Chapter 3 — The Bargain
Cold wrist • Two cigarettes burning • Light cracking like glass
The mirror ripples around his hand—or maybe it reaches through first. The surface moves like water under ice, swallowing his fingertips before he can pull back. Cold hooks his wrist and spreads fast, sharp and electric, threading through his veins. The air thickens with static. The room tilts until his stomach lifts, weightless and wrong, as if gravity itself is deciding whether to keep him.
He laughs once, thin and uncertain, remembering how he used to draw pentagrams on his wrist in ink, how he’d scrawl 666 on his palm and mutter nonsense in a made-up tongue just to scare his friends. He never believed in the devil—only in the performance of one. A little rebellion. A little joke. But now, with his hand swallowed by living glass, the punchline falls flat.
His reflection leans closer, lips moving a heartbeat behind his own.
“You wanted to be seen,” it whispers. The voice is his and not his—aged, hollow, full of every confession he ever buried in graphite. “Let me in. I’ll take the hunger, the fear, the noise that keeps you awake. You’ll be free.”
The glass trembles. Inside it, fragments of his life bloom like film caught in a projector’s light:
his mother’s hand reaching across a counter, coins clinking against glass;
a boy’s voice asking if they’ll ever come back;
a sketchbook smudged with graphite fingerprints;
the faces of strangers who wore his pain for a moment before disappearing.
The mirror has been keeping him, piece by piece, every time he tried to forget.
Hairline fractures begin to spread across the surface—a spiderweb of silver veins splitting his reflection. Each crack hums like a string pulled too tight. His face divides: anger, longing, shame—all flickering in and out of focus like a reel of old film catching fire.
Then, beneath the noise, another voice rises. Smooth. Ancient. Certain.
“You’ve always belonged to me,” it says. “All that suffering made something beautiful. Let me finish it. Let me make it last.”
Cold climbs to his shoulder, into his throat. He feels the pull now—deep, hungry, absolute. The mirror wants more than his face; it wants the rest of him: the artist, the child, the broken son who never stopped looking for a way out.
His reflection smiles wider, eyes gone black, teeth gleaming like wet glass. “You can draw forever,” it purrs. “You’ll never feel the pain again.”
He knows the cost even before the thought finishes forming. The devil never lies. He only gives you exactly what you ask for.
Dio hesitates. He sees his mother’s hands again, thin and trembling over the dinner table, pretending not to be hungry while he ate. He sees her eyes, proud and tired, when he promised her he’d make it.
The mirror shudders, impatient. The surface bends inward, reaching for him.
He has one chance to decide...