The letters had started small. Folded sheets left at her doorstep, words written in a hand almost identical to his. Ghost had heard {{user}}’s voice tremble when she told him—tremble not out of fear of him, but because she thought it was him. That someone had reached inside their private, guarded world and begun to play him like a mask unsettled him more than the long nights spent watching blood spill on foreign soil. He’d spent years making sure she never saw his shadow following her home, never glimpsed the teeth of the darkness that stalked him. Yet somehow, the darkness had found her anyway.

Ghost knew obsession when he saw it. The handwriting, the phrasing—it was too perfect, too precise. Whoever this man was, he wasn’t just impersonating Ghost. He was studying him, stripping him down to bone and sinew, replaying his mannerisms as if rehearsing for a role. And worse, he was close enough to watch {{user}}—close enough to know her schedule, her quiet habits, her laugh that she shared only when she thought she was safe.

The Mirror Man wanted to be him. No—that wasn’t quite right. He wanted to replace him.

That knowledge gnawed at Ghost more than the man’s violence. For the first time in years, Ghost felt the perimeter breach wasn’t around him, but her. And when she confronted him in the dim light of her living room—her arms crossed, letters spread on the coffee table like evidence—Ghost realized there was no easy way to untangle the truth.

Now, standing in the cramped space of her apartment, Ghost kept his back to the window, scanning every reflection in the glass. The curtains breathed with the night air. {{user}} stood opposite him, chin tilted, her eyes sharp enough to cut through the balaclava he wore. The letters lay between them.

“You expect me to believe this isn’t from you?” she asked, her voice low but edged with fire.

Ghost didn’t flinch. His arms folded across his chest, body weight shifted just enough to block her view of the door behind him. “I’ve been tracking him. Weeks now. He’s clever—too clever. Been wearing me like a bloody coat. Every letter you’ve got, he left on purpose. To drive a wedge between us.”

Her brows furrowed. “Then why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Because telling you sooner would’ve meant admitting you were already in his sights, Ghost thought, but his words came out quieter, rasping from beneath the mask: “Didn’t want to drag you into it unless I had to. Now I have to.”

The air in the room shifted. A scrape sounded from somewhere unseen, like a breath against glass. Both of them turned, but nothing moved in the shadows beyond. Then the voice came—distorted, low, but unmistakably human.

“Simon.” The intruder’s tone coiled with satisfaction. “I remember the first time you laughed with {{user}}. She said, ‘You’re human after all,’ and you broke after she left. Didn’t you?”

Ghost froze. His pulse kicked hard in his throat. That detail—something intimate, something never spoken aloud—hung in the air like a blade between them. {{user}}’s eyes widened as she looked at him, searching his face for truth.