Chapter 18
“You know, I’m speechless right now,” Pain says, dropping into a squat.
He’s been on his feet the entire time I’ve been catching him up on everything that happened since we last saw each other, but I guess I finally managed to stump him so hard his legs gave out.
He rubs a hand over his face, looking at the floor for a second before he glances back up at me. “I really don’t know what to say.”
“How about,” I drawl, arching my brows, “you say you’ll merge with me, here and now, so I can become an all-powerful being again and all my problems go away?”
“Except the wraiths, you mean?”
I pause.
“Yeah,” I say, a little flatter than I intended. “Except the wraiths.”
To be honest, the wraiths have slipped completely into the background of my life. Who cares about them when I’m dealing with a real, living murderer made of flesh and bone? I’ve got cellmates now. Two girls’ lives are riding on me.
“But I’m not going to lie,” I add quickly, because I can hear how that sounded, “getting my powers back would help me handle those too.”
Pain just stares at me, and something about it feels strange. I’ve wanted to talk to him for so long that I don’t even have the energy to cuss him out. Usually we bicker. Usually we snap at each other like it’s our shared love language. Usually we hate each other.
Now I’m just grateful he’s here. Call it the effect of a claustrophobic prison. It makes you open up to the unusual stuff.
“I can’t,” he says after a moment.
For a second, I stay in my nice little bubble, like his words bounce off without sinking in. Then my brain catches up, and the smile drops clean off my face.
“What?”
“I can’t merge with you,” he repeats.
Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me. Is this yet another moment where I find out I’m screwed? I don’t want that. Nope. I refuse. I’m already shaking my head when a sharp, annoyed laugh punches out of my chest.
I hold his gaze. “You too?” I ask. “Seriously, Pain. You are supposed to help me. Help. Do you know what help means?”
Just like that, whatever bubble of niceties we managed to create between us pops.
“Are you really going to treat me like that now?” he asks. “Skye, I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Too fucking late!”
“You are too fucking late,” he counters. “Your brain developed too fucking late.”
And I actually have to inhale and hold the air in my lungs at that. I do not know what is more annoying: the fact that his attitude matches his external teenage looks, or the fact that he is me, and that childish response is a figment of my own being.
Either way, I feel embarrassed.
“I came when I heard the call,” he says. “It’s not my fault that all you needed was five seconds without me to put yourself in some life-and-death situation that could have been avoided.”
He snorts and looks away. I am still holding the air in my lungs.
When he notices I am not breathing, he turns back toward me. “Want to suffocate all over again?” he asks. “Be my fucking guest.”
And to think we started this entire interaction so well. Clearly, we cannot keep that up for long.
No. I should not give in to this. I should act like an adult. Be mature and all.
I exhale.
“I expressed myself wrong,” I say slowly. “All I meant to say is that I really hoped you’d appear earlier. I thought if you did, you’d save the day.”
“I can’t!” he exclaims. “I literally can’t! It’s impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t just flip a switch like that.” He throws his hands up, frustration cracking through his voice. “We got divided into the living and dead parts of our soul. If we want to fuse back together, we have to bridge the gap.”
That’s confusing enough that I just stare at him, waiting for the part that makes sense.
“It means you need to accept that you’re dead and stop chasing life the way you are,” he says, each sentence sharpening as it lands.
“All you ever do is have sex, avoid your Grim Reaper duties, and reminisce about what it used to be like to be human. You’re not human, Skye.
You might look like one, but you’re not. ”
His eyes burn into mine.
“You’re a walking fucking corpse.”
I try my best not to get hurt. I really do. The only way I can make it through is to shut up for a moment and let the ugly feeling in my chest pass on its own.
I don’t know why hearing it stings, but it does. It stings so much.
Then again, it’s me saying it. A part of me standing outside my skin, watching, judging, and somehow knowing me better than I want to admit. So I don’t brush his words off this time. I force myself to listen.
Was I really doing all that? Chasing life?
All this time, it felt like I was simply making the best of my situation. Like I was trying to claw my way out of the loop of misery I built for myself. I actually felt proud of it. I found love. I found happiness. I found strength.
But what if I was chasing the impossible? What if I had been slipping, without noticing, deeper and deeper into detachment?
No. I told Nathaniel he has no future with me. I didn’t chase a life with my men.
But I did chase the touch. The emotion. The thrill.
“I just wanted to experience the things that were taken away from me,” I mutter out loud. I don’t mean to say it. It just slips free, and my voice sounds sad even to my own ears.
Something shifts in Pain. The anger eases, peeling back from his face.
“And in doing so, you rejected me,” he says.
I swallow. My throat feels too small for everything piling up inside it.
“I didn’t reject you,” I whisper, and immediately hate how weak it sounds.
Pain’s eyes hold mine anyway.
“I am the things you hate,” he says. “Your death. Your wasted youth. Your… Pain.”
My fingers curl into fists in my lap.
There’s a weight in my throat, and it keeps growing, bigger and bigger, until it feels like I can barely breathe around it.
“I feel lots of pain,” I say.
“When you choose to,” he replies. “You do.”
I blink at him, slow and disbelieving, like he just spoke in a language I don’t have words for.
“That is such a…” I swallow the rest because I don’t mean to argue with him, even when I want to. “That’s not how pain works.”
Pain tilts his head, unimpressed. “No?”
“No,” I bite out. “It’s not a mood. It’s not a fucking outfit I put on in the morning. It happens. It shows up. It sits in my chest and rots.”
“And then you decide what to do with it.” His gaze doesn’t waver. “You decide whether you let it touch you, or whether you turn it into something else.”
“I don’t turn it into something else,” I say, my voice tight. “I survive it.”
“You fuck it away,” he says, blunt as a hammer. “Your three guys are real good at helping you with that.”
Heat crawls up my neck. Embarrassment, or anger. It’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins with him. With me.
“You’re making it sound like I’m some kind of…” I gesture vaguely at my own chest, at the cage of ribs that keeps everything contained. “Addict.”
“You are,” he agrees. “You’re addicted to escaping.”
I don’t answer. I don’t want to. It doesn’t matter. He’s not finished.
“You have to face that you died.”
In other words, I have to let go.
“What if I don’t want to?” I ask.
“Then we will be split forever,” he replies.
This conversation wasn’t supposed to go like this.
It was supposed to help. It isn’t helping.
If anything, it’s making everything worse.
To somebody else, someone who isn’t me and isn’t Pain, the idea of us staying apart would sound almost harmless.
A technicality. A manageable consequence.
If I laid it out for Nathaniel, or Talon, or Cassian, they’d probably look at each other, reach the same brutal conclusion, and tell me to stay split.
But it’s not that easy.
A part of me is missing. Not metaphorically. Not in a poetic, dramatic way. Literally. And I have to do the hardest thing I’ve ever done if I want it back.
“What about you then?” I ask, the question slipping out before I can stop it.
He lifts a brow.
“What do you need to do to merge back with me?”
Pain’s mouth twitches, like he’s about to make a joke.
He doesn’t.
For a second, he just looks at me. Really looks. I can practically see him measuring his answer, turning it over in his head the way you’d weigh a brick before you decide whether to throw it through a window.
“You want to know what I need?” he says finally. “That’s a new one.”
“Don’t be a dick about it.”
“Alright.” He exhales through his nose.
Then he does something that makes my skin prickle.
He kneels.
“I have to stop being your punishment,” he says.
My brows knit. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“It does.” His eyes flick up. “You made me into a jailer.”
His jaw works, like this is the part he hates the most.
“I’ve been angry,” he admits, “At you. At them. At the whole workaround you built. I used that anger because it kept me intact.” His eyes sharpen.
“If I’m cruel, I stay separate. If I’m cruel, you stay defensive.
If you stay defensive, we never merge. But now I have to stop being the voice that only shows up to call you a corpse and slap your hand away from anything warm. ”
My breath catches.
He doesn’t look away when I don’t answer.
“I have to accept,” he says, “that you finding people you want to be with might be a good thing.”
My heart stutters, because that is the thing. The thing I didn’t want to admit I needed from him. Not permission, exactly. Understanding. The thing I never got from him.
“You finally found something that feels like yours,” he says. “And even if it ends badly, it was worth it. Right?”
My eyes burn, stupidly. I blink hard because I refuse to cry in here.
But I do.
“Right,” I whisper. “It really has been worth it.”
His expression softens in a way that makes my throat ache. He reaches out and puts his hand on mine.
For a second I wait for something dramatic to happen. For the click. For the pull. For that clean, cinematic moment where everything finally locks into place.
Nothing does.
I let out a shaky breath, almost a laugh, almost a sob.
“So that’s it,” I murmur. “We say the right thing and the universe doesn’t immediately fix us.”
His mouth twitches.
“You can do it,” he says, like he’s stating a fact he hates.
“I can,” I agree, and the words taste strange. “But not like this. Not on command.”
“I told you so.”
He did.
I huff a laugh through my tears and tilt my head at him. “Of course you did.”
He does not even look smug. He just looks relieved, which is somehow worse.
“I understand,” I say. “I get what you’ve been doing, and I get what you have to stop doing. I’ll do my part.”
We sit with that for a moment.
“Soon,” I say, mostly to myself.
“Soon,” he repeats.
I wipe at my face with the back of my hand and try to lighten the air before it crushes me. “I should probably do it fast,” I add, a little too casual. “If I want to live.”
He goes perfectly still.
His stare pins me in place.
I grimace.
“Right,” I say, clearing my throat. “I’m supposed to not want to live. See? I need some work.”
Something shifts in his expression. I think he smiles, a genuine smile I’ve never seen from him. Then my body goes heavy again, and exhaustion rolls over me like a tide.
I squeeze his hand once, then let go and lie back. The room blurs at the edges as sleep drags me under. I close my eyes, lashes still wet, and let myself fall.
I don’t dread the darkness for once.