I should've known the moment I saw the door.
It was cracked open—not wide enough to be an invitation, not closed enough to mean "stay away." It breathed a quiet suggestion into the cold night air: come closer. And like I always did with Adrian, I followed.
The hallway was dim, flickering under the weight of a dying bulb, the buzzing like the static in my chest. I stepped inside the abandoned building, the air stale with the scent of mold, dust, and something faintly metallic… coppery. Blood, maybe. Memory.
"Brother, where are you leading me?"
I whispered it out loud.
No answer.
Just the scuff of my boots against the floor and the hush of shadows curling against the walls. Adrian had always loved these kinds of places—forgotten things, lost things, things left behind. He said they felt more real than anywhere people still smiled.
The first time he ran, he was thirteen. Disappeared for three days. We found him inside the broken shell of an old observatory on the edge of the city. He said he was watching the stars and listening to the silence. He came back quieter. More precise. That was the beginning.
I didn't see it then. Or maybe I did… but I didn't want to.
A soft thump echoed ahead—wood against concrete. I paused. The hallway branched left, where the walls were stained with graffiti that looked too deliberate to be random. Red spirals. A single slash through the center. Adrian's mark. Not the one the media knew. His real mark. The one only I recognized.
It was a message.
Keep following.
I swallowed hard and turned.
The room I entered was wide and dark. Windows shattered. The moonlight sliced through in broken shards. There was a single chair in the center. Empty. A flickering candle on the floor beside it. Its flame swayed like it, too, was trying to breathe through the tension in the air.
And then I saw it.
A mirror. Seven feet tall. Leaning against the far wall. Draped in a gray sheet—except it wasn't fully covered. One corner had fallen away, revealing glass so clean it almost shimmered like water.
I walked up to it, the echo of my steps stretching into eternity.
And I saw us.
Me… and Adrian.
Only… Adrian wasn't really there.
But his reflection was.
He stood behind me in the mirror, eyes unreadable, his lips just barely curved upward. That smile. Half-boy, half-beast. The one he wore the first time he told me about the girl he almost killed in boarding school.
"She deserved it," he'd said, back then. "She lied about something small… so I showed her how small things become fatal."
He'd looked me in the eye. I remember trembling. Not from fear. But from the horrifying realization that some part of me… understood him.
I stared at the mirror now, reaching toward the glass, but my hand met nothing.
The image vanished.
He was gone.
Only my reflection remained—eyes tired, jaw clenched, a man dragged between loyalty and truth. I wasn't sure which face was more mine: the one in the mirror… or the one hidden beneath it.
Then I heard the whisper. Right behind me.
"Still following, brother?"
I spun.
No one.
But there—on the chair—now sat something that hadn't been there before: a folded paper, weighted down with a matchbox.
My chest tightened as I picked it up. His handwriting.
Block letters. Clean. Controlled.
> "Stop chasing. Start listening. You won't like where this path ends."
—A.
I lit the match before I realized I had struck it. The small flame hovered, trembling. I lowered it to the paper. Watched it catch. Watched it burn. Watched it curl and blacken and die.
Adrian didn't want me chasing him. He wanted me to see what he saw.
To become what he became.
But I wasn't ready. Not yet.
Because there was still one question that haunted me more than any body, any signature, any blood-smeared clue:
What if I wasn't chasing Adrian into darkness… but following him back home?