The third day came crawling in like a hungover thief at the Crack of dawn.

Lucia lay sprawled across the tangled sheets, her mouth slack, and limbs heavy. Thin blades of morning light sliced through the blinds, striping her face like prison bars. She didn’t bother to stir, she was dreaming of Manuel again.

He came to her slow and confident, dropping his coat like he owned the Zona Rosa, like he owned her. His hands slid up her thighs like iron wrapped in warm silk. She could smell that cologne. The expensive one from Palacio de Hierro. The one he wore for other women. Even in the dream, it made her want to hurt him. His mouth found her jaw, her throat, the hollow beneath her ear and when he finally kissed her, deep and starving, she whispered his name like a prayer and a curse.

I love you. I love you. I love you. He said it back between desperate starving kisses like a man who'd been wandering the desert of Sonora and finally found water. Her hips rose to meet him. Her fingers dug into his back, then slid around his throat, pressing just enough to feel his pulse flutter. For one perfect moment, he was hers completely.

Then the dream cracked. His skin turned clammy, his voice echoed, distant. The weight on top of her became suffocating. Even in the dream, he was already leaving.

Lucia tightened her grip around his throat, but he only smiled a cold, practiced smile.
You still think this is love? He asked her.

She woke with a sharp gasp, heart hammering, thighs slick with sweat and lingering arousal. The ceiling fan spun lazily above her, mockingly.

'Pathetic,' the voice said, unkindly. 'Just wake up already, mija.'

She didn’t want to. She wanted to drag him back into the dream and finish it until he promised never to leave, until his eyes rolled back like the blonde’s had in the alley.

But the music started.
Heavy bass thumped through the thin walls from Jay’s room. Again.

Lucia’s fingers twitched. She imagined wrapping them around his skinny neck and squeezing the life out of him until the narcocorrido stopped forever.

'Make the bloody music stop. Cállalo, por favor.,' the voice suggested, almost playful. 'That good for nothing dead weight.'

She stormed barefoot down the hallway in her red silk pajamas and burst into Jay’s room like a runaway cyclone.

The music was even louder inside. Some cantante with more tattoos than talent singing about a camioneta and a pista.

Lucia was one of the few people who knew the truth about Jay. The kind of truth that doesn't wash off even with bleach and prayers.

Jay was the product of the ciudades perdidas the lost cities of Nezahualcóyotl, or Neza as everyone called it. From the time he could walk, he'd roved those filthy streets with a band of other ragged children preying on tourists, surrounding them with dirty hands outstretched, chanting the only English words that he knew: "Money. Money. Money."

His father was a short, stocky Mexican with the flat black eyes of a sicario. Never done a day's work in his life. Every night, he'd wait for Jay to come home with the day's haul. If the boy brought back less than three hundred pesos, the father would seize him, raise his ragged clothes, and savage his naked flesh with a belt the same belt he probably used to beat his wife before she ran off.

That was Jay's childhood. Bruises on top of scars. The stench of the Neza garbage dumps in his clothes and his memory.

It lasted until he was fifteen. Then one night, coming home with less than the required amount his mind and body already cringing at the thought of the thrashing to come he found Lucia's mother, Kate, waiting. Kate had gone to Neza with a church group. She saw Jay begging outside a Oxxo. Something broke in her and decided to do something about it.

She took him away. Gave him a roof in Colonia Portales, food,school and a future that didn't involve begging and bleeding.

That's how Jay ended up here. In this house. With Lucia. And sometimes she wondered if Kate had done him any favors. Because the streets never really leave a boy.

Now Jay was twenty-two, skinny, with dark circles under his eyes, a small scar on his lip from a fight he'd lost in the barrio, and a Santa Muerte tattoo on his forearm that he hid from Kate. He looked like a boy raised by wolves and then sent to finishing school.

“What kind of poor fish are you?” she snapped. “It’s barely eight-thirty. Some of us had a rough night. Some of us don't want to hear your corridos at the crack of dawn.”

Jay killed the volume and grinned lazily. “Buenos días, prima." He stretched like a cat. "You know what? A nadie le importa (nobody cares). So take a chill pill. Go back to your room. Start daydreaming about Manuel again."

Her hands curled into fists. For a second the room tilted. She saw herself stepping forward, pressing her thumbs into his windpipe, watching his eyes bulge. The voice purred approval.

“Lucky for you,” she said, forcing a flat smile, “I’m in a good mood today.”

She left his door open on purpose. Let the music bleed into the hallway like an infection.

Back in her room, she took a cold shower, the water was ice-cold. Exactly what she needed. She stood under the spray and let it wash away the dream, the fight, the memory of the blonde's face turning purple.

She slid into her best outfit. A black dress that hugged every curve. Heels that added four inches and subtracted ten years of good judgment. Lipstick the color of fresh blood, rojo sangre from the drugstore on Calle de los Misterios. Then she sat at her dresser and picked up the brush.
That was when the mirror began to shift.

At first it was just her thick blonde hair, dark eyes, red lips. But the longer she stared, the more the reflection drifted. The eyes in the glass were too still. Too hungry. She tilted her head. The reflection lagged by half a second.
Who are you? she thought.
The voice answered, but the lips in the mirror moved first.
We are becoming something better.

Lucia leaned closer until her breath fogged the glass. She raised a hand. The reflection’s fingers met hers with that strange, delayed sensation like touching a stranger through ice. She pressed harder until her nails scraped down the mirror with a sound like claws on stone.

“You almost killed that girl,” she whispered.

The mirror-Lucía smiled. 'We almost killed her. And it felt good, didn’t it?'

A dark thrill ran through her. She watched herself this other self, slide a hand down her body. The dissociation was almost pleasurable now. Like watching an erotic film where she was both star and voyeur. In the mirror, her own eyes fluttered half-closed. Her hand slipped lower, circling through the fabric of the dress.

'Look at us,' the voice purred, clearly coming from the reflection now. 'So beautiful when we stop pretending.'

She came quietly, forehead pressed to the cool glass, eyes locked on her fractured self. When the shudder passed, she pulled back and studied the smeared lipstick, the messy hair, the glassy, satisfied eyes.
The reflection smiled at her.
'Wednesday is coming. And when it does, we won’t need him anymore. We’ll just take him.'

Lucia wiped the glass with her sleeve, erasing the evidence. The woman in the mirror did the same.
“Good,” she whispered.
She wasn’t sure which one of them had spoken.

A soft knock at the door brought her back to reality.

Her mother, Kate, stood in the hallway with that familiar worried expression.
“Breakfast is ready, mija. Chilaquiles. I made them the way you like. With crema and queso fresco. You haven’t eaten properly in days.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Lucia.” Kate stepped closer. “I’m not taking no for an answer.”

Something ugly uncoiled in Lucia’s chest. She kept brushing her hair, watching her mother in the mirror the same mirror that had just shown her another version of herself.
“You know what, Mom? I’m not a little girl anymore. You had your chance to control me when I was young. Not anymore.”

Kate’s jaw tightened. The woman had patience. Saint-like patience. But even saints have their limits especially in a city like Mexico, where saints are just sinners who knew the right people. “What has gotten into you? You never used to be like this.. so cruel.”

Lucia set the brush down and turned. She stepped close enough to smell her mother’s perfume.
“You’re right. I wasn’t like this before.” Her smile was thin and sharp. “People change, Mom. We grow up and we stop being weak.”

NGood girl,' the voice whispered proudly.

Lucia placed her hands on her mother’s shoulders gentle, almost tender and guided her backward toward the door.
“Come on. We wouldn’t want the food to get cold, would we?”

Kate’s eyes glistened. The look of a woman realizing the child she raised had grown teeth and claws.

After her mother left, Lucia closed the door and leaned against it. The room felt smaller. Her skin felt tighter.
She returned to the mirror.
The woman staring back now looked almost serene. Calm in a way Lucia had never been.

Lucia blinked. For a split second, the reflection didn’t.
She touched her own cheek. The reflection’s hand rose too, but the fingers felt wrong — too steady, too cold. She dragged her nails down her face, not hard enough to draw blood, just enough to feel something. The mirror version did the same, leaving faint red lines.

“Manuel loves us, he always has. His... His just busy with work that's all. Right?” she asked.

The reflection laughed, low throat and delighted.

Lucia’s stomach twisted with sick pleasure. She watched her reflection bunch the black dress up around her hips again, but this time she stepped back, breathing hard, refusing to touch herself.
The woman in the mirror didn’t stop. She smiled wider.

Lucia turned away from the glass before the reflection could finish.

No messages from Manuel. Of course not.
She picked up her phone and opened the old photo from Condesa the two of them smiling, his arm around her. She stared until the image blurred.

Wednesday was still a day away.
She could wait.
The voice was already counting the hours while patiently smiling and sharpening its teeth inside her skull.