Chapter 1: The Barroom Boast Backfires
The whiskey burned going down, but Marcus Thorne had stopped tasting it three rounds ago. The bar's amber glow painted everything in shades of gold and bad decisions, and he was holding court in his usual booth like a king who'd forgotten his kingdom was built on other people's bones.
"Swear to God, she cried for an hour." Marcus slapped the mahogany table, rattling the collection of empty glasses. His laugh came out wet and mean. "An hour. In the conference room. With the glass walls. Everyone saw."
The two men across from him—colleagues, sycophants, it didn't matter—laughed on cue. One of them, a heavyset guy with a wedding ring and a guilty conscience, checked his phone for the fifth time in ten minutes.
Marcus didn't notice. He never noticed anything that wasn't about him.
"So I told HR she was unstable. Emotionally compromised. Classic female overreaction to basic feedback." He gestured at the bartender for another round. "Fired her by end of week. Best decision I ever made."
The bartender, a wiry man with faded tattoos crawling up his neck, poured four fingers of Glenfiddich without comment. His eyes flicked to the end of the bar—just once, quick—then back to the glass. If Marcus had been sober, he might have caught it. But Marcus hadn't been sober since 2019.
At the end of the bar, tucked into the shadow where the neon sign flickered and buzzed, Małgorzata Wiśniewska swirled her whiskey sour with a finger that hadn't touched ice in twenty minutes.
She'd been here for three hours. Long enough to memorize the way Marcus's voice rose when he lied, the way his eyes darted left before he told a story, the way he touched his tie when he was about to say something particularly vile. She had a notebook in her apartment—actual paper, spelled against detection—filled with dates, names, and the specific flavor of each cruelty he'd committed over the past eight months.
Some witches kept grimoires. Gosia kept receipts.
"He's got maybe forty seconds before I do something we all regret," she murmured to her glass.
The whiskey didn't respond. It knew better.
Marcus raised his new glass, sloshing amber liquid onto the table. "To men who know how to keep women in their place," he announced, loud enough for the entire bar to hear. "And to the ones smart enough to hire us."
His companions drank. The heavyset one winced. The other—younger, sharper, with the hollow eyes of someone who'd already sold his soul and was now negotiating the interest rate—just smiled.
Gosia set down her glass.
She didn't stand. Didn't rush. That wasn't her style. She simply turned on her stool, crossed one leg over the other, and looked at Marcus Thorne with the patient expression of a cat watching a wounded bird drag its wing across the floor.
He noticed her then. It took him a second—he was drunk, and she was dressed in black, and the bar's lighting was designed to make everyone look like background noise. But when he did notice, his face did something interesting. A flicker of confusion. A spark of interest. The expression of a man who considered every woman in the room a potential audience member.
Or a potential conquest.
He raised his glass toward her. "See something you like, sweetheart?"
Gosia smiled.
It was not a nice smile. It was the smile of someone who had spent months cataloguing every sin a person could commit and had finally, finally finished the list. It was the smile of a woman who had already won and was simply enjoying the pause before the killing blow.
"You know," she said, her Polish accent curling around the words like smoke, "I have heard many men say many stupid things in many bars. But this." She gestured vaguely at all of him—the flushed face, the expensive suit, the soulless grin. "This is special."
Marcus's grin faltered. Just slightly. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means I have been waiting for you."
She snapped her fingers.
The sound was not loud. It was barely a whisper of skin against skin, the kind of noise that would get lost in the clink of glasses and the low hum of conversation. But it didn't need to be loud.
It needed to be precise.
The bar stopped.
Not the way a conversation pauses or a song fades. It stopped the way a heart stops—completely, instantly, with no warning and no mercy. The bartender froze mid-pour, whiskey suspended in a perfect amber arc above a glass. The heavyset man's phone went dark. The younger one's smile became a wax figure's grimace, his eyes fixed on nothing.
Even the music—some smooth jazz that had been playing from hidden speakers—cut to silence. The only sound left in the world was the hum of the neon sign and the frantic, rabbit-quick beating of Marcus Thorne's heart.
He looked around. Then up. Then at the woman in black, who was now standing directly in front of him, closer than she'd been a second ago, though he hadn't seen her move.
"What the—" He tried to push back from the table. His body didn't cooperate. "What the hell is this?"
Gosia tilted her head. "This is the part where you learn something."
She snapped her fingers again.
Reality folded.
Marcus didn't have time to scream. He didn't have time to think. One moment he was sitting in a whiskey bar, king of his little kingdom, and the next he was—
Elsewhere.
Somewhere small. Somewhere tight. Somewhere his shoulders pressed against walls that shouldn't exist, and his hands—where were his hands? They were moving, but not the way he wanted them to, not the way they should, and there was a mirror in front of him, a full-length mirror framed in cheap plastic, and the reflection staring back was not Marcus Thorne.
It was a woman.
She was small and sharp-featured, with dark eyes and a bobbed haircut that framed a face he didn't recognize. She was wearing a blazer that fit wrong and shoes that pinched, and when she tried to straighten her tie, her fingers moved the wrong way. The man in the reflection was gone.
Marcus opened his mouth to scream.
What came out was a stranger's voice.
"Two seconds," a voice murmured from somewhere outside the mirror, somewhere beyond the walls that were closing in. Gosia's voice. Amused. Patient. "Two seconds to understand what it feels like."
The woman in the mirror—Marcus, somehow Marcus—watched her own hands tremble. She felt the weight of something she'd never carried before: a body that didn't belong to her, a life that wasn't hers, a person she'd never wanted to be.
Two seconds.
She looked at her reflection again. Saw the fear in her own eyes. Saw the way her jaw tightened, the way her shoulders hunched, the way every muscle in her body braced for impact.
She knew this face.
She had seen it before.
In a conference room. Through glass walls. With tears streaming down her cheeks and a man's voice telling her she was unstable, she was emotional, she was fired.
She was the woman he'd destroyed.
The woman he'd broken.
The woman whose career he'd ended with a laugh and a whiskey and a shrug.
And now he was her, and she was him, and the world was too small and too tight and too much, and if he tried to breathe, he'd suffocate, and if he tried to speak, he'd—
Time snapped back.
Marcus was in his chair again. His glass was still raised. The music was still playing. The bartender was still pouring, and the heavyset man was still checking his phone, and the younger one was still smiling his hollow smile.
But Marcus Thorne was not the same.
He was shaking. His skin was pale. The whiskey in his glass had gone cold, and his hands were trembling so badly that half of it sloshed onto the table. His eyes found the end of the bar—
But the woman in black was gone.
Just her glass. Empty. And a cocktail napkin, folded once, with something written in purple ink.
He snatched it off the bar, nearly knocking over his own drink. The words were handwritten, elegant and sharp, the kind of cursive that could cut if you looked at it too long.
Next time, I take more than two seconds. Stop ruining lives, Mr.Thorne. I'm watching.
He turned the napkin over. There was more.
P.S. Your tie is crooked. And your breath smells like failure.
Marcus looked down.
His tie was crooked.
He didn't know how he knew that.
He didn't know how any of this had happened.
But the woman in the red dress—wait, black dress—was gone, and the world was moving again, and his friends were asking him what was wrong, and he couldn't answer, couldn't find the words, couldn't explain that for two seconds he'd been someone else, someone he'd destroyed, someone he'd laughed at.
He downed the rest of his whiskey in one swallow.
It didn't help.
Outside, in the alley behind the bar, Małgorzata Wiśniewska lit a cigarette she wouldn't smoke—just held it between her fingers, watching the cherry glow, listening to the city breathe.
That was one.
There were forty-seven others on her list.
She had all the time in the world.
The neon sign flickered above her, buzzing like a trapped fly. She exhaled smoke she didn't feel, and it curled upward like a question no one had the courage to ask.
Inside, Marcus Thorne was ordering another round.
He was still shaking.
She smiled, dropped the cigarette, crushed it under her heel, and walked away.