It's raining when she opens her eyes.
Not in the way that water falls, but in the way memory dissolves—one shimmer at a time. The mirror is gone. She knows this not because she saw it break, but because her mind no longer aches.
And Lucien is beside her.
Breathing like he forgot how.
His hand wrapped around hers as if he didn't quite win her back, only managed to catch her as she fell.
---
They're lying on the marble floor of the gallery.
The real one.
No gold-flecked illusions. No bleeding chandeliers. Just cool stone and the scent of extinguished fire.
And silence.
---
> "You came back," she murmurs, voice a fragile thread.
Lucien turns his head toward her. His eyes are red-rimmed, but his grip is steady.
> "You say that like I ever left."
She almost smiles.
Almost.
Then she remembers:
The girls in the mirrors.
The versions of her that hated.
That kissed him with knives in their mouths.
> "You saw all of them," she says, quieter. "All the other me's."
Lucien nods.
> "They weren't you."
> "They were. Just… twisted. Bruised. Versions of me if I broke a little differently."
He swallows.
> "But you didn't break."
> "I did," she corrects. "I just remembered how to pull the pieces back."
---
They sit in silence.
Outside, the storm moves on. The sky stretches open like a wound learning to close.
---
After a while, Lucien finally says it:
> "Mara's gone."
Irlenne doesn't ask how. She doesn't need to.
> "Good," she says, but it doesn't feel triumphant.
It feels like a stitch pulled too tight.
Like something rotten pulled from a wound that's now able to fester in peace.
---
> "She loved me," Irlenne says suddenly. "Or wanted to. Or wanted to be me. I'm not sure which was worse."
> "All three."
> "Do you hate her?"
Lucien looks at the darkened space where the mirror used to be.
> "No," he says softly. "But I wouldn't save her."
Irlenne turns to him.
> "You saved me."
> "No," he corrects, brushing her knuckles with his thumb. "You came back. I just didn't let you do it alone."
---
✴︎
They don't leave the gallery for a long time.
Not because they're trapped—
But because they're free.
And neither of them know what the world looks like when it isn't distorted by longing.
---
Later that night, Irlenne returns to the manor's upper floor.
The room with the silver spine of the house. Where the mirror used to live.
The walls are bare now. The air still.
But something glimmers faintly in the corner.
She steps forward.
Not a mirror.
A shard.
Just one.
Half the size of her palm.
It hums when she touches it.
And instead of a reflection, it shows a memory:
Lucien, laughing. Real. Whole. Hers.
She slips it into her coat pocket.
---
Not as a weapon.
Not as a keepsake.
But as a reminder:
The mirror never creates. It only shows.
And sometimes—what you see is a choice.