# 🩸 **CHAPTER 6 — FIRST DEATH**

A scream woke the town. The few residents ran from their homes, some in their bathrobes, others standing still. The sound carried from the forest—shrill, drawn-out, cracking with panic.

Alice stared out the window. The fog that had enveloped the streets yesterday now looked as if it had been cut with a knife. Shreds of white floated above the ground like flakes of skin.

She couldn't stand idly by. She threw on her jacket and headed toward the source of the scream. In the distance, she could already see a police car and the silhouette of Commander Rybak, who was holding someone back.

When she got closer, she saw a body.

A girl—maybe seventeen—was lying on the wet ground. Her face was frozen in a grimace of surprise, as if she hadn't even had time to understand what was happening.

But it was the **wound** that caught Alice's attention.

Right in the center of her chest, just below her sternum, a perfectly even cut. Not torn, not jagged. **One perfect entry, one exit.** As if someone had cut her off from life in one, impossibly precise movement.

She had seen exactly the same wounds in her mother's papers.

"What are you doing here?" The fisherman approached quickly, his voice hoarse.

"I had to see," she whispered.

"This is the crime scene. You're going home. Now."

Their eyes met.

Alice saw something she hadn't expected in them—**despair**.

And a fear deeper than anything she'd seen yesterday.

"This is only the beginning," he added quietly.

---

# 🩸 **CHAPTER 7 - THE WHISPERER**

She returned home, but the whole time she felt someone walking beside her. A second footstep, perfectly synchronized, only softer, as if someone were walking barefoot, was right beneath her.

The house was dark. As she stepped into the kitchen, she saw something in the oven window. Her own reflection.

But it didn't move like she did.

The reflection stood still.

Its eyes were wide, unnaturally open, as if someone had parted them with fingers.

Its mouth stretched in a subtle, mocking smile.

And then she saw the reflection move its lips.

**“Can you hear me?”**

The voice wasn't a sound, it didn't carry. It appeared in her head, as if someone were whispering directly to her thoughts.

Alice stepped back abruptly. The oven darkened. The reflection was hers again.

Or pretended to be.

The Whisperer returned many times that night.

She heard his voice in the faucet as water dripped.

In the reflection of her glasses when she tried to read.

In the black surface of her switched-off phone.

**“It’s not HIM. This is WHAT you woke up.”**

**“Your mother wasn’t so innocent.”**

**“It’s getting closer. You have to REMEMBER.”**

“What am I supposed to remember?!” she screamed into the empty house.

But only silence answered her.

And then a light, almost imperceptible tapping on the kitchen windowpane…

*as if someone outside were tapping the glass with a fingernail.*

---

# 🩸 **CHAPTER 8 — MEMORIES THAT ARE NOT HER**

Alice dreamed she was running through the forest. The air was thick as syrup, hard to breathe. Branches snagged her hair, but she kept running, driven by an impulse that wasn't hers.

She clutched a knife in her hand.

Long, thin, like a scalpel, but the blade was black—it gleamed like liquid ink.

Someone was running away from her. A girl in a yellow jacket. She heard her cries, her pleas for help, for mercy.

But in her dreams, she had no will of her own.

Her body belonged to someone else.

Someone who enjoyed the chase.

Someone who knew every nook and cranny of this forest.

Someone who loved the moment when her prey stumbled.

The girl fell. Alice—or whoever she was in this dream—walked slowly toward her. She picked up the knife. She felt its weight.

And then the girl turned to face her.

It was the same one found dead this morning.

Alice screamed and woke up, trembling.

Her hands... were clammy.

It wasn't sweat.

It smelled like... earth.

And iron.

--

# 🩸 **CHAPTER 9 - MOTHER'S NOTES**

With trembling hands, she found her mother's journal. The leather cover was rough, as if soaked in years of fear. She opened the first page that came to hand.

**"The curse of reflection doesn't fade. It waits. Always waits.

You can't look him in the eye, or you'll see yourself—as you could have been if you'd let him in."**

Next:

**"He doesn't murder. He shows.

Only one thing is imposed on him: the heart.

Always the heart.

Because that's where he goes.

That's where he goes."**

Alice felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

**“If you're reading this, my daughter…

forgive me.

I couldn't close the door.”**

At the end of the page was a symbol—a circle with a vertical line through it.

It was identical to the one she'd seen in the old photos in her folder.

Suddenly, she heard a creak.

As if someone were walking down the hall.

--

# 🩸 **CHAPTER 10 — THE FOREST THAT BREATHE**

The fisherman knocked on her door at six in the morning.

“We need to talk,” he said without greeting.

They took her to the forest. The fisherman led the way.

He followed a path he knew all too well. After a dozen or so minutes, they reached a place Alice hadn't seen before—a stone circle. Twelve boulders, each over two meters high.

They looked as if they had been there for centuries.

"This is where it all began," said the Fisherman.

"Those murders from years ago?"

"No. This is where the curse began. Your mother knew that."

They approached one of the boulders. It was cracked. Something glittered in the crack.

As she got closer, Alice realized it wasn't stone that glittered.

It was glass.

In the cracks were shards of mirror.

As if someone had smashed something enormous and crushed the remains into the stone.

The forest spun. She felt a strange pressure in her temples.

And then she heard a soft, dull voice:

**“But you came back to me.”**

The fisherman didn't react. Hadn't he heard that?

The forest around her seemed to be moving—the branches swayed, though there was no wind.

Alice felt as if the whole circle was… **breathing**.

--

# 🩸 **CHAPTER 11 – REFLECTION**

When she got home, she felt drunk. She felt dizzy, the lights seemed too harsh, the shadows too deep.

In the bathroom, she looked into the mirror.

Her reflection looked back at her simply. An ordinary face, disheveled hair, tired eyes.

And then, very slowly, the reflection tilted its head.

In the opposite direction from where she had done.

Alice froze.

The reflection smiled faintly. Too faintly.

A tiny mark appeared on his cheek—a thin, reddish scratch.

Alice put her hand to her own face.

There was no scratch on hers.

The reflection blinked slowly.

Then it opened its mouth.

And a soft, silky-smooth voice sounded in her head:

**“I know who your mother was.

You don’t yet.

But you will.”**

---

# 🩸 **CHAPTER 12 — TRACES**

That evening, Alice closed all the doors and windows, drew the curtains, and turned out the lights.

But when she went downstairs in the morning, she saw **wet barefoot prints** on the floor.

They led from the front door… straight to her bedroom.

And then they came back.

To the full-length mirror in the living room.

The last mark was right in front of the mirror.

And on the pane of glass, someone had left a delicate handprint from the inside—as if from the inside.

A darker spot pulsed at its center.

Like a drop of blood.

--