Chapter 3: The girl in the mirror

Serena’s POV

The first thing I noticed was the ceiling.

White. Smooth. A water stain in the far left corner shaped like nothing in particular. I stared at it for a long time before I understood that I was staring at it, that my eyes were open, that I was somewhere.

I turned my head.

Machines. Tubes running from my arm to something beeping steadily beside me. A window with pale winter light pressing through half open blinds. A chair pulled close to the bed with a blanket folded across it, creased in the specific way blankets got when someone had been sleeping under them for a long time.

A hospital.

I tried to sit up and the room swung sideways so violently I fell back against the pillow, gasping. My head was full of something thick and heavy. My mouth was dry as paper. I lay still and breathed and waited for the spinning to slow.

Something was wrong with my hands.

I raised them slowly and held them above my face. Stared at them. Turned them over. Pressed them together. They were smaller than I expected. The knuckles were different. There was a small scar on the left palm that I had never seen before in my life and had absolutely no memory of getting.

My hands.

Except they were not my hands.

I pushed myself upright despite the spinning, slowly this time, gripping the bed rail with fingers that did not belong to me. Something fell across my face. I grabbed it. Hair. Dark. A thick curtain of dark hair falling over my shoulder when I pulled it forward.

My hair was not dark.

My hair had never been dark in my entire life.

I dropped it like it had burned me and pressed both hands to my face and felt the wrong jaw, the wrong cheekbones, the wrong everything, and something primal and wordless moved through my chest that was not quite a scream but wanted to be.

The door opened.

A nurse came in carrying a clipboard, already talking before she fully entered the room. “Good morning, I just need to check your…” She stopped. She looked at me sitting upright in the bed with both hands pressed to my face and her clipboard came down immediately. 

“Oh my goodness.” She was across the room in three steps. “You’re awake. You’re actually awake.” She grabbed my wrist to check my pulse, her other hand already reaching for the call button above the bed. 

“Don’t try to move too fast, okay? You’ve been under for a long time. Just breathe for me.”

“A mirror,” I said. My voice came out as a croak, rough and strange, like it had been folded up and put away somewhere. “I need a mirror.”

She looked at me with the careful expression of someone assessing a patient’s mental state. “Let me get the doctor first and then we can…”

“Please.” I grabbed her wrist. “I need to see my face. Right now. Please.”

She hesitated. Then she reached into her scrubs pocket and produced a small compact mirror and held it out.

I opened it with shaking hands.

A stranger looked back at me.

Dark eyes. Dark hair framing a face I had never seen before. Full lips. A small nose. Skin a few shades paler than mine had ever been. She looked young, maybe my age, maybe younger. Pretty in the girl next door type of way. 

I did not know this face.

I closed the mirror. Opened it again. The stranger did the same.

I closed it a second time and held it in my lap and sat with the particular stillness of someone whose mind has gone somewhere very quiet and very cold because it is the only way to keep functioning.

“Are you alright?” the nurse asked.

“My phone,” I said. “I need my phone.”

“There’s no phone in your personal effects, I’m afraid. You came in without one.” She was watching me carefully. “Is there someone I can call for you? A family member? Your…”

“Can I borrow yours?” I looked at her. “Please. Just for one minute. I need to look something up.”

She looked uncertain. Then something in my expression must have told her that this was not a normal request from a normal patient because she reached into her pocket again and unlocked her phone and handed it to me without another word.

I opened the browser.

I typed my own name.

The results loaded and I read the first headline and the room went completely silent around me even though the machines were still beeping and the nurse was still standing beside me and the city was still moving outside the window.

SERENA COLE, FORMER RHODES INC ASSOCIATE, DEAD AT 26 FOLLOWING LATE NIGHT ACCIDENT.

I scrolled.

TRIBUTES POUR IN FOR SERENA COLE AS RHODES INCORPORATED CONFIRMS HER PASSING.

INVESTIGATION CLOSED: SERENA COLE ACCIDENT RULED MECHANICAL FAILURE.

Mechanical failure. The accident was a blur — rain, headlights, then nothing — and apparently that nothing had lasted six months.

But the gala was not a blur.

The gala was crystal clear. Every detail of it sitting in my chest like broken glass. Vivian’s betrayal. And Killian — Killian who I had given everything to— standing at that microphone and believing that I could betray him. Three years together and he had not hesitated for a single second. Had not pulled me aside. Had not looked at my face and thought wait. He had just said ‘remove her’ and turned away.

I kept scrolling with hands that would not stop shaking. There were photos. My face on every screen attached to words like former and late and deceased.

A girl from the Rhodes marketing team had posted a black and white photo of us at a company lunch with the caption gone too soon. She had never once spoken to me at that lunch.

I scrolled further.

KILLIAN RHODES AND VIVIAN HART CONFIRM RELATIONSHIP EIGHT WEEKS AFTER COLE TRAGEDY.

The photo was taken outside a restaurant. Killian in a dark coat. Vivian beside him, her hand in his, her face turned toward the camera with that smile I had known for six years. The smile I had trusted completely.

Eight weeks. She had waited eight weeks.

I kept scrolling.

RHODES INC CEO KILLIAN RHODES ENGAGED TO VIVIAN HART.

I put the phone face down on the bed and pressed both hands over my mouth and sat completely still and breathed through it. In and out. In and out. The machines beeped steadily beside me, indifferent, measuring a heartbeat that belonged to a woman who was supposed to be dead.

The door burst open.

The man who walked in stopped completely when he saw my eyes open. He looked like he had not slept properly in months. Shadows under his eyes. Jaw unshaven. A shirt that was slightly wrinkled in the way shirts got when you had been living somewhere you had not planned to stay.

He stood in the doorway and stared at me.

Then something broke open in his face completely and he crossed the room in four steps and pulled me into his arms so suddenly I had no time to react. I could feel him shaking against me.

“Elena,” he said against my hair. “Elena. Elena.”

I sat with my hands at my sides and my heart hammering and absolutely no idea who this man was or what I was supposed to do.

He pulled back and held my face in both his hands and looked at me like he was checking every part of me for damage.

“Say something,” he said. His voice broke on the last word. “Please. Say anything.”

“Mama!”

A small body launched itself through the door and onto the bed with the fearlessness of a child who has never once doubted the world will catch her. She pressed her face into my stomach and wrapped her arms around my waist and held on.

She looked up at me. Dark curly hair. Big brown eyes full of a trust so complete and unconditional it physically hurt to look at.

“I told Daddy you would wake up,” she said. “I told him every single day.”

I looked at the man over the top of her head. He was watching me with wet eyes and a smile that was still shaking at the edges.

“How long,” I paused, trying to search for the right words. “How long have I been unconscious?”

His smile faltered. “Six months and four days.”

Six months.

I looked down at the child pressed against my side. 

She had found my hand in her sleep.

Six months. Killian was engaged. Vivian was wearing a ring that had no right to exist. And I was sitting in a hospital bed in a body I did not recognize with a child I had never met and a life I did not know waiting outside those doors.

I looked back at the man.

“What is your name?” I asked.

The smile left his face completely.

“Elena,” he said carefully. “It’s me. It’s Dominic.”

I held his gaze for a long moment. At the exhausted eyes. At the wrinkled shirt. At the blanket on the chair that told me he had been sleeping here for six months waiting for a woman whose life I was apparently now living.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

His brow furrowed. “Sorry for what?”

I didn’t answer.

Outside the window, the city was moving. Killian was somewhere in it, engaged to my best friend, building an empire on the foundation of everything I had given him.

That was enough to snap me out of my existential despair. 

I didn’t understand what was happening but one thing was certain. 

I was going to have to be Elena. For now. For as long as it took.

And when the time was right, I was going to burn the world down.

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