cameras exploding in bursts of white as microphones jab at my mouth.
“Miss Reed?—”
“Miss Reed?—”
They shout over each other, like hungry hyenas.
The flashes blind me. The heat of the lights burns my eyes. Someone grabs my sleeve. I flinch back, heart kicking like it wants out of my chest.
It’s always the same. Every time Lucian’s name hits a headline, they drag me back to the trial. Back to the gavel slamming down.Guilty. Life.Never to be released.
The words still ring in my bones.
“Do you still wear his ring?”
“Do you write to him?”
“They call you the Ghost Bride. How does it feel to be tied to a killer?”
That last one lands like a slap.
Ghost Bride.
The world tilts. My throat tightens.
