Chapter 2 #2
“You sound jealous.”
“I’m protective,” he fires back instantly. “Which is insane, considering what I am. But yes, maybe I don’t enjoy watching pieces of myself get tossed to three men who don’t deserve you. You’re better than them, Skye. They’re cracked souls frozen in the moment of their undoing.”
“And I’m not?” I ask quietly.
Now it’s his turn to freeze.
For once in this back-and-forth, Pain has nothing sharp to fling at me. His mouth remains half open, caught mid-retort, like he can feel a response forming but can’t get it past his own throat.
When he finally speaks, his voice is lower. “No. You’re not. You can’t move on either.”
A beat.
“But you will. Eventually.”
I hear it, but I don’t. The second half skids right past my comprehension and dissolves into nothing. All that lodges in my chest is the first half, the admission: I am just like them. Not adjacent. Not incidentally similar. Not a higher, purer version. The same.
“Stop talking like I’m something rare and untouchable,” I say, and my voice betrays me with how tight it comes out. “We’re alike. Me and them. You know it. I can feel it.”
Pain’s jaw works, a muscle ticking along the side of it. Then, he exhales slowly, lets his eyes slide away from me and into the dim hallway beyond.
“I didn’t come here to fight with you,” he mutters.
“You live to fight with me,” I argue.
His lips twitch, like he wants to smirk but can’t commit to it.
“I didn’t come here only to fight with you,” he corrects. “Believe it or not, I actually took pity on you.”
I stare at him. “Pity. Seriously. How generous of you. Enlighten me, pity for what?”
He faces me fully this time, shoulders squaring.
“For getting yourself into a state so pathetic I had to intervene before you embarrassed both of us.”
“Oh, bless your black little heart,” I mutter. “Tell me, shouldn’t we both be spiraling? Shared downfall, tethered fates, all that classic tragic duet stuff? One of us falls, we both fall?”
He shakes his head and steps closer, radiating something colder than disapproval.
“No. I’m not tethered to your stamina anymore,” he says. “I’m auxiliary now. I can act when you can’t. I can move when you’re lying still.”
My breath catches.
“And here’s your cautionary tale,” he continues. “If you keep dragging yourself around like a half-rotted marionette, the others will see it. And when predators smell hesitation, they push.”
“The others?” My body goes rigid. “What others?”
He meets my gaze evenly. “Other Grims.”
A chill licks up my spine. This thing, this… self, should not know more about our nature than I do. But apparently he does. Because he isn’t just a raven anymore. He’s auxiliary.
“Explain,” I grind out, fingers pressing into my temples as the headache spikes. “Now.”
“Well,” he says mildly, “ravens are opportunistic omnivores. Thought you knew that much.”
I blink at him. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“You’ll see.”
He shrugs, unbothered. Then he raises a hand. A scythe materializes in his grip.
The sight of it makes my teeth clench on instinct.
“Cute trick,” I say, voice flat and way too thin for how violently every hair on my arms just stood on end.
I want it. I want to touch it, claim it, take it. Power.
He smiles.
“Just wanted to remind you what it looks like in capable hands.”
He lifts the blade slightly. The air hums with it. He tilts the blade a fraction and the air sings with it. It’s beautiful and haunting both.
The words slip out before I can catch them. “I miss it.”
“Then you’re in luck,” he says softly. “Because I’m going to transfer some of our power to you. But just a bit.”
Something inside me tightens. “Transfer,” I echo slowly. “Like… battery to battery transfer?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Something like that.”
He steps closer, close enough that the hum of the blade vibrates along my skin like static heat building toward lightning. It feels eerily similar to the dagger I pulled out of that other Reaper’s scythe… except this isn’t foreign. Isn’t theft. This feels like being plugged back into myself.
His hand finds my wrist. The contact is cold. It feels like touching a phantom limb you didn’t know you lost until it was suddenly back.
My breath catches.
“Don’t fight it,” he murmurs.
Which, of course, makes every stubborn part of me tense on instinct—right until the surge hits.
The energy slips under my skin like melted ice, like winterstorm breath force-fed straight into my bloodstream.
It fills the hollow places in me, the scraped-out caverns where my strength should live.
I lock my knees to keep from folding. It feels like milliseconds before it’s over.
Pain releases me. The scythe dissolves into nothing, like it was never there at all, and I find myself missing it all over again.
“You’re welcome,” Pain says dryly.
I blink hard, trying to steady my breathing.
“Thanks,” I mutter, flexing my fingers.
I straighten by degrees, rolling my shoulders once, then again, testing myself. I feel… better. Power-hungry, sure, but much, much better. The ache in my limbs is dulled, like someone’s wrapped them in thick cloth. My head feels clearer. I am stronger.
Then reality clicks.
I freeze. Narrow my eyes.
“Wait a damn minute.” I plant my hands on my hips. “You could do that all this time?”
There’s a beat of still silence before the slowest, most infuriating smirk creeps across his face like he’s been waiting for this.
“Of course I could.”
Oh, this little parasite.
“For three days?” I snap.
“For three days,” he confirms, smug and utterly unapologetic.
“You—” I stare at him, speechless. “You really do deserve to get your wings cut off.”
He tilts his head, ravenlike. “You were unconscious. I figured you’d either wake up or you wouldn’t. Why waste energy on a coin toss?”
“A coin toss?” I choke.
“Figure of speech,” he says. “More like a slow horse race where you were the only horse and the finish line was ‘not collapsing in the hallway like a sack of wet laundry.’”
I squint at him. “You’re this close to getting slapped.”
He only smirks wider. “Go ahead. Might shake loose some more power.”
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?
I am not afraid of Pain… right?