Her hand lifts—slow, graceful—toward my throat. Toward the choker. Toward the place where Drogo’s mark sits warm against my pulse.
The tips of her fingers are black, as though dipped in ink, or rot.
They hover an inch from my skin.
The mirror begins to frost over from the edges inward, creeping like ivy. My reflection blurs at the corners. Hers sharpens.
I meet her eyes in the glass.
“Try it,” I whisper. My voice comes out steady, low, the same tone I used the night I told a room full of armed menenough. “See what happens.”
Her head tilts—curious, almost amused.
The frost reaches the center of the mirror.
Her fingers brush the diamonds.
And the room goes black.
Not lights-out black. Mirror black. The reflection swallows everything—me, the dress, the bedroom, the diamonds—until there is only her face, huge and pale and smiling now, teeth too sharp, eyes bottomless.
The mirror has gone full black now, a void that drinks the light from the room. My reflection is gone. The velvet gown is gone. There is only her—enormous, filling every inch of the glass, her pale face so close the fog of my breath beads on the surface like tears she’ll never cry.
Her smile stretches wider. The teeth glint like broken glass under moonlight.
I feel it then—the choke. Not just the invisible hand at my throat, but the weight of seventeen years of this. Every nightmare I’ve written down because they demanded it.Every deadline I bled to meet because the scratches would come if I didn’t. Every time I bowed my head in the dark and whisperedI’m listening, I’m writing, I’m sorryjust so the cold would lift for one more night.
I’m so fucking tired of bowing.
The diamonds at my neck feel like a collar now. The room is freezing, but sweat prickles between my shoulder blades. My lungs burn like I’ve been underwater too long.
Enough.
I force my body to move.
I turn—slow, deliberate—away from the safety of the mirror and face her directly.
She’s there. Not in the glass anymore. Standing in the room. Real enough that the air ripples around her like heat off asphalt. The mourning dress clings to a body that shouldn’t have substance, yet it does. Her eyes are endless black, but now they flicker with something almost like surprise.
I step closer.
One step. Then another.
Until I’m so near I can smell the old grave-dirt on her, the faint rot of lilies left too long on a headstone.
She doesn’t retreat.
“Why?” I ask. The word comes out slow, low, carved from the back of my throat.
The ghost stills. Completely. Even the faint tremor of her hem stops floating.
I lean in until our faces are inches apart. Until I can see the tiny fractures in the porcelain of her skin, the way herpupils don’t dilate because there’s no light left inside her to need it.
“I do what you want,” I say. Each syllable deliberate. “And I will keep doing it.”
Another step. My bare foot brushes the cold hardwood. I don’t flinch.
“You know why?” My voice drops to a whisper that still carries. “Because I care about your stories being told. I care that the world hears what happened to you. The pain. The betrayal. The things no one else would write.”
