The glass was covered again.
Not my main cabin upstairs but the small ground-floor cabin near the entrance, the one I only used for quick meetings. I walked in and froze.
Red strokes. Permanent marker. Scribbles running across the entire glass wall like someone had tried to draw symbols or shapes they barely understood.
I felt my jaw tighten. I pulled out my phone and dialed one of the junior managers.
He picked up instantly. "Sir?"
"Come to my ground-floor cabin. Right now."
Within seconds he appeared at the doorway, nervous, adjusting his badge. I didn't let him speak. I pointed at the glass. "You see this?" I said, voice flat. "We warned that guy outside. Repeatedly. Strictly. Yet every morning, this is what I walk into. Permanent marker. Do you understand? It doesn't come off."
He stammered, "Y-Yes sir, but—"
"No excuses. Get rid of him. I don't want him on this property again. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever."
He nodded frantically and rushed out.
I stayed a moment longer, staring at the red scribbles. Why was he drawing? Why the same shapes? Why the windows of my cabin?
I didn't know, and frankly, after a long day, I didn't care.
I headed down to the parking lot. My Rolls-Royce sat in its reserved spot, flawless under the dim basement lighting. The moment I slid in, the soft leather and quiet hum of the engine washed over me like relief.
Home felt warm the second I stepped inside. Lucy peeked from the kitchen with her hair in a bun, apron half tied.
"You look like a storm cloud," she said, laughing.
"Some idiot vandal keeps scribbling on the ground-floor cabin glass," I muttered. "Permanent marker. Again."
She shook her head, amused. "You attract chaos, Denny."
Before I could respond, Ben ran to me — tiny toy piano in hand, cheeks flushed with excitement. "Dad! Dad! Wanna hear my NEW song?!"
He smashed a handful of keys at once. No rhythm. No melody. Pure chaos. He looked proud enough to explode.
"It's beautiful," I told him.
"It's about a dragon named BLOOF!" he announced.
Lucy leaned in. "Yesterday the dragon was a cat."
Ben gasped. "He shapeshifts!"
We talked, laughed, ate. Ben argued that bedtime was illegal. Lucy pretended to scold him. I felt at least for a moment like life was simple.
When we finally went to bed, exhaustion hit me in a slow wave. But sleep didn't stay peaceful.
I jolted awake, drenched in sweat.
Lucy was already sitting up beside me, worry softening her voice. "Denny? What happened?"
I tried to breathe. "Just a dream… a strange one."
She handed me a glass of water, rubbing my back until the tremors eased. Eventually I lay down again, letting the exhaustion pull me back under.
Morning came fast.
I didn't go to the office today there was a partner meeting in the next city. The forest route was quieter, shorter, peaceful. Exactly what I needed.
I drove with indie pop humming through the speakers, sunlight streaking through the trees. My fingers tapped the wheel to a tune I'd played the night before on our piano. For a while, the road felt perfect — long, silent, uncomplicated.
Then something changed.
A cloud of dust formed ahead not blowing away, not drifting. Forming. Pulling together like invisible strings were tightening.
I slowed the car.
The dust thickened. Darkened. Sharpened and became a grille. Headlights. A hood. A car materialized out of thin air.
"What the"
The car swerved violently into my lane.
A split second of sheer silence.
Then
CRAAAAASHHH!!
Metal ripped. Glass exploded. My world spun sideways. My breath vanished. The seatbelt crushed into my chest. The steering wheel tore away under impact. Sound collapsed into a ringing void.
And then everything went black.
When my eyes finally opened, I wasn't on the road anymore. I wasn't in the woods. I wasn't in my car. But I was still strapped into the same driver's seat — tightly, painfully as if the crash had swallowed only me and left the rest of the world behind.
And around me… mirrors.
A room made entirely of mirrors. Floor, ceiling, walls everywhere I looked, there were reflections of me strapped to the seat. Hundreds of versions of my own terrified face, staring back at me from every angle. No doors. No seams. No lights yet somehow the room glowed.
It felt like being trapped inside my own skull.
I tried to shout, but the sound bounced back at me a thousand times, echoing until it didn't even sound like my voice anymore.
Then… movement.
In the far corner, dust began lifting off the floor. Not falling forming. Gathering. Tiny particles swirled together like someone was drawing a human shape out of smoke. The outline sharpened. Shoulders. Arms. A head. Then a second figure formed right beside it both of them solidifying into men dressed in full black from head to toe.
My breath stuttered.
They started walking toward me without a sound, perfectly in sync, like they weren't people at all just shadows wearing bodies.
And then more dust rose.
Right between the two men, the air twisted again, faster this time, forming a third shape. The particles pulled inward until another figure stood between them. Taller. Still. More controlled. His clothes were darker than theirs — sharper lines, heavier fabric and his face wasn't a face at all.
He wore a mask.
Smooth. Metallic. Two glowing red lines where eyes should have been.
I had never seen anything like it. Not in my life. Not in any nightmare my mind could have invented.
The closer he stepped, the harder my chest tightened, like the room itself was shrinking around me.
"What… who are you?" I whispered.
The red lights on his mask flared bright enough to paint every mirror in the room with streaks of crimson. The two black-clad men stopped beside him, standing like guards around a king. The masked one tilted his head just slightly, studying me as if he had finally found what he'd been looking for.
I swallowed, unable to breathe.
This wasn't a rescue. This wasn't an accident. They took me.
The masked man finally spoke, and the sound of his voice made my skin crawl. It wasn't human not fully i think. Every word came out warped, metallic, like it had been torn apart and rebuilt by the mask before reaching my ears. It echoed unnaturally through the mirrored room, bouncing off my own reflections until I couldn't tell where it was coming from.
He moved forward and lowered himself as if to sit, and for a split second I realized there was nothing there no chair, no platform until dust rose from the floor beneath him. The particles swirled violently, compacting, shaping themselves into something solid. A throne. Not carved, not built, but formed like universe itself was obeying him. He settled into it slowly, deliberately, crossing one leg over the other as if this place belonged to him.
"The only way you walk free from us," he said, his distorted voice stretching unnaturally on certain syllables, "is if you tell me everything about Naudrem… and how you did all of this." A harsh, synthetic laugh crackled through the mask. "I'm serious now." The red lines on his face pulsed brighter. "I want to know about RedTie. Its connection to the Nine Stars. And Naudrem."
My mind reeled. My throat went dry.
"What… what are you talking about?" I asked, my voice shaking despite my effort to steady it. "What did I do? I don't even know what Naudrem is." The word felt wrong in my mouth, foreign, like it didn't belong to my language or my life. "And the Nine Stars how do you know about that? That symbol is tied to my family… my ancestors. Who are you? And what game are you playing with me?"
The mirrors caught my expression from every angle fear, disbelief, anger — all of it trapped and multiplied.
One of the men in black finally spoke, his voice low and uncertain, turning slightly toward the masked figure as if daring to question him. He said something to the effect of maybe this one isn't him, maybe they had the wrong Dennison and for a brief second I felt a fragile flicker of hope spark in my chest.
But it died instantly.
The masked man rose from the throne, the dust beneath him collapsing back into nothing, and he stepped toward me with a calm that was far more terrifying than anger. He leaned in so close I could feel the cold radiating off the mask, the red lights hovering inches from my face, and then he whispered directly into my ear his distorted voice dropping into something almost intimate:
"There's a way we can go."
The moment the words left him, a second voice erupted from behind me loud, broken, layered, as if multiple realities were screaming at once. The sound tore through the room, and the mirrors began to fracture not cracking but bending inward, spiraling like liquid glass. The walls folded into themselves, reflections stretching and warping until my own face shattered into countless versions, all screaming silently. The throne dissolved. The men vanished. The room collapsed inward and swallowed itself, and suddenly I wasn't falling I was floating, suspended in absolute darkness, a void so complete I couldn't feel my body anymore.
And then it started.
Memories slammed into me without warning, playing over each other like corrupted footage. I saw the accident the one from weeks after Lucas died the sudden car, the impact, the moment I'd blacked out without ever realizing what I'd missed. At the same time, another crash played beside it, overlaid in my head like a second screen: a different road, a different me, the same impossible car forming out of nothing, the same violent collision. Two Dennys. Two crashes. Perfectly identical glitches only separated by time.
Then another memory tore through the darkness Christopher. The chamber. The gun. I saw him raise it, saw Abel fall, saw Oliver drop, and finally felt the moment the weapon turned toward me. I remembered the sound. The light. The impact. And then nothing. Blackout. Not death. Not sleep. Just absence.
The darkness thinned slowly, like fog peeling off my skin until I felt my breath again.
Lucy. I was just with her. In the kitchen. Laughing. Eating. Holding Ben while he shouted about his dragon Bloof. I could still smell her apron. I could still hear Ben's toy piano.
But at the same time Diana. Her voice. Her little shoes tapping on the stairs. Her giggle. Her doll. Her photo frame that changed right in front of my eyes.
Why did I remember her so clearly… when she didn't exist in this world?
And then Lucas. The accident after he died. The road. The apology from the man in the painted mask. The way I blacked out. But here in this version of my life Lucas wasn't dead. He was alive. He existed. He was normal.
So how do I remember both?
Why do I feel like I'm living two lives at once? Two families? Two tragedies? Two timelines piling inside one skull?
The questions only multiplied. I tried to hold onto something my name, my life, the mirror room, the masked man but everything slipped like water through my fingers.
And before I could anchor myself
A sudden, sharp inhale ripped out of me. My eyes snapped open.
I wasn't in the dark anymore.
I was lying on a dusty wooden floor in a building that looked like it had been abandoned for years. Broken windows. Cobwebs in the corners. Rusty metal beams overhead. Paint peeling off in long strips. A place that hadn't seen life for decades.
My head ached violently as I pushed myself upright.
"What… what the hell…" I whispered.
And then I saw something that froze my blood.
There was writing on my hand.
A sentence. Drawn in thick red permanent marker. The same colour as the vandal's scribbles on the cabin glass. The same colour as the warning I'd ignored.
Four words.
There's a way we can go.
My breath left my lungs in one violent rush.
It wasn't a dream. It wasn't a hallucination.
I stared at the words on my skin, the ink burned into my flesh as if it wasn't just written on me but written for me.
My heart pounded.