Page 76 of You Were Always Mine
My breath catches, but I don’t move. If I run, he’ll chase. If I stay, he’ll find me.
“Shhh,” he whispers now, almost gentle, and it feels like warm breath ghosts over my ear. “Don’t cry, little rabbit. The more you fight, the sweeter it tastes.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. Silent. Always silent.
And then—knuckles drag against the mirror just inches from my cheek. Slow. Scraping. Claiming.
“Scarlett.” His voice is velvet wrapped around a knife. “I’m right here.”
The scrape of his knuckles fades, swallowed by themirrors. My pulse thunders so loud I almost believe it could crack the glass for me. Almost.
I keep my mouth shut. I don’t beg. I don’t call his name.
“Still quiet,” he murmurs from somewhere behind me — but when I whirl, there’s nothing. Just a row of Scarletts staring back, lips clamped shut, eyes glistening like hunted things.
The floor creaks two steps to my left. Then, there were three behind me. Then closer, so close I swear the breath on my neck is real, though every time I spin I see nothing but myself.
“Every time you don’t answer, Scar…” His voice slides down my spine, molten and cruel. “…I imagine what you’ll sound like when I finally take the choice away.”
My nails dig into my palms. The mirrors multiply my trembling body, my pressed lips, my shame.
“You’re soaked, aren’t you?” The words are silk and venom. “Lost, scared, and wet. You don’t need to say it — your silence already gave you away.”
I press harder into the mirror behind me, glass biting cold through my shirt, my chest rising and falling in frantic waves.
Somewhere close — a low laugh. Not loud, not sharp. Just soft. Certain.
“You won’t last long, little rabbit,” he whispers, circling. “I’ll hear it in your voice. I’ll taste it when you break.”
The silence after is worse than the words. It thrums thick and endless until my knees almost buckle beneath it.
I stumble deeper into the glass maze, palms leaving sweaty smears on the mirrors as I turn corner after corner.My own face mocks me—cheeks wet, lips trembling, eyes wide with the terror I won’t speak aloud.
Every reflection is a liar.
A whisper of leather creaks somewhere to my right. A shadow skims the glass on my left. I whip around, and it’s only me again, multiplied a hundredfold.
“Run faster,” Kai’s voice croons through the dark. “If you don’t, I’ll have to drag you down.”
My breath hitches. My shoes slap the warped tiles as I push forward, frantic. Lights flicker overhead, painting me in stuttering flashes of red and white.
The mirrors twist my image taller, thinner, broken. In one pane, I look like I’m already caught, his hand around my throat, my mouth open in a silent scream. I slap the glass—shatter nothing. Just a cruel trick of the funhouse.
“Do you feel it?” His voice coils closer, teasing, cruel. “Your heart breaking itself against your ribs. Your thighs clenching, trying to hide what you really want me to see.”
I shake my head hard, strands of hair sticking to my damp cheeks. Silent. Then—footsteps. Slow. Heavy. Definite.
One reflection shifts. Not me. Broader. Darker. A silhouette bleeding through the glass.
My breath tears out of me, a soundless sob, as I lunge deeper into the maze, mirrors rattling as my shoulder smashes against them. The sound of his laugh follows, low and sure, like he already knows there’s no exit.
I take one more wrong turn, breath hitching, my palms slipping on the cold glass. My reflection breaks into twenty frantic Scarletts, all trembling, all with nowhere left to run.
And then I feel it.
The wall of heat behind me. His body blocking thenarrow path, his reflection slides in behind mine until the mirror swallows us whole.
“Game over.” The words are low, steady, almost kind. They make my skin crawl worse than a shout.
