CHAPTER FOUR BROKEN MIRRORS
1669 Words
CHAPTER FOUR
BROKEN MIRRORS
His hand stayed around my throat for exactly three seconds.
Long enough for terror to lock every muscle in my body.
Long enough for me to feel the unnatural strength in his grip.
Long enough to realize the eyes staring down at me did not belong to either version of him I understood.
Then he blinked.
Confusion cracked across his face instantly.
The pressure vanished.
Caelan jerked backward violently like he’d touched fire.
“What the hell—”
His voice changed halfway through the sentence.
The darker edge disappeared.
Cold personality.
Human.
He stared at me on the floor, breathing hard, gold eyes flickering with disorientation.
Then he looked at his own hand around my throat.
And horror swallowed his expression whole.
“I didn’t—”
He stopped.
Because he didn’t remember.
I knew it immediately.
The realization chilled me deeper than the threat itself.
Rain whispered softly against the cabin windows while silence stretched between us.
Broken furniture still littered the floor from the hunter attack. Blood stained the wooden boards beneath the fireplace. Smoke curled weakly from dying firewood while distant wolves howled somewhere beyond the trees.
The cabin felt haunted now.
Not by ghosts.
By fractured pieces of one man.
Caelan stood slowly, avoiding my eyes.
“What happened?”
His voice sounded controlled.
Too controlled.
Like someone trying not to panic.
I rubbed my throat carefully. “You tell me.”
His jaw tightened instantly.
That answer frightened him.
I could see it.
The uncertainty.
The missing time.
Something moved behind his eyes—brief, fractured confusion before the emotional walls slammed back into place.
“You should keep your distance today,” he said quietly.
Not cruel.
Worse.
Afraid.
By noon, I started documenting everything.
Because I genuinely thought I might lose my mind otherwise.
I found an old leather notebook hidden inside a kitchen drawer and sat near the window while rain rolled endlessly through the forest outside.
Page One:
Cold Personality
— Dominant posture rigid
— Speaks precisely
— Uses left hand more often
— Avoids touch
— Watches exits constantly
— Protective behaviors hidden beneath hostility
— Refers to wolf as separate entity
Wolf Personality
— Strong eye contact
— Emotionally expressive
— Uses right hand predominantly
— Seeks proximity
— Calls me “mate” constantly
— Heightened possessiveness
— Distressed when I’m frightened
I stared at the words afterward feeling nauseous.
It sounded clinical written down.
Too clinical for something this terrifyingly personal.
A floorboard creaked behind me.
I turned.
Caelan stood near the hallway watching me silently.
Cold personality.
“You’re profiling us now?”
Us.
Not me.
Us.
Another contradiction.
“I’m trying to understand what’s happening.”
“You won’t.”
His voice sounded exhausted.
But then he crossed the room, placed a fresh bandage beside my elbow, and walked away without another word.
I stared after him.
Five minutes later, I discovered he’d repaired the shattered lock on the front door while I’d been writing.
He never mentioned it.
Never acknowledged it.
But every protective thing he did screamed louder precisely because he acted like he didn’t care.
That terrified me more than the wolf staring at me like devotion made flesh.
Because the human personality loved through survival.
And people like that burned themselves alive trying to protect others.
The wolf emerged near sunset.
No warning.
One moment Caelan stood at the sink rinsing blood from his knuckles.
The next—
His shoulders loosened.
His breathing deepened.
And warmth flooded his eyes so suddenly my pulse stumbled.
“You’re hurt.”
He crossed the room immediately toward me.
Not aggressive.
Drawn.
His hand hovered near the fading bruises on my throat with visible restraint.
Pain twisted across his expression.
“He frightened you.”
I swallowed hard. “You threatened to kill me.”
“No,” he said softly. “Not me.”
The certainty in his voice unsettled me deeply.
His fingertips brushed my wrist carefully.
The mate bond pulsed violently beneath my ribs.
Heat spread instantly through my chest.
God.
Every time he touched me, it felt like my body remembered something my mind didn’t.
“You should hate us,” he whispered.
Instead, my stupid heart hurt for him.
A knock echoed suddenly through the cabin.
Three sharp taps.
The wolf went perfectly still.
Danger rolled off him instantly.
He moved in front of me without thinking.
Protective.
Always protective.
The door opened before either of us reached it.
A woman stepped inside carrying rain and cold air with her.
Beautiful.
Not delicately beautiful.
Dangerously beautiful.
Dark curls soaked from the storm framed sharp cheekbones and silver-gray eyes that scanned the cabin like someone accustomed to violence.
Then she looked at me.
And immediately froze.
Recognition flashed across her face.
“Oh,” she said quietly.
Mate.
The word went unspoken.
But I saw it in her expression.
The wolf beside me growled softly.
Possessively.
The woman’s gaze shifted toward him.
And something devastating crossed her face.
Fear.
Guilt.
Pity.
Like she remembered who he used to be before something terrible hollowed him out.
“Lyra,” the colder personality said suddenly.
The shift happened so fast it made my head ache.
Caelan now.
Guarded instantly.
Lyra’s eyes softened painfully.
“You look worse every time I see you.”
“That makes two of us.”
Tension coiled through the cabin immediately.
Old history.
Ugly history.
Lyra removed her coat slowly. “Hunters are moving farther north. You killed six last night.”
“Seven.”
Her expression flickered.
“Of course you counted.”
I watched them carefully.
The familiarity between them felt strange—not romantic.
Survivor familiarity.
People who had endured horrors together.
Lyra glanced toward me again.
Then quietly said, “So it finally happened.”
Caelan’s jaw tightened.
“She shouldn’t be here.”
The wolf growled beneath the surface instantly.
I felt it somehow.
Not heard.
Felt.
Lyra noticed too.
Her eyes darkened.
“You think the wolf is dangerous because he shows his teeth,” she said softly to me. “You should be more afraid of the part that learned how to hide them.”
Silence swallowed the room.
Caelan looked away first.
That disturbed me most.
Because part of him agreed.
Rain hammered harder outside while Lyra unpacked medical supplies onto the kitchen counter.
“We found records,” she said quietly. “More information about the program.”
Every muscle in Caelan’s body locked.
Program.
Not experiment.
Program.
Intentional.
Organized.
Lyra continued carefully. “They separated wolf instinct from human consciousness in adolescent subjects. Trauma conditioning. Isolation. mirror exposure—”
“Stop.”
The word cracked through the room violently.
Caelan staggered backward.
His breathing turned ragged instantly.
Mirror exposure.
I watched panic flood his face so fast it looked almost childlike.
“No mirrors,” he said hoarsely.
His hands shook violently.
Gold flickered in his eyes.
Fear.
Pure fear.
The wolf surfaced hard enough to distort his voice.
“Don’t say that word.”
Lyra immediately fell silent.
Too late.
Caelan backed away from all of us like the walls themselves were closing in.
Then disappeared upstairs.
A door slammed.
Silence followed.
I looked at Lyra slowly. “What happened to him?”
Pain crossed her face.
“They tried separating the wolf from the boy.” She swallowed hard. “But you can’t carve instinct out of a child without destroying something human in the process.”
My chest tightened painfully.
“How old was he?”
Lyra didn’t answer immediately.
When she finally spoke, her voice sounded haunted.
“Too young to survive it.”
I found the hidden room after midnight.
The floorboards beneath the storage closet shifted oddly beneath my feet.
A hidden latch.
My pulse quickened as I pulled it open carefully.
Cold air rose from below.
The stairs creaked under my weight descending into darkness.
Then lightning flashed through narrow basement windows.
And I stopped breathing.
Mirrors.
Shattered ones.
Hundreds of broken reflections covering the walls.
Bloodstained restraints bolted into concrete.
Silver chains.
Old medical equipment rusting in corners.
Childhood drawings scattered across the floor.
Most were wolves.
Some were cages.
Some showed one boy standing beside another version of himself drawn entirely in black ink.
My stomach twisted violently.
Messages covered the walls in different handwriting styles.
Some jagged.
Some neat.
Some barely legible.
HE MADE ME TO SURVIVE.
HE TAKES THE BAD MEMORIES.
DON’T TRUST THE ONE WHO CRIES.
HE HURTS PEOPLE WHEN HE LOVES THEM.
The room felt less like evidence and more like a mind ripped apart physically.
I backed away slowly—
Then heard screaming upstairs.
Not rage.
Pain.
Raw, soul-deep agony.
I ran.
The second-floor hallway glittered with broken glass.
Every mirror in the cabin had been destroyed.
Caelan knelt in the center of the wreckage breathing hard, blood pouring from shredded hands.
Fragments of himself reflected everywhere around him.
Distorted.
Broken.
Gold eyes flickering violently between personalities.
And for the first time since meeting him—
Caelan was crying.
Not the wolf.
The human personality.
Tears mixed with blood across his face while he stared at the ruined mirrors like they were still hurting him.
The sight devastated me.
Because this man feared vulnerability more than violence.
And now he looked shattered open.
I stepped toward him carefully.
“Caelan…”
His breathing hitched.
Slowly, he lifted his bloodied hands away from his face.
And whispered:
“He remembers things I can’t survive remembering.”
The words hollowed something inside me.
The wolf wasn’t destroying him.
He was carrying pieces of trauma Caelan physically could not endure alone.
Before I could speak—
Three slow knocks echoed through the cabin.
Everything froze.
Caelan’s entire body locked instantly.
Fear flashed across both personalities at once.
Not confusion.
Recognition.
Then a familiar male voice drifted through the front door.
“Brother…”
A pause.
“Open the door.”
- Writer
