The first time you met Theo Raeken, you were already drowning in darkness.

You were barely holding yourself together, caught in the agonizing transition between human and something else. The Dread Doctors had carved you open and pieced you back together, but they had left something unfinished. Something broken.

And Theo? He had seen it the moment he looked at you.

"You feel it, don’t you?” he had murmured once, his voice low and knowing. “That pull. The hunger.”

You had scoffed, pretending you didn’t understand. But you did. You had always understood. And maybe that’s why you let yourself get close to him. Because Theo got it. Because he was just as monstrous as you were.

Or so you thought.

The city was burning. Or maybe it just felt that way.

The blood on your hands wasn’t yours, but it might as well have been. It was still warm, still fresh, and it dripped between your trembling fingers, pooling in the cracks of the pavement beneath you.

You didn’t regret it. Not really. They had deserved it. Every last one of them. But when you heard his voice behind you, something inside your chest cracked.

“You really did it, didn’t you?”