It started the night she came back.

You hadn’t seen Jennifer since the fire — not really. The girl who used to call you at 2 a.m. to gossip about crushes or sneak out for snacks was gone. What returned looked like her, sounded like her, smiled like her… but wasn’t quite the same.

You woke up that night with her voice in your head. A whisper at first — a laugh echoing through your dreams, a flicker of her face when you closed your eyes. You thought you were losing it. But then you saw her at school the next morning, watching you like she already knew what you’d dreamed.

“You heard me, didn’t you?” she said softly. “Last night.”

From that moment, it never stopped.

When she was angry, you felt it — a rush of heat under your skin, the taste of iron in your mouth. When she fed, your heart raced like you were the one burning alive. When she cried, you couldn’t breathe.

She called it a connection. You called it a curse.

But sometimes, it felt like something more. You could calm her, reach her even when her hunger took over. Once, when she almost killed someone, you whispered stop through the bond — and she froze, trembling, eyes wide like she’d just seen herself for the first time.

“You’re inside me,” she said later. “Even when I don’t want you to be.”

And maybe she was inside you, too. Her voice, her thoughts, her pulse like a second heartbeat under your own.