Chapter 3
The silence of my room was worse than the garden’s whispers.
I lay on the bed, my skin still humming from the pact, my mind replaying the raw crack in Virgil’s voice.
It’s everything. Hours passed, marked only by the slow creep of moonlight across the floorboards.
Sleep was impossible. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw black petals and a man’s fist clenched so tight his knuckles were bone.
I got up. The manor at night was a different creature, breathing softly in the dark.
I wandered without aim, my bare feet silent on cold runner rugs, my fingers trailing along damask wallpaper.
I was looking for nothing. Trying to outwalk the feeling that I’d signed a contract in blood I couldn’t see.
Then I heard it—a low, harmonic hum, like a finger run around the rim of a crystal glass.
It pulled at the base of my spine. I followed it down a narrow corridor I hadn’t noticed before, one that ended in a solid, dark-paneled wall.
Except now, the wall wasn’t solid. A veil of shimmering light, like heat haze over asphalt, trembled in front of the wood.
A new door. The house was showing me another one of its teeth.
My pulse kicked, that familiar cocktail of dread and curiosity.
I didn’t hesitate. I stepped through the light.
The cold hit me first, sharp and dry like the air inside a glacier.
Then the light—a fractured, dazzling brilliance that made me flinch.
I stood in the center of a vast, circular chamber.
Walls, floor, ceiling—all were made of living, shifting crystal.
It wasn’t static. Prisms within the stone pulsed with a soft, internal radiance, and the surfaces seemed to ripple like water, though they were solid to the touch when I stumbled forward and brushed one.
And in every angled surface, I saw myself.
Not just one reflection. Hundreds. Thousands.
Each crystal facet held a different version of Anna Taylor, each living a life that had flickered through my darkest, most private anxieties.
There I was, ten years older, alone in a sterile apartment, staring at a spreadsheet on a laptop, my face hollowed out by the blue glow.
In another, I was at a glittering party, laughing too loud, a champagne flute in my hand, my eyes desperately scanning the crowd for someone who knew the real me.
In a third, I was in a small, cluttered cottage, surrounded by cats, my hair a mess, my shoulders hunched as if against the world.
A recluse. A socialite. A lonely data analyst forever.
Every path I’d been too scared to choose, every potential failure I’d nursed in the dead of night, was rendered here in perfect, crystalline detail.
The cacophony was silent, but it screamed inside my skull.
The weight of all those possible lives, all those wrong turns, pressed down on me.
I saw the moment in each reflection where the fear had won—the moment I’d chosen safety over risk, silence over truth, emptiness over the terrifying prospect of wanting something real.
It was a maze of my own cowardice, and I was trapped at its center.
I couldn’t move. My breath came in short, sharp gasps, fogging the cold crystal in front of me.
I wanted to run, to shatter every mirror, but the paths between the towering formations shifted as I looked at them, creating new dead ends, new corridors of regret.
I was lost. Truly, utterly lost. “Anna.”
His voice was a low vibration in the still air, calm and sure.
I hadn’t heard him enter. I saw his reflection first, materializing in the glass behind my own shoulder.
Virgil. He stood close. So close I felt the heat of his body a moment before I felt his breath, warm and startling against the sensitive skin of my neck.
In the crystal, our reflections merged—his broad shoulders framing my trembling ones, his dark, intent gaze locked on my wide, panicked one in the glass.
The hundred other Annas watched from their prisons, but here, in this single shard, there was only him and me.
“These are yours,” he said, his voice barely above a murmur.
The words brushed my ear, intimate and devastating.
His hands remained at his sides, but his presence was an embrace. “But you are here.”
I tried to speak, to argue, but my throat was sealed shut.
I tried to run, to break the spell of his proximity, but my feet were rooted.
All I could do was stare at our merged reflection—the solid reality of him against the chaotic potential of me.
The panic was a live wire, sizzling under my skin.
But beneath it, coiling low in my belly, was a different kind of thrill.
The thrill of being seen. Not just seen—anchored.
He didn’t touch me. He didn’t need to. His certainty was a tether, pulling me back from the edge of the maze.
“Look,” he commanded softly, his eyes holding mine in the reflection. “Not at them. At this.”
This. The heat of his breath on my neck.
The solid floor under my bare feet. The rapid, real beat of my own heart.
The version of me standing in a chamber of crystal, with a man who dealt in nightmares standing at her back, choosing her.
The panic didn’t vanish. It simply met the heat head-on, creating a pulse that echoed through my entire body.
Part terror, part surrender. Part thrill.
He was the only fixed point in a universe of my own shifting failures.
And God help me, I wanted to lean back into that solid warmth and let the crystal world shatter.
I turned. It wasn’t a decision. It was an explosion of motion, a frantic lurch away from the mirror, from his voice, from the terrifying clarity in his eyes.
My shoulder clipped his chest as I spun, and the contact—solid, warm, real—sent another jolt through me.
I didn’t look at him. I just ran. The nearest archway, a gap between two towering violet crystals, swallowed me.
The harmonic hum that had drawn me here turned into a dissonant ringing in my ears.
The path ahead, clear a second before, shimmered and split.
A new corridor branched to the left, its walls a sickly green.
I veered right, my breath already coming in sharp gasps.
The floor, smooth as ice, made my socks useless.
I skidded, arms pinwheeling, and caught myself against a wall.
It was cool and humming under my palms. “Anna.”
His voice came from everywhere and nowhere.
Calm. Unhurried. It didn’t echo; it simply arrived in the space around me, as if the crystal carried it.
I pushed off and ran again. Left, then right, then a sharp turn into a dead end that dissolved into three new openings as I neared it.
A maze. A fucking funhouse mirror of my own psyche.
Every surface showed me a fragment of myself—an Anna in a sleek pantsuit giving a presentation, her face a mask of confidence; an Anna curled in a dim apartment, staring at a blank television; an Anna laughing at a crowded party, the smile not reaching her eyes.
They multiplied with every step, a hall of horrors made of my own mediocrity.
My heart wasn’t just racing; it was a hammer against my ribs, so loud I was sure the sound was echoing back at me through the crystal.
Part panic. Yes, that was the acid in my throat, the cold sweat at the small of my back.
But the other part… the thrill… it was a low, persistent burn between my legs, a traitorous pulse that matched the rhythm of my fleeing feet.
I was running from him. But a shameful, desperate part of me was running for him.
To see if he would follow. To see if he could find me in this mess. “Stop.”
The command was gentle, but it held a weight that made the air feel thicker.
I didn’t stop. I ducked through a low, narrow passage, the crystals here a deep, opaque black.
It was darker, quieter. I pressed my back against the cool wall, trying to quiet my breathing.
The sound of my own blood was a roar in my ears.
A soft scrape, like a shoe shifting on stone, came from my left.
I froze. “You’re only lost if you believe you are,” he said.
His voice was closer now, just around a bend in the path.
“The paths shift with your fear. Stand still. Breathe.”