The rain was constantly hammering, a monotonous drumbeat that seemed intent on piercing the apartment windows. He rose from the bed, the cold, damp sheets peeling away from his body like a second, dead skin. The air inside the room smelled of confinement—old wood and the dampness seeping through the window frames. He didn’t turn on the light. There was no need. The grayish half-light of the rainy dawn was enough to move through the small, familiar space.

  He headed to the bathroom with the automatic steps of someone repeating a ritual for the thousandth time. Only the sound of rain accompanied him, a white, enveloping hum that drowned out every other thought. As he crossed the doorway, he avoided looking at the mirror above the sink. There was no reason to. He knew what he would see: his own tired face, the shadow of stubble, eyes still clouded by a restless sleep.

  He leaned over the sink; hands braced on the edge of the cold porcelain. He turned the cold-water tap. The stream burst out strong, clear, and icy. He bent lower, scooping the water onto his face with both hands. The impact of the freezing liquid against his skin should have been a revitalizing shock, a brutal wake-up. But it wasn’t.

  Something was wrong. A strange sensation—viscous and warm—spread across his cheek, sliding down his chin. It wasn’t the clean freshness of water. It was… sticky. Confused, he frowned with his eyes still closed and rinsed again. And again. The sensation didn’t fade; it intensified damp heat that clashed violently with the cold water. And then, the smell. A metallic, heavy stench that filled his nostrils and lodged at the back of his throat: iron and rust. Blood.

  His heart, which a second earlier had been beating with the sluggishness of the newly awake, lurched wildly and climbed into his chest, hammering his ribs in a terrified gallop. His eyes flew open, still blurred by what he had believed was water, and his gaze dropped first to his hands.

  They were stained red. It wasn’t dyed; it wasn’t something that could be washed away. It was a thick living liquid that coated his palms, dyed his fingers, and pooled in the lines of his skin. Blood. Warm. His.

  A scream died in his throat, collapsing into a hoarse gasp. With a spasmodic movement, he lifted his head and, for the first time, faced the mirror. And the world shattered. It wasn’t him staring back from the other side of the glass.

  It was a girl.

  She had brown hair, long and tangled, stuck to her temples and shoulders by something wet and dark. Her face was pale, ghostlike, spattered with red droplets and carved by an expression of horror so absolutely it defied comprehension. But it was her eyes that were most unsettling: large, an intense emerald green, yet empty—gone—as if they were looking through the mirror and through him, into an abyss only she could see.

  And when he, driven by a reflex of pure disbelief, raised a trembling hand to his cheek, the girl in the mirror did the same. Her hand, stained red, lifted; her fingers touched her own skin. It wasn’t an illusion. It wasn’t a trick of the light. It was a reflection. His reflection.

  The revelation landed like a punch to the diaphragm. The air flew his lungs in a dry hiss. His gaze, dragged downward by primal terror, followed the reflection of the girl’s neck. There, right where the throat met the shoulder, was a wound. Not a scratch, not a clean cut. It was a deep, irregular gash, as if something had bitten or torn the flesh with savage force. And from that wound, slowly, inexorably, blood seeped. A thin crimson trickle slid along the collarbone and vanished into the hollow of the neckline of clothes that were stranger, oversized and loose, also soaked in red.

  But the most monstrous part wasn’t the wound itself, it was what was happening around it. The torn edges of flesh were moving. Healing, but not with unnatural speed—rather with an agonizing slowness, almost lazily, as if thousands of invisible threads were tugging at them, stitching the void together against their will. It was an obscene vision, a violation of the body’s logic.

  His legs gave out. It wasn’t an elegant faint; it was a total collapse, as if his bones had turned to jelly. He dropped to his knees on the cold tile floor, the impact reverberating through his body. He doubled over, bringing his hands to his mouth, only to smear his lips further with the sweet, metallic taste of blood. Air escaped his lungs in short, useless gasps; he tried to breathe, but every inhalation was a titanic effort, as if his chest were sealed inside an armor of ice.

  And yet, amid the paralyzing panic, a new and contradictory sensation began to bloom inside him. It wasn’t warmth—not exactly. It was as if the blood he had lost, the blood forming an ever-widening, darkening pool around him, wasn’t dead. It was alive. It throbbed with a slow, heavy pulse, and that pulse echoed in his veins, in his arteries. He could feel how that vital liquid, now spilled and cold on the floor, seemed to want to return. A strange tingling crept up his arms, a slow, viscous pull that wasn’t physical but purely perceptual—instinctive—of reconnection. The blood on the floor and the blood in his veins was calling to each other, and that call settled like an unsettling warmth in the deepest parts of his now-cold, trembling limbs.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  Through tears he couldn’t control, carving clean paths through the dried blood on his cheeks, he opened his eyes and looked down. The reflection in the pool of blood—dark and distorted—returned the same image: the unknown girl, kneeling in her own spill. But now he saw the detail that froze him to the marrow: fine scarlet threads, almost imperceptible, rising from the edge of the pool. They weren’t physical; they were like shadows of color, liquid intentions. And they crawled slowly up her bare arms, following the lines of her veins, advancing toward the wound in her neck like thirsty serpents. They didn’t hurt her. Quite the opposite. Wherever those shadows of blood touched her skin, a sudden, almost feverish warmth blossomed, as if life itself were being injected straight into her veins. The wound, at that contact, seemed to shudder and close another millimeter.

  It was too much. His vision, already blurred by tears and shock, began to cloud over, to smear the outlines of the bathroom, turning the exposed brick walls into indistinct stains of color. The only clear thing was the chattering of his own teeth—a dry, frantic clatter that filled his skull. The shaking was no longer just from cold or fear; it was a dull convulsion rattling his skeleton, setting every muscle vibrating in an uncontrollable spasm.

  Then, from the deepest part of his being—from a place he didn’t know, that wasn’t his and yet now fully inhabited him—a force was born. It wasn’t will. It wasn’t courage. It was something ancient, primitive, visceral. An absolute rejection of reality imposed upon him. His stomach clenched violently, folding his body even further. He opened his mouth, but no scream came out. What came was dry heaving deep, abominable retch that expelled no food, only a wave of pure nausea, of digested horror. The shudder that followed coursed from his empty stomach to the soles of his feet, a dirty, electric tremor.

  The treacherous body responded with its cold physiology. He felt the sudden, humiliating warmth between his legs, liquid escaping beyond his control before he could even think it. The acrid smell of urine mingled with the sweetness of blood, a nauseating cocktail that slammed into his senses like a blow.

  He couldn’t take it anymore. His lungs fought to find a rhythm, but managed only short, sharp inhalations, as if he were breathing shards of glass. His vision faded almost completely; the bathroom’s contours melted into a smear of gray and brown. His hands shook so violently he thought the bones would snap. His chest convulsed, rising and falling in desperate spasms. And then, the cold. A cold that didn’t come from outside but rose from within—as if the warmth of the returning blood had suddenly run out. His feet, his hands, went numb, losing all sensation. The tingling turned into a lethal numbness climbing up his limbs.

  Everything began to vanish. The light, the sound of the rain, the smell of blood and urine, the cold of the floor, everything faded, swallowed by a darkness creeping in from the edges of his vision, advancing relentlessly toward the center. Before the blackness consumed him completely, a word formed on his lips. It wasn’t a fully articulated thought; it was a whisper born from the fracture of his very identity, a ragged question spoken in a voice he didn’t recognize—thin, fragile, horrifyingly feminine.

  “What… am I?”

  The question hung in the poisoned air of the bathroom—no echo, no answer. And then infinite darkness swallowed her, without mercy, without dreams.

  The return was not an awakening. It was a slow, painful emergence from the depths of a bottomless well. First came sensation: a light, cool breeze brushing her skin. Then sound: the soft rustle of wind against fabric, the distant murmur of muffled voices. Finally, consciousness, dragging itself back into a body that felt strange—heavy, alien.

  She opened her eyes. The movement was slow, as if her eyelids weighed tons. The light was dim, filtered through a thick, rough fabric. She was lying… no, she was lying… on something hard. She turned her head with an effort that sent stabbing pain through her neck. On one side, only a fabric door. On the other…

  She saw buckets. Wooden buckets of various sizes, lined up against another stone wall. In one—the largest—the water reflected the diffuse light, still and clear. Water. Reflection. A new shiver, this one purely mental, ran down her spine. No. Please, no.

  But necessity macabre curiosity mixed with a desperate urge to deny—was stronger. Her legs didn’t respond; she felt her legs… her legs… like numb blocks of wood. With a stifled groan, she began to drag herself forward, using her elbows, hauling her heavy torso while her inert legs scraped across the wooden floor. Every centimeter was agony, a brutal reminder of her new reality.

  She reached the edge of the large bucket. The water smelled of damp wood and earth. She held her breath, closed her eyes for a moment, then—with one last effort of will—leaned over.

  Horror stared back at her from the still water.

  There she was again. The girl from the mirror. The pale face, the green eyes now filled with a dawning, understanding terror, the brown hair tangled and filthy. The blood was no longer fresh; it had dried into dark stains on her neck, leaving no scar at all.

  The trembling seized her again—a tremor that came from the center of her bones, violent and uncontrollable. She looked at her hands, raised them before her eyes. Slender fingers longer than she remembered, with a delicacy she had never possessed. Slightly long nails, dirt beneath them. A woman’s hands. This woman’s hands.

  Denial—fierce and desperate—exploded inside her. She pinched her arm hard, nails digging into the pale skin until red crescents formed. Nothing. She bit her lower lip, clamping down until the sweet taste of her own blood filled her mouth. Nothing. She struck her forehead with her closed fist—once, twice—but nothing happened. Nothing.

  She didn’t wake up. There was no sudden return to her old life, to her old body. This prison of soft flesh, of strange curves, of stranger pain that was now hers, was not a dream. It was reality, the only reality. That body was hers. That pain, that despair clawing at her chest with icy talons, was hers. And this unknown place, this stolen existence… was her prison.