“Goddamn, Lux…”
“Say it.” He snarls, and I repeat it again. “Say it.”
“You’re mine.”
I slam down on him so hard it knocks the breath out of both of us. “Wrong.” I grind. “Try again.” He locks eyes with me, voice raw and reverent.
“You’re fucking divine.”
He reaches between us, thumb pressing tight against my clit, rubbing fast, and filthy, and perfect. I explode around him, screaming his name. My body jerks, vision goes white. Cumming so hard, clenching around him, riding it out like I’m taking the world down with me.
And he loses it. Riven growls my name, hands gripping my hips like they’re the last thing tethering him to this world. He thrusts up into me once. Twice. Then stills.Hot and full and spilling inside me with a groan that sounds like a man giving himself up. He thinks I’m his, and maybe I am. I know at this moment he’s mine.
I collapse forward against his chest, still pulsing, still trembling, still gasping like I just came back from the edge of something holy. We don’t speak. Not for a long moment. He strokes a hand down my spine. “I should’ve known,” he murmurs.
“Known what?”
He tilts his head, breath still hot against my throat. “You weren’t made to be taken.” I lift my head.
“No,” I whisper. “I was made to take.”
I don’t move. Not at first. I sit there in his lap, still trembling, still slick, my breath catching on the ghost of that last thrust, that final kiss of violence between my thighs. My body sings with it—the heat, the ache, the high of owning him.
His hands are still on me. They’ve gone still. Like he’s listening. Like something just shifted. I blink. Swallow. My pulse starts to stutter in my ears. “Riven?” He doesn’t answer. Not right away. His gaze isfixed on something past me, his body is coiled beneath mine like he’s waiting to strike, but not at me. Through me.
Then I feel it. The air bends and warps. A low hum crawls up from the floor beneath us, through the stone, into my spine. I shudder from the recognition of something behind the veil seeing me and smiling. The mirrors along the wall begin to vibrate, softly, and just enough for the sound to curl under my skin. The mirror bends inward. The pressure shifts—my ears pop, my pulse surges.
Behind the glass, Elias is watching us. He physically isn’t fully there. He is just a silhouette with a glint of pale hair, the sharp line of wire-rimmed glasses, and the edge of a white coat. It’s him. I know it like I know the sound of my own name in someone else’s mouth. My whole body goes still. He lifts a hand. And presses it against the inside of the mirror. Like he’s touching it from the other side. Like he’s testing the barrier. The glass fogs under his palm. Black veins crawl outward, spidering across the surface like frost in reverse. A word slowly seeps through the center as if it’s bleeding from the inside out.
NECROSE.
It pulses once. Twice. Then disappears.
The mirror silently implodes. Like the air just swallowed it whole. All the torches snuff out. The book slams shut on the altar. And then silence, dark and breathless. Like the whole world just inhaled and forgot how to let go. Riven moves first. He grabs me by the wrist and pulls me back, out of the center of the room. His hand trembles.
Riven’s hand trembles.That’s when I understand. This wasn’t just a warning; it was a message. He saw us. He saw me.And he liked what he saw. And somewhere behind the shattered glass…something else was watching too.
15
The Mirror Lies
I wake up cold and the bed feels larger than it did. Too still. The sheets smell like sex and ash, but the fire’s gone out and the air’s turned brittle. There’s no weight beside me. No warmth. Riven’s gone.
I sit up slowly. My muscles ache but not in the soft, satisfied way they usually do after I fuck him into the floor, but like I’ve been used. Like something borrowed my body while I slept and left my bones in the wrong order.
The room is quiet. Too quiet. No wind through the windows. No distant hum of the city. No ticking from the strange, spiral-marked clock above the door. It’s like time just…stopped.
The air is heavy. The kind of heavy that sits on your chest and asks you to notice it. I notice it. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and freeze. My sketchbook is open on the floor.
The pages are fluttering…not from the wind. There is no wind. They just…move, like something’s breathing through them. I kneel. The page is covered in graphite. Soft smudges. Precise lines. And then I realize what I’m looking at. It’s my face. Far from the version of myself I’m used to seeing. This version is smoother. Hollow, with eyes wide and empty. Skin too perfect. Lips just barely curled into a smile that doesn’t belong to me. And below it, written in handwriting that I know isn’t mine… “She won’t notice.”
My blood goes cold. I back up fast, knocking into the edge of the bed. My heart’s thudding now, loud enough to drown out everything else. I stare at the glass wall across the room.
The mirror. It’s fogged from the inside. I push to my feet. Step closer. There’s a handprint in the middle of it, faint, like someone pressed their palm to the mirror while I slept. Not mine. Too long in the fingers. Too narrow in the palm. I blink. My reflection is there. But…it’s not right. Her arms hang too still. Her face too relaxed. Her expression blank when I know mine is twisted in confusion. And when I move? She moves half a second late. I stagger back. “Nope,” I whisper. “Fuck no.”
I snatch up the towel from the foot of the bed, wipe the mirror hard, but there’s no fog. No condensation. No moisture at all. The handprint stays. And the reflection? She’s smiling. I’m not. I turn my head and move fast. She doesn't follow. Just stares. Still smiling. Still me…but not.
Behind her, the wall ripples. Just slightly. Like a curtain pulled too tight across something that wants to see through. The spirals carved into the ceiling catch my eye. They’re twisting again. Not just the illusion of movement. They’re crawling, slowly, like they’re trying to reach the corners.
