LOVE ME TO DEATH

The mortuary's fluorescent lights hummed like dying wasps as Mia Carter stared down at her best friend's corpse. Except

This isn't Lana.

Mia's breath fogged the glass as she pressed closer, her stomach twisting. The mortician had done a decent job, platinum hair styled in Lana's signature messy waves, the leather jacket she'd practically lived in, but they'd missed three crucial details.

First: the scar. Lana had gotten that jagged line above her left brow when they were sixteen, when her stepfather's whiskey bottle had found its mark. Mia could still hear her laughing through the blood. "Now we match," she'd said, pressing their foreheads together.

The woman in the coffin had smooth, unmarked skin.

Second: the nails. Lana bit hers to the quick, always had. These were polished coffin-red, filed into perfect ovals.

Third, Mia's phone buzzed. A text from Lana's number:

Don't trust what you see.

Her pulse jackhammered. The chapel's oppressive heat congealed into something thick and syrupy in her lungs.

"Ms. Carter?" The funeral director materialized at her elbow, his aftershave cloyingly sweet. "We're about to begin."

Mia grabbed his sleeve. "This isn't her."

His smile didn't reach his eyes. "Dental records confirm-"

"Bullshit." Her voice cracked. "Where's the scar? Why the manicure?"

A hand closed around her bicep, fingers like steel cables. Ethan Cole smelled like bergamot and something darker beneath, like wine left to turn. "Darling," he murmured, lips grazing her ear, "you're making a scene."

She yanked free. The movement made her purse swing open, revealing the gleam of rosewood, Lana's switchblade, tucked beside her wallet.

Her blood iced over. She hadn't put that there.

Across the chapel, Detective Kade Vance watched her through a haze of incense smoke. When she shoved her phone in his face, the message had vanished.

"Get some air," he said, thumb brushing her wrist where Ethan had gripped her. "You're seeing things."

__________________________________________________________________________

The parking lot swam in her vision. Mia fumbled for her keys and then froze. Three hours had passed. The sun hung low, painting the asphalt orange. Her mouth tasted like copper.

And her hands...

She turned them palm-up in the fading light. Dark soil packed her cuticles. A fresh scratch curved over her knuckles like a crescent moon. Beneath her index fingernail, something rust-colored flaked away.

Blood.

The switchblade's handle warmed against her thigh as she drove home, the streets blurring. She'd last seen it in Lana's apartment the night before__

Her headlights swept over her apartment building. Something glinted in her rearview mirror. A figure? Gone before she could focus.

__________________________________________________________________________

Her keys hit the counter with a clatter. The lights flickered on.

Mia screamed.

Scrawled across her bathroom mirror in Lana's signature Scarlet Sin lipstick:

YOU WERE ALWAYS THE SMART ONE, MIA.

SO WHY HAVEN'T YOU CHECKED THE GRAVE?

Beneath it, smeared like an afterthought:

P.S. The shovel's in your trunk.

Mia's reflection wavered in the bathroom mirror. For half a heartbeat, her pupils dilated too wide, the way Lana's always did when she lied.

Then the lights flickered.

When they steadied, the mirror showed only her hollow-eyed stare.

And something else.

At the edge of the glass, barely visible: faint fingerprints smudging the surface. Too large to be hers. Too fresh to be anything but deliberate.

Her phone buzzed- a new voicemail.

Three seconds of static. Then a whisper that wasn't Lana's voice, but she knew her words:

"Check the security footage from your building, darling. The cameras don't lie."

A mechanical click. The line went dead.

Mia's blood turned to ice.

She hadn't told anyone about the cameras.

Not even the police.