Chapter 435: Finally sleep with it
FIA
Get up.
My mother’s voice cut through the fog in my head, steady and sharp, as if she stood over
instead of sowhere far beyond reach.
Get up, Fia.
I tried. I really did. But my body refused to listen.
Pain sat everywhere at once, not in one place I could brace against, but spread through
like it owned every inch. My skin felt wrong, stretched too tight over bones that ached deep and heavy. When I tried to move my fingers, the effort dragged through sothing jagged, as my nerves had turned into shards of glass. Even breathing felt like a mistake.
I forced my eyes open.
The world ca back slowly, as if it didn’t want
to see it yet. Shapes blurred together before they settled into sothing I could recognize. Ceiling first. Then the walls. Then the floor pressed cold against , grounding
in a way that hurt more than it helped.
And him.
Valentine stood over , the syringe already in his hand again.
"Do not move."
His voice stayed calm, detached, like he was speaking to sothing that couldn’t hear him anyway.
"Do not hurt yourself."
I tried to push myself up.
My arm collapsed under
before I got anywhere, muscles seizing, strength gone before I could even test it. I hit the floor harder than I expected, and the impact tore through my chest, sharp enough to steal whatever breath I had left.
For a second, I couldn’t hear anything but the ringing in my ears.
Then he moved.
Valentine crouched beside , setting the syringe down with care that didn’t match anything else about him. He tilted his head, studying my face like he was trying to solve sothing small and irritating.
"One thing I have noticed with the healers I brought back from extinction," he said, almost casually, "and even in the texts I have read about them, is that healers are not self-sufficient."
His fingers reached for my arm.
I tried to pull away. My body barely twitched.
It was the effort that hurt most, the gap between what I wanted to do and what I could actually manage.
"All creatures must have a fatal flaw." His fingers traced along my forearm, slow, following the line of a vein like he had all the ti in the world. "And I guess the most important one for your kind is you cannot fix yourself."
Sothing inside my chest stirred.
At first, it was faint. A low hum, steady and quiet, like it had always been there and I was only just noticing. It didn’t match my heartbeat. It didn’t follow anything natural, but I understood this and what was happening.
So I held onto it.
I let it fill the space where the pain lived, not pushing the pain out, but dulling it just enough for the ti being that I could think past it.
Valentine picked the syringe back up.
"I really do not know why you are terrified of ."
He shifted closer, blocking out the thin light above, leaving
with him and the cold and the hum inside .
"I know better than to want to keep you for life. I just want to do tests. Make my old shit better."
The needle caught the light for a second.
"Though, I will not lie. There is a lot of temptation to keep you. But Alpha Cian can be a god of wrath when he is put together."
My stomach twisted at the na, but I didn’t have space to hold onto that feeling.
He hovered the needle over my arm, eyes fixed, searching.
"How you attacked , though, is a wonder. I have an inbuilt chanism in all of you to prevent that, and you being born years away from your mother’s escape should not change that. But I will figure things out. Eventually."
The needle ca down.
I moved.
I didn’t think about it. I didn’t plan it. I just moved.
Pain tore through
the second I did, bright and overwhelming, like my body was punishing
for trying. My vision darkened at the edges, threatening to pull
under, but I forced myself to stay there, to stay awake long enough to make it count.
I twisted, barely, just enough that the needle missed.
"Fuck."
It slipped out of him before he could stop it.
His hand closed around my shoulder, hard enough that I felt it even through everything else.
"We cannot have this. It can affect the experint."
He dragged
up without care, like I weighed nothing, like the way my body reacted didn’t matter. My ribs scread when he lifted , sothing inside shifting wrong, but he didn’t slow down. He didn’t even look at , not really.
The table t my back again, and I couldn’t stop the sound that left , sharp and broken.
The humming grew.
It spread through , no longer just in my chest. It moved into my bones, settled into my skin, into the spaces between pain and breath and thought. It felt wrong and right at the sa ti, like sothing waking up that had been waiting too long.
I didn’t fight it.
I couldn’t.
I let it move through , let it settle into my hands, into the parts of
that still listened when I told them to do sothing.
And then I saw it.
My right hand glowed.
The light ca soft at first, blue and familiar.
Only this ti, it turned inward.
I watched it happen through a haze as my vision was still unsteady and my body hadn’t yet caught up to what it was doing. The skin on my palm had been torn open, raw and ruined, but the light moved over it with purpose, steady and sure. Flesh pulled together. Burns faded. The split skin sealed itself over muscle and tendon as it had never been broken or torn in the first place.
By the ti I could really focus on it, my hand looked untouched.
Valentine stopped moving.
I didn’t need to look at his face to know he was staring, but I did anyway. His eyes had dropped to my hands, then shifted to the floor where the restraints lay in pieces, scattered like they had been ripped apart by sothing far stronger than .
"Your gift of small miracles is superb, too."
He moved around the table slowly, stepping over the broken tal, studying it like it was more important than I was. Like I was just the source, not the point.
"To tear through this kind of tal..."
His hand lifted, fingers moving in a pattern I knew too well. Magic.
Power gathered at his fingertips, as if ready to undo what I had done, to put everything back into place like I hadn’t fought at all.
I didn’t wait.
I flicked my hand.
The force left
before I could think about it properly, instinct more than decision. It cut through the space between us, aid straight for his head. I didn’t hold back. If it landed, it would kill him. There was no doubt in that.
His other hand ca up fast.
A shield snapped into place between us, thin and shimring, like glass that hadn’t decided if it wanted to be solid. My attack slamd into it hard enough to send a crack of pressure through the room. He staggered back a step, his balance slipping for just a second.
But the shield held.
He was still standing.
"Wow."
He straightened slowly, brushing dust from his shoulder as if none of it had mattered, like he hadn’t almost died.
"I see you still have so fight in you."
His fingers snapped.
The air shifted.
Lightning sparked into existence in his palm, thin threads at first, orange and alive, crawling between his fingers like they had a mind of their own. He rubbed his fingers together, and the color deepened and sharpened, until it burned white-hot, too bright to look at directly.
Then he threw it.
I didn’t think.
My hand ca up on its own, the sa way it had when I healed, the sa pull in my chest answering before my mind caught up. The feeling surged, louder now, pressing into every part of , and sothing ford in front of , shaped like his shield but different at its core.
I didn’t know if it would work. Psychic force didn’t follow magic cleanly. It never had.
The lightning hit anyway.
The impact rang through my arm, through my chest, through everything, but the makeshift shield made from the gift didn’t break.
It held.
Then it turned.
The energy twisted back on itself and shot away from , redirected with a force I hadn’t ant to control so precisely. It went straight for him, his own attack coming back faster than he’d sent it.
For the first ti, his expression cracked.
His eyes widened, real shock cutting through the calm he wore like a second skin.
I didn’t see what happened next.
The humming rose too high.
It swallowed everything, sound and thought and fear, building until it felt like it would split
open. The blue light burst out of my chest, not contained anymore, not careful. It spread over
in waves, moving through every part of my body at once.
It didn’t just fix what was broken.
It erased it.
Burns vanished. Bones set themselves without resistance. The deep ache in my chest disappeared as if it had never been there. Even the weight inside my lungs lifted, and I dragged in a breath that didn’t hurt, not even a little.
I sat up before I realized I had moved.
The table beneath
felt cold, solid in a way that grounded
again. When I looked down, it made sense why. Most of my clothes were gone, burned through, hanging in blackened strips off my shoulders and hips.
The air still slled like smoke.
When it cleared enough, I saw him.
Valentine stood across the room, one side of his barrier flickering, barely holding together. He looked like he had taken the hit, even if it hadn’t finished him. There was sothing different in his face now, sothing less certain.
"Well, this is new."
His voice had lost that smooth edge, just slightly, but enough that I noticed.
"You can actually heal yourself."
I slid off the table, my feet hitting the ground steadily this ti.
"Maybe if you thought well enough," I said, my voice rough but holding, "you would start to understand you are no god and you did not make ."
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