The mirror was a liar.
Lovina sat in the cramped, windowless bathroom of her basement apartment, staring at the woman reflected in the cracked glass. For a year, she had avoided looking at herself for more than a few seconds. To look was to remember the heat. To look was to hear the roar of the flames that had turned her skin into a map of scars and her future into ash.
She picked up a pair of heavy kitchen shears. With a steady hand, she chopped through her long, chestnut hair—the hair Julian used to wind around his fingers every night before they slept. It fell to the linoleum floor in thick, dead clumps.
"Lovina Thorne died in that fire," she whispered, her voice raspy from the smoke damage that had never truly healed. "Vina is all that's left."
She spent the next hour applying a dark, cheap dye to her remaining hair, turning it into a flat, unremarkable raven black. It drained the warmth from her face, making her eyes look unnervingly large and haunted.
Then came the makeup. She wasn't trying to look beautiful; she was trying to look invisible. She used a heavy, medical-grade concealer to hide the worst of the scars on her neck and jawline, blending it until she looked like a woman who had simply lived a hard, weary life. She practiced her posture in the mirror—shoulders slumped, head bowed, eyes downcast.
A maid. A shadow. A ghost that cleaned the corners of the room.
The next morning, Lovina stood outside the Grace Medical Center. She had saved every cent from three under-the-table cleaning jobs to afford this final touch.
"The vocal cord procedure is delicate," the doctor had told her months ago. "It won't make you sound like a singer, but it will remove the rasp. It will change your pitch."
Perfect, she had thought. Julian knows my voice as a melody. I want him to hear me as a whisper.
Weeks after the surgery, her new voice arrived. It was lower, cooler, and stripped of the rhythmic lilt that Julian used to call his favorite song. She sounded like a stranger. She sounded like a threat hidden in a lullaby.
Her final stop was a park bench across from Elena's favorite boutique. Lovina watched through the glass as Elena walked out, draped in shopping bags, laughing into her phone.
"Yes, Julian is still... difficult," Elena said, her voice carrying over the street noise. She stopped to check her reflection in the store window, preening. "But he's leaning on me. He needs me. Once he stops mourning that pathetic girl, I'll be the mistress of that house in every sense of the word. I just need a new maid—someone stupid and quiet who won't notice when I start moving my things into the master suite."
Lovina gripped the handle of her bag so hard the leather groaned.
Stupid and quiet. Elena didn't want a human being; she wanted a tool. She wanted someone she could look past, someone who would witness her triumph and say nothing.
Lovina stood up, her movements fluid and predatory. She had the name of the agency Elena used. She had the fake references. She had the new face, the new voice, and a heart that no longer felt the cold.
She looked up at the sky. The clouds were heavy, promising more rain.
"I'm coming home, Julian," she murmured, the words feeling like a vow. "Not to save you. But to take back what's mine."
She walked toward the bus stop, leaving the remnants of Lovina Thorne in the trash can of a public park. The game had officially begun.