She stood behind me with my severed braid in her hand, laughing as I cried—but ten minutes later, my husband walked in with a guest who made her face go white. / Chapter 63 / 91

Chapter 63 - The Mirror and the Scalpel

Pain is supposed to be immediate. It is supposed to scream through your nervous system like a wildfire, commanding you to pull away, to preserve the vessel.

When the blades pierced my wrist, there was no pain.

There was only a high-pitched whine, like a turbine winding up in the distance, and the acrid smell of ozone and burnt plastic.

A jolt of current arced through my arm, throwing my head back against the pilot’s chair. My vision inverted—the gray blizzard outside the windshield flashed into blinding negative, white snow turning pitch black, the dark lake turning into an ocean of blazing ultraviolet light.

And in that flash, memories that did not belong to me tore through my brain.

I saw a room of mirrored steel. I saw Elena Sterling, thirty years younger, wearing sterile white gloves, holding a tiny infant whose chest was open, bathed in the glow of a surgical laser.

*“This one will hold the key,”* a voice had said. Elena’s voice. But she wasn't sneering. She wasn't the petty, cruel matriarch who had humiliated me at my wedding. Her face was etched with a terrifying, desperate grief. *“If we don’t weave the conductor into the neural spine now, Arthur will harvest her before she speaks her first word.”*

Then came the second memory—the wedding day.

The grand ballroom of the Drake Hotel. The laughter of the guests. And Elena, standing behind me in the bridal suite, the heavy tailoring shears in her hands, snickering as she hacked through my thick, dark braid right at the nape of my neck.

*“It’s only hair. It’ll grow back,”* she had laughed, holding the severed lock in her hand as I sobbed into the vanity mirror.

The world slammed back into reality.

I fell to my knees on the grated floor of the wheelhouse, gasping for air, the shears clattering across the deck.

The gold filament in my wrist had retracted. The synthetic violet light was gone, replaced by a slow, sluggish seep of dark, thick blood that finally, mercifully, felt warm.

"Clara!" Sarah dropped beside me, grabbing a roll of sterile gauze and pressing it desperately against the wound. "You're bleeding! You're bleeding real blood!"

"She didn't cut it to humiliate me," I whispered, the words tumbling out of my mouth like broken glass. My vision was swimming, the cabin spinning around me. "The braid... on our wedding day. She didn't do it out of spite."

Nicholas was trying to pull himself up on the cot, his knuckles white against the metal frame. "What are you talking about...?"

"The nape of my neck," I breathed, touching the short hairs at the base of my skull with trembling, blood-stained fingers. "There's a scar there. I always thought it was from when I fell off the swing set as a child. But it wasn't. Elena wasn't cutting my hair to ruin my wedding."