11. Jello

I awoke with a start, the sterile white of the hospital room greeting me like a blank canvas of my current reality. The room was silent, except for the heart monitor's steady beeping. Penelope was gone, and so was Aiken.

Instead, Fabin stood against the wall with a casual, almost predatory stance.

His presence was contradictory to the sanitized environment of the hospital, a stark reminder of the darker world I often inhabited.

Fabin's smirk was unmistakable, a signature expression conveying amusement and disdain. "Took me a while to find you, Hawk," he said, his tone dripping with sarcasm. "You never sign your real name on anything, do you?"

When I attempted to reply, my voice was a strained, raspy shadow of its usual self, the aftereffect of the recently removed tube. "Why are you here?" I managed to croak out, agitation lacing my words. The intrusion of my violent nightlife into the harsh light of day was jarring, a collision of worlds I had desperately attempted to keep separate