Burden Of Guilt: Haunted By Lies Novels & Stories

Haunted by Mistakes Killian’s POV Guilt has a smell. Like burnt iron and wet stone. It sticks to your skin, falls into your clothes, ties itself around your neck when nobody sees you. You can work yourself clean, toss till you feel your very bones, bathe in your responsibilities and still there is that something there. It doesn't fade. It festers. And mine had festered so long, it became a second heartbeat. People thought I was mourning like everyone else. That I was grieving the near-loss of the girl we all loved. That I was angry at Selene. At the gods. At fate.

“I’ve always liked you—so much that you just ignored me. My studies were ruined because of you. Every night I stayed up thinking about you instead of my books. You became my distraction… my obsession.” A knot tightened in my throat. It’s not my fault, I thought desperately, tears blurring my vision. Everything that happens in their lives somehow becomes my burden. But I don’t control their fates. I never asked to be anyone’s reason for falling apart. The guilt they placed on me felt like chains heavier than the ones biting into my skin.

Each burn… each stab on them poured right back into me like my guilt had become a magnet of pain. It felt like a baggage on my chest that could never go away. Because I knew that I brought this upon them. I made my brothers into beasts that destroyed the very people we swore to protect… And the burden of the guilt only grew stronger with every cry that tore through the temple. Yet I tried to stand strong. I tried to find a way to help them. But it was all hopeless. My presence only made the screams grow worse… And just when I couldn’t handle it anymore, the darker version of me came again.

Could it be that our shared cursed bond compelled him to protect me? The weight of this revelation settles on my shoulders, burdening me with guilt and remorse. How could I have been so reckless, unaware of the consequences my actions would bring? The insurmountable guilt grips my heart, tightening its hold with every beat. I am responsible for his suffering, for the wounds that mar his body and the pain that shadows his eyes.

“Helena died because of me---” “I also blame myself for my mother’s sickness. Did you know that?” I said, cutting him off before he could spiral any further. He froze, his eyes searching mine as if trying to piece together what I’d just said. “But she was sick,” he said finally, his voice hesitant, unsure. I nodded, swallowing against the lump forming in my throat. Zane’s words from earlier kept replaying in my mind. The pain in his voice, the weight of his guilt—it was suffocating. He carried Helena’s death like a shackle around his soul, convinced that if he had done something differently, she’d still be alive. But I knew how heavy the shackles of guilt could be. Hell, I’d been chained to

“That’s the point. If they kept you, it was in the spaces between the things we counted.” I looked at my hands. The tremor was there again, small, stubborn. I decided not to look away. “I woke up three weeks ago with the taste of anesthesia in my throat and no reason for it,” I said. “I blamed the flu I didn’t have. I blamed old ghosts. That’s on me.” She inhaled, eyes softening despite herself. “You blame yourself for things gravity did.” “That’s medicine.” “That’s guilt,” she said. “They count on men like you to carry it.”

Because she had to. Oh the temptation had been there, to pretend he'll set everything right. But this life wasn't whole. Like laying planks over quicksand so no one, not even her had to dig deeper. This feeling the nightmares had left her with, were needles of panic and horror resting atop a leviathan corpse left to rot on the shore of her mind. Guilt of deflected responsibilty. Guilt like those multitudes of reality were hers to live but by some beatitude miracle she had escaped them.

Even the louder contestants had lost whatever energy usually kept their mouths running, and the atmosphere hanging over the hall felt more chilly than before, filled with the realization that partnerships meant nothing here except finding the person you would eventually have to bury. Or become… buried by. That thought was unsettling: I stayed on my bunk for most of the evening, barely moving except to curl my fingers tighter around 0269’s scarf whenever the image of her turning to dust flashed through my mind again. The memory replayed constantly no matter how much I actually tried to stop thinking about it. That’s the thing about guilt, isn’t it? Your conscience just doesn’t know when to le

The fight for survival has brought about far more significant problems. It’s still hard to believe it has come to this. Even though Easton repeatedly tells me, it's not my fault, that lingering sense of guilt follows me wherever I go. Even at night, when I sleep, I often wake up haunted by a realization: the dangerous truth of the words, “They are fighting for me.”

"And because I realize now that the Firm’s greatest lie wasn't that we were machines. It was that we were separate. Your guilt is my guilt. Your survival is my survival." "I don't deserve you," he whispered, his grip tightening until I could barely breathe. "You don't," I agreed, pulling back to look at him, my heart aching with a love that felt like a wound. "But you have me. And if the world wants to see the monster, they have to go through me first." We sat together on the sofa, the lights of New Macau flickering outside. The rumors would continue. Hauer would find a new angle. The past was a ghost that wouldn't stay buried.