Chapter 6
He sets me down in the middle of a room, and the moment my feet touch the floor I open my mouth to scream — and then I see it.
Mirrors. Everywhere. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, an entire room built out of glass, and my hands fly up to straighten my veil before my mind has even finished registering the horror of it.
"It's alright," he says, low, steady, watching me the way you'd watch something small and wounded. "You're alright."
"I have to go." My voice comes out thin, frantic. "Please, I have to — I can't be in here, I can't—"
"I told you." He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. "I'm going to put you back together, piece by piece. This broken little doll." His eyes hold mine, unbothered by the veil between us. "I'll fix you exactly the way I want you fixed."
I shake my head, hard, and try to twist free of him, but the room is already collapsing in on me — every wall a mirror, every mirror a threat, and I can't look anywhere, can't find a single safe surface to fix my eyes on. My breath comes ragged. Tears spill hot down my face.
"Please," I beg. "Let me go. Please, let me go—"
He doesn't. When I keep thrashing, he presses me back against the glass itself, his whole body pinning mine there, one hand rising to grip my chin and hold my face still.
I keep fighting, keep twisting against him, and in the struggle I feel him — the hard, unmistakable press of him against my stomach — and my body reacts before my terror can stop it, some traitorous heat unfurling low in me even as panic claws at my throat, as though I'm being pulled apart by two entirely different hands.
He curses under his breath, rough and low. "Christ — keep moving like that, love, and I will have you right here on this bloody floor, and nothing in this world will stop me. Not even you."
I freeze. Every part of me locks rigid, caught between fear and something I refuse to name.
"It's alright," he says again, gentler now. "You can trust this room. Do you understand me? You can trust this one."
I don't believe him. I shake my head, still shaking, still refusing.
"This is the Dracula room," he says. "The vampire trick. Every mirror in here is treated — one-way glass, angled just so. No reflection gets thrown back. Not yours. Not anyone's. Expect mine."
I go still.
Slowly, he loosens his grip and steps back, just enough to gesture toward the mirror directly in front of us. "Look."
Through the mesh of my veil, I make myself look — carefully, sideways, bracing for the worst — and see only him. His reflection, full and clear. Nothing beside him. Nothing behind him.
I step closer, heart hammering, testing it. I move — and nothing moves with me. No shape. No ghost of a girl in a black dress. Nothing at all where I stand.
And then, in the glass, I watch him step up behind me, and reach up, and gently pull the veil from my face — and it appears only once it's in his hands, as though the fabric itself had been part of the trick all along.
I gasp.
This — this, of everything tonight, is the single most terrifying thing that's happened to me.
I lift my eyes, and for the first time, I let myself truly see him.
He's older than me by some years, that much is immediately clear — not old, but settled into himself in the particular way only certain men manage, all easy, dangerous confidence.
Dark hair, near-black, swept back from a face that belongs on something carved rather than born — a sharp jaw, a mouth that looks equally suited to cruelty or tenderness, and eyes so dark they're nearly black themselves, fixed on me now with an intensity that makes my knees go unsteady.
He's tall — taller even than he seemed in the street — and broad through the shoulders in a way his coat had only hinted at, every line of him suggesting strength held carefully, deliberately, in check.
I haven't looked at another living soul like this in seven years.
He steps closer, and I don't step back. His fingers trace along my bare arm, slow, deliberate, and I gasp despite myself at the trail of heat it leaves behind.
"There you are," he murmurs, and something in his voice has gone almost reverent.
"Do you have any idea what it's like, watching you refuse to look at anything — at anyone — for this long?
Watching you hide from your own face like it's something to be ashamed of?
" His hand rises to my cheek. "You're not something to hide, Ophelia Sorrell. "
My name. My full name, spoken like it belongs to him now.
He brushes my hair back from my neck, and before I can protest, his mouth finds the curve of my throat — soft, then not soft at all, his lips and teeth working a mark into my skin that makes my whole body arch toward him instead of away.
His arms wrap fully around my waist, pulling me flush against him, and in the mirror ahead of us I watch him — only him, his hands, his mouth, his body moving against a girl who isn't reflected there at all, as though whatever's happening to me is happening to no one.
"You're an unexplored canvas," he breathes against my skin, "with a broken mind and a body that's been waiting — God, waiting so patiently — for someone to finally mark it properly.
" His mouth moves to my ear, his voice dropping lower still.
"Let me inside the parts of you that you've locked away.
I'm going to mark your broken mind and brand your skin until every single piece of you answers only to my name. "
I shiver so hard my teeth nearly chatter.
"I don't even know you," I whisper. "What do you want from me?"
"You," he says simply, like it's the only true thing left in the world. "All of you. Every cracked, broken, hidden piece."
His thumb finds the mark he's just left on my throat, tracing it with something close to reverence, his dark eyes fixed there before lifting back to mine.
"I'll fix your mind," he says. "I promise you that.
But I'll put you back together exactly how I want you.
Not how you were. Not how anyone thinks you should be. "
Something in that — the sheer, unrepentant possessiveness of it — finally breaks through whatever spell has held me still.
I shove past him and run.
Without the veil, I have no choice but to keep my eyes down, half-lidded, fixed on the ground as I stumble through the crowd, bumping shoulders, apologizing to no one in particular, until I burst out through the iron gate and into the dark street beyond.
I run the entire way home. I keep my gaze low the whole time — half down, careful, deliberate — even when I splash straight through a puddle at the edge of the road, black water rippling out around my boots.
I don't look down at it. I don't risk it, not even in the dark, not even for a fraction of a second.
I reach The Tin Heart breathless, my chest heaving, and find my father slumped against the front door, fumbling uselessly with his key, too drunk to manage the lock.
He looks up when he sees me. And his face — already ugly with drink — twists into something worse.
"You," he slurs, pointing an unsteady finger.
"Come to haunt me some more, have you? Go on, then.
Go back to whatever hell you crawled out of.
I don't want you here. I never—" His voice cracks, and for one horrible second I think he might actually weep, before the anger swallows it whole again.
"I never asked for a ghost for a daughter. "
"Papa—"
"Don't — don't you 'Papa' me. You're not — you're not even really her. Either of them. Not even Ophelia. You're just — you're just wearing their face like some kind of sick—" He curses, foul and slurred, the words barely holding together. "Get away from me."
He tries to push himself upright and misses the door entirely, collapsing hard onto the pavement, one knee cracking against the stone. He doesn't even seem to feel it. He just lies there, muttering, cursing at nothing, at the dark, at me.
“You? You are her, aren't you? You bitch! You reincarnated inside my daughter, didn't you? You are here to punish me for what I did to you? Well, guess what, you thankless whore? All I did was love you, you were the one who chose to accept me.”
Who is this her he always mentions when he is drunk? What is he even saying? He doesn't even appear to me to talking to me right now.
"She used to look at me like that too. Right before she stopped looking at me at all.”
I know, standing there, exactly what these moments have done to me over the years — how every drunken accusation, every ghost, every refusal to look at me sober or otherwise, has made the thing living in my own chest so much worse.
He apologizes every single time when he's sober, and every single time some new crack opens anyway as soon as he gets drunk the next night, and I don't know anymore how many cracks a person is meant to survive before there's nothing left to call whole.
I don't try to help him up tonight. I can't. I simply unlock the door, step around him, and stand there long enough to watch him struggle uselessly against the frame before I go inside, leaving the door open so he can crawl in and I can lock the door.
He tries to crawl and then slumps on the entrance floor, one hand still wrapped loosely around the neck of the bottle, his legs folded at an angle that would hurt if he were sober enough to feel it.
I crouch beside him despite everything — some old, stubborn instinct that still can't quite let him lie there unattended, even now, even after everything he's said tonight.
"Papa," I murmur. "Are you hurt?"
He doesn't answer straight away. His eyes are unfocused, drifting, and for a moment I think he might simply pass out entirely and spare us both whatever comes next.
Then his hand shoots out and closes around my wrist.
"Look at me." His voice is wet, slurred, but there's a sudden, terrible clarity underneath it, like something surfacing from very deep water. "Go on. Look at your father."
"Papa, please—"