The Woman in the Mirror
Vera Kane - POV
The taste of copper fills my mouth before I'm fully awake.
My eyes snap open to fluorescent bathroom light cutting through my skull like a scalpel, and I'm standing—when did I get up?—in front of my mirror with something cold and sharp pressed against the pulse point beneath my jaw. My reflection stares back at me, wide-eyed and terrified, but my hands... my hands are steady as stone, gripping the kitchen knife with professional precision I've never possessed.
"Stop," I whisper to myself, but my hands don't listen.
The pressure increases. A thin line of blood appears on my throat in the mirror, and I watch in horror as my own face remains perfectly calm while inside I'm screaming. This isn't me. This can't be me.
Fight back.
The thought comes from somewhere deeper than conscious will, and suddenly I'm wrestling with my own body, muscles straining against muscles, my right hand trying to complete the motion while my left hand claws at my wrist. The knife wavers, the blade catching bathroom light like a silver promise of release I don't want to keep.
"NO!" The word tears from my throat, and my grip finally loosens. The knife clatters into the sink, the sound echoing off marble tiles like a gunshot.
I stumble backward, gasping, and that's when I notice everything else.
I'm wearing leather. Black leather pants that cling to my legs like a second skin, pants I've never seen before in my life. A fitted jacket that smells like cigarettes and danger, nothing like the soft cottons and silks that fill my closet. My knuckles are scraped raw, skin torn and bruised, with something dark caked under my fingernails that makes my stomach lurch.
Blood. Someone else's blood.
My apartment spreads out beyond the bathroom doorway like a crime scene. The Italian leather sofa is overturned, its legs pointing toward the ceiling like a dead animal. My coffee table lies in pieces, the glass top shattered into a constellation of sharp stars across the hardwood floor. The floor-to-ceiling windows that normally showcase Elliott Bay's gray morning light are spider-webbed with cracks, as if someone tried to break out from the inside.
As if I tried to break out.
My phone. I need my phone. I pick my way carefully through the wreckage, glass crunching under my bare feet—when did I take my shoes off?—until I find it wedged between the overturned sofa cushions. The screen shows 3:47 AM, and there's a notification that makes my blood freeze.
Security footage available. Motion detected: 12:23 AM - 3:15 AM.
I tap the notification with trembling fingers, and my building's security app opens to show grainy black-and-white footage of the lobby. At 12:23 AM, I watch myself stride through the entrance with predatory confidence, moving like someone who owns every room she enters. The woman on the screen wears the same leather outfit I'm wearing now, but she carries herself like a weapon wrapped in human skin.
That's not me. That can't be me.
But the timestamp doesn't lie, and neither does the woman's face when she turns toward the camera for a brief moment. It's my face, but wrong. My features arranged into an expression I've never worn, eyes that hold secrets I don't remember learning.
I fast-forward through hours of empty lobby footage until 3:15 AM, when the same woman returns. This time she's moving differently—urgent, almost panicked. She keeps looking over her shoulder as if something's chasing her, and there are dark stains on her jacket that weren't there when she left.
The footage ends, and I'm left staring at my reflection in the phone's black screen. My hands won't stop shaking.
I need to document this. The thought comes automatically, the same compulsion that's driven me to photograph everything in my life since the integration therapy began. Evidence. Proof that these blackouts are happening, that I'm losing pieces of myself to someone I don't recognize.
I grab my camera from what's left of my dresser and start shooting. The overturned furniture. The broken glass. My bloody knuckles. The leather clothes that smell like smoke and secrets. Each flash illuminates another piece of a puzzle I can't solve, another fragment of a life I'm apparently living without permission.
That's when I see the note.
It's tucked under the corner of my laptop, written in my own handwriting but with an aggressive slant I don't recognize. The paper is expensive—cream colored, heavy stock that I keep in my desk for important correspondence—but the words are scrawled across it like a hastily composed battle plan.
Day 31. She's getting stronger. The integration isn't working—she's fighting back. Find Ash before she finds you. —R
R. Raven. The name Dr. Voss uses for my "other self," the personality that emerges during my dissociative episodes. But this note suggests something Dr. Voss never mentioned—that Raven isn't just a symptom of my fractured psyche.
She's fighting something. Or someone.
And who is Ash?
I flip the paper over, hoping for more information, but there's only a small sketch in the corner. A bridge, drawn with quick, confident strokes. Something about it tugs at my memory, but the harder I try to remember, the more it slips away like water through my fingers.
My phone buzzes, making me jump so violently that I nearly drop it. A text message from Dr. Voss, sent just now at 3:52 AM.
Emergency session required. Come alone. Tell no one about tonight's episode.
I stare at the message, ice forming in my veins. How does she know about tonight? How does she know anything happened at all?
Unless she's been watching.
I look around my destroyed apartment with new eyes, searching for cameras, listening devices, anything that would explain how my doctor knows about my 3 AM breakdown. The thought that I might be under surveillance in my own home should terrify me, but instead it brings an odd sort of relief. If someone's been watching, then at least there's proof. Evidence that these episodes aren't just psychotic breaks but something else entirely.
Something that requires emergency intervention at four in the morning.
I move to my laptop, stepping carefully around the broken glass, and open the folder where I keep all my documentation. Photos of strange clothes appearing in my closet. Screenshots of texts I don't remember sending. Receipts from places I've never been to, restaurants and bars that Raven apparently frequents during my blackouts.
But this is different. This is violent. Dangerous.
The fresh injection marks on my inner arm throb as I type, two small puncture wounds surrounded by bruising that definitely wasn't there when I went to bed. Someone—Raven?—has been injecting something into my system, but what? And why?
My reflection catches my eye in the darkened window, and for a moment I see her. The other woman. Raven. She's there in the set of my shoulders, the way my head tilts slightly to the right, the curve of my mouth that suggests secrets I don't remember keeping.
"What did you do?" I whisper to the window, to her, to the stranger wearing my face.
But she's already gone, leaving me alone with the wreckage and the growing certainty that Dr. Voss's integration therapy isn't healing me.
It's making something else stronger.