Bonus Chapter
ALENA
The bedroom is quiet except for the soft rustle of silk and my own breathing, which feels too loud in the hush.
I stand in front of the full-length mirror in nothing but black lace underwear and the diamond choker Drogo fastened around my throat an hour ago—his fingers lingering, possessive, promising later.
The stones are cold against my skin, heavy with meaning.
Tonight isn’t just a party. It’s a coronation disguised as champagne and caviar.
I lift the gown from its hanger. Midnight velvet, floor-length, cut so low in the back it’s practically an invitation.
The bodice is structured, boned, meant to cinch me in and push everything up until I look like sin wrapped in elegance.
I step into it, the fabric cool against my calves, then thighs, sliding up like dark water.
I pull the straps over my shoulders. Reach behind for the hidden zipper. Tug it slowly, tooth by tooth, feeling the dress close around me like a second skin. The sound is intimate, obscene in the silence.
When the zipper reaches the small of my back, I smooth my hands down the front, adjusting the neckline, the fall of the skirt. Then I look up.
And freeze.
In the mirror, behind me, there is a woman who is not me.
She stands perhaps five feet away—too close for the depth of the room, too still for anything living.
Pale as frostbitten marble, her dress is old-fashioned, high-necked, the kind of mourning gown women wore a century ago when grief still had rules.
Her hair is dark and loose, falling in heavy waves past her waist, the same length as mine. Her eyes are black pools, unblinking.
She doesn’t move at first.
Just watches.
I don’t turn around. I know better. Turning gives them permission to cross the threshold between glass and reality.
My pulse kicks hard under the diamonds.
She takes one step.
Slow. Deliberate. The hem of her dress doesn’t brush the floor—it floats just above it, as if the laws of gravity gave up on her long ago. No sound. No whisper of fabric. Only the sudden drop in temperature that makes my breath fog the mirror in a small, perfect cloud.
Another step.
Closer.
The air thickens, tastes of old grief and wet stone. My fingers tighten on the edge of the vanity until my knuckles bleach white.
She stops directly behind me now—close enough that if I leaned back, my spine would meet her chest. In the reflection, her face hovers just over my shoulder. Her lips part. No sound comes out at first, but I feel the words anyway, sliding cold and wet into my ear like fingers dipped in frost.
He will never be yours.
The voice is layered—hers, mine, someone else’s all at once. It vibrates inside my skull.
I don’t flinch. I’ve heard worse from the things that follow me.
But this one… this one feels different. Personal.
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 men enough. “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 whispered I’m listening, I’m writing, I’m sorry just 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 her pupils 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.”
I look past her now.
Shapes are gathering at the edges of the room—tall, thin silhouettes bleeding in from the shadows like ink dropped in water. More of them. Dozens. Women in tattered lace, men with broken necks, children with empty eye sockets. They press closer, silent, watching.
“But damn…” I let the word hang. Let it cut. “I am done being treated like that.”
My eyes flick to the dresser.
Drogo’s gun rests there—matte black, heavy, the one he always leaves within reach when he knows I’m dressing alone. He never says why. He doesn’t have to.
I cross the room in three strides. My hand closes around the grip. Cold metal. Familiar weight.
I lift it.
Press the muzzle to my temple.
The barrel is still warm from when he checked it earlier.
The shadows tremble.
A low sound ripples through the room—not words, not wind. Something between a sigh and a scream held back. The shapes shift, overlap, argue in silence. Some lean forward as if to stop me. Others draw back like they’re afraid I’ll actually do it.
I don’t blink.
“I don’t mind joining you all,” I say quietly. The words taste like copper and truth. “If that’s what it takes to stop being your fucking scribe. Your punching bag. Your deadline.”
The gun doesn’t shake in my hand.
The ghost in front of me—the first one, the one with the mourning dress—lifts her black-tipped fingers toward me. Not to grab. Not to scratch.
Almost… pleading.
The room is so cold now my teeth ache.
But I don’t lower the gun.
I meet every pair of hollow eyes in the gathering dark.
“Your move,” I tell them.
And for the first time in my life, the dead don’t answer right away.
They just watch.
Waiting to see if I’m bluffing.
I’m not.
The gun stays pressed to my temple, steady, the metal biting into skin like a promise I’m ready to keep.
The first ghost—the woman in mourning black—freezes mid-reach.
Her body jerks in strange, stuttering spasms, like film stuck on a broken reel.
Her head twitches sideways, then back, eyes bulging wider, blacker.
The other shapes around the room ripple in response, their edges fraying, limbs elongating then snapping short again.
They’re shaking. All of them.
Not fear, exactly. Something closer to panic.
I lower my voice until it’s almost gentle.
“Would you show me an ounce of respect?” I ask her, the words slow and clear. “Accept that I am your friend?”
A few of the nearer shadows detach from the walls. They crawl—low, insect-like—across the floor toward me, heads tilted, fingers scraping wood without sound. Their faces are half-formed, mouths open in silent questions.
I don’t flinch.
“I’ve seen you—I don’t know why—all my life,” I continue. My throat tightens, but I force the words out anyway. “You were the only family I knew in all those orphanages. The only ones who never left me alone in the dark. Why do you treat me like this?”
The woman in front of me trembles harder.
Her face twists— suddenly, violently. The porcelain skin cracks like old paint.
Her mouth stretches into something ugly, too wide, lips splitting at the corners.
Eyes bleed ink down her cheeks. Rage pours off her in cold waves that make the air taste like rust.
She raises her hand—black-tipped fingers curled into claws—and lunges.
Fast.
Too fast.
I brace for the strike, for the rake of nails across my face, across the diamonds, across everything Drogo just claimed as his.
But it never lands.
From behind me, another shape surges forward—taller, thinner, wrapped in what looks like shredded hospital linen.
No face I recognize, but the movement is protective, deliberate.
It slams into the mourning woman with brutal force, shoving her back hard enough that she stumbles, heels scraping air that isn’t there.
The two ghosts collide in a silent explosion of frost and shadow.
Then chaos.
The room erupts.