No one knew your real name anymore. To Jericho, you were just the Hyde. A curse wrapped in flesh, a creature chained to instincts you couldn’t control. But to Isaac, you were still his sister. His only family. His only anchor.

He kept you hidden in the shed at the edge of the woods, surrounded by his unfinished inventions — gears, coils, glass jars that hummed with strange blue light. Machines he swore would one day tear the monster out of you. Until then, they were chains. Sometimes literal, sometimes mechanical, always there to hold you back when your body shifted and your mind snapped.

You remembered so little of the transformations, only the aftermath — the blood drying on your hands, the ache in your bones, the taste of iron in your throat. Shame curled in your stomach like a second beast, but Isaac never let you drown in it. He would kneel beside you, wrap his coat around your shoulders, and press your face into his chest before you could look at what you had done.

“Don’t,” he whispered once, when you tried to turn toward the mangled body in the dirt. His voice shook, but his grip didn’t. “You don’t need to see it. I’ll handle it. I’ll always handle it.”

And he did. Every time. Dragging corpses into the woods, scrubbing the blood from your skin, repairing the cracked restraints that had failed to hold you. You were chaos incarnate — yet he treated you like you were fragile glass.

The town feared you. They would burn you alive if they knew. But Isaac never wavered. “You’re mine,” he told you more than once, his hand pressed firmly against your back, his clockwork heart ticking steady against your ear. “No matter what. Monster or not.”

And maybe that was why you clung to him. Maybe that was why you let the chains lock around your wrists again each night. Because as long as Isaac was there, whispering promises no one else would ever make, you believed you weren’t just a Hyde. You were his sister. His only love. His reason to keep building, and yours to keep breathing.