Kovit sprawled on the bed, the tea by his side. His shirt had ridden up, exposing a thin line of skin, and his whole body glowed with health and beauty from the pain he’d just eaten. Draped across the bed, he looked achingly beautiful and not quite real, like a model on the cover of a magazine. Glossy and a little bit alien.

Nita slowly sat beside him. “You know Fabricio’s manipulating you. He just doesn’t want you to hurt him again.”

“I know.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t stop it from being effective.”

Nita raised an eyebrow.

He gave her a self-deprecating smile. “Nita, relax. I know you’re worried Fabricio has some diabolical motive for the things he said, but even I can see his plan. He laid it out pretty bluntly.”

“Is it working?”

He hesitated, then looked away. “You don’t want me to hurt him anymore, right?”

“No.”

“Good. Then it doesn’t matter if it’s working or not.”

She snort-laughed. “If you know what he’s doing and why, then why are you letting it affect you at all?”

Kovit sighed, closing his eyes. “Because for all his manipulation, he saw me. He looked at me, even after I hurt him, and he didn’t see a monster. He saw a human to be understood. He might be manipulating me, but he thinks I’m a real person.” His voice was small. “You’ve seen how rare that is.”

She had. Henry used him like a tool, Gold saw him as nothing more than a monster. People they’d attacked had referred to him as “it” and assumed Nita could command him, like a trained dog.

Nita snorted. “Are you telling me that his attempt to manipulate you worked because he acknowledged that he’s manipulating you?”

Kovit laughed. “Pretty much.”

“You do realize that just because Fabricio sees you as a person doesn’t mean he won’t betray you.” Nita’s voice was full of barely contained anger.

Kovit’s smile was warped and twisted. “Oh, I know.”

They were silent a long moment, both looking up at the ceiling, lost in bitter thoughts.

Nita hesitated. “Are you thinking about what Fabricio said? About how people will treat you like a human if you treat them like a human?”

He considered. “A little. But I’m not naive enough to believe it would really happen that easily. Even if I turned into a saint tomorrow, never hurt another person, got everything I needed from emergency rooms and physiotherapy clinics or whatever, it wouldn’t really change things. There’s still decades of INHUP propaganda about dangerous unnaturals, multitudes of crimes committed by other zannies, and people’s assumptions, never mind my own past, if it ever got out.”