Chapter Thirty-Eight
Deogal
She looks at me differently now.
She thinks I do not notice. Humans always think pain makes them discreet. It doesn’t. Pain makes them obvious. It strips the manners from their faces, the careful little masks they spend years learning how to hold.
Rheda Ainsley watches me like grief has found teeth inside her.
Good.
That is where I need her. Not sympathetic. Sympathy is too clean. It’s too easily corrected by distance and sleep and a rational conversation with someone who thinks they know better.
I need her guilty.
I need her protective.
I need her angry at anyone who touches me.
I need her body to mistake my suffering for hers before her mind has time to interfere.
The bracelet was not sentiment.
It was a hook.
A pretty little thing around her wrist, delicate enough to look harmless, intimate enough to feel chosen. She touches it when she is afraid now. She does not know she does it. Thumb to metal. Pulse beneath silver. A doctor soothing herself with evidence she does not understand.
I gave her something to wear because humans believe in objects.
They believe in proof.
They believe if something leaves a mark, it must be real.
She is learning.
Tonight I will give her pain with a shape she can recognise. Something small enough to fit around her wrist. Something intimate enough to follow her when she wakes.
She will call it horror at first. Then she will call it connection.
The difference is patience.