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Summary
What disturbed him the most was not that insane gaze, nor the creature's sharp tongue or the threats it uttered, trying to destabilize him and poke at open wounds in a cruel game of truth or dare that the Sinner played alone, day after day, as soon as he surfaced.
In truth, the worst lay in those atrocious moments when the sedatives administered to him by Leonardo slowly left his system, yet remained active enough to dull him. And then there was that limbo between unconsciousness and awakening, between the abyss of sleep and the world beyond the fog that rendered his body useless, between the delirious Riario and the half-awake Sinner, when both met halfway. They did not repel each other, yet neither reached the fullness of their mental faculties. They lingered there, fighting for dominance over a dormant body—the chains that bound him merely another adornment to keep them in place—while the real and the illusory blurred before his glazed eyes. And it was exactly in this moment, neither conscious nor unconscious, that Girolamo Riario was forced to face the dark mirror of his soul.