Fishnarts // N.H

Chapter Twenty Three

I had always been the weird child. Growing up, I had always been the one who was too uptight, too serious, and too suspicious of others. My friends, Miliana and Liza, were the only ones who decided to give me a chance. As days went on, they found new traits about me that they claimed to love. 

And I trusted them.

I put my suspicions about people and their intentions aside as I forced myself to let them in. I made myself so uncomfortable when I let them in. I let a spark of hope ignite instead of being turned off by my trust issues, or was it my anxiety?

I was never sure what was wrong with me.

Both Miliana and Liza had their ways of weaving their way right into my closed-off bubble, and when I think about it, they were abnormal. Liza's anger and Miliana's ability to calm me down was unusual. It had never occurred to me that Niall sent them to me.

If they were genuinely my friends, they wouldn't have let me go with Niall. All of it planned by him. He wanted people to get close to me to keep me safe just because of some promise he made to my father, so he sent Miliana and Liza. 

And I was clueless the whole time.

"He has a kid," I said to no one in particular as I kept staring at the spot Niall was occupying moments ago. 

"That's unheard of," Hai said, confusion lacing his voice as he walked up beside me.

"Tell me, Hai," I said as I felt anger rise inside me, "what's more lethal than an angry person who'd ruin everything on the spot?"

He sighed as he looked at my face. "A silent one who waits for the right moment to unleash their anger."

I raised my eyebrows in surprise, not expecting him to answer correctly. "And what's scarier than a power-hungry man?"

He inhaled as he looked back to the direction we left his lover. "A heartbroken woman."

He looked back at me as I laughed. "I'm surprised."

"Niall-"

"Is dead to me," I said, cutting him off. "Now take me wherever you were taking me."

He nodded and led me. As I followed him, I thought about how they all just played me like that. Niall had a lover and a child. That was why he never wanted me. If only he told me the truth, none of this would've happened. I would've packed my things and left peacefully.

But no. It seemed that Niall wanted me to be his enemy.

And an enemy he will get.

"I wanted to get you as far away as I could from hearing ears," Hai said as we neared a lake, "because I don't want Phaedra to know if you gained a power."

"Why?" I said as I stopped beside him. "She's already using me."

"Listen, Elina. That injection you took isn't like being turned into any other species, okay?" He said as his worried eyes skimmed over everything but me. "Your strengths come naturally to you. You won't need to train to become better. And if you gained a superpower, you'll know how to use it and control it without needing anyone to teach you because that power has always been inside you. You've always been familiar with it. It'll be like a second brain to you."

I looked at him in confusion as I looked at my hands. "I don't get what's dangerous about that."

"It's rare to gain a superpower. Phaedra doesn't have one. Only one of the people she turned had one." He said as he breathed out. "And because he had a superpower, she turned him into a full Fishnart. He's more powerful as a Fishnart, but that means that she stripped him of his emotions, his free will, and his humanity. He just became a thing she controlled fully."