God, I hated him as a raven, but now, he’s like every unfiltered intrusive thought I’ve ever had, stuffed into a body with free rein to talk back.
And he’s still me.
“Do we share the pool, though?” I ask.
He cocks a brow.
“You know—same source of power?”
He pauses. Then nods once.
“So if I get stronger, you get weaker?”
Another nod.
“That’s good to keep in mind,” I mutter.
Pain watches me like he can hear the thought forming before I can.
“Don’t get clever,” he says. “If somehow you manage to drain me, you’ll regret it.”
I flash a thin smile. “Wouldn’t dare.”
“Yeah. Sure you wouldn’t.” He steps back into the doorway, his silhouette framed by that sickly yellow light again. “Now, try to look like you haven’t been through all the shit, okay? You’ve got an audience waiting downstairs.”
I frown. “Why not just tell them to wait?”
His lip curls. “Just in case.”
“They wouldn’t hurt me.”
He laughs once. “Funny.”
The retort burns my tongue, but I swallow it down, because I know the truth buried under his cynicism: caution means survival, and right now I’m held together by little more than stubbornness and whatever’s left of my borrowed humanity. And just because they waited beside my body for three days doesn’t erase what they are.
That’s where Pain is coming from.
“Keep your shoulders up when you walk in,” he says quietly. “And don’t let them see the limp.”
It lands like an instruction and a warning and a bruise to the ego all in one.
Then—just as abruptly as he came—he dissolves back into the hall’s shadows, silent and spectral, a fracture of myself slipping out of view.
I’m left gripping the edge of the sink again, knuckles white, staring at a reflection that looks clear-eyed but not quite real.
I don’t know if what he gave me was a pep talk… or a threat… or a reminder that I’m walking a line so thin I can’t tell where I end and the weapon begins.
Probably all three.
Either way, it’s up to me to heed the warning.
And I think we’ve already settled this.
I am just like the men waiting downstairs.
We’re four, broken little peas in a pod.
So why should I be scared of them?
