Chapter 1: A New Reflection
The first thing Dorian Vance noticed was the smell.
It wasn’t the usual stale tang of last night’s whiskey or the crisp, clean scent of his five-hundred-thread-count sheets. It was something floral, cloying, and sweet. It clung to the inside of his nostrils. He grimaced, or tried to. His face felt wrong. Heavy. Unmoored.
He opened his eyes. The ceiling of his penthouse bedroom was its usual expanse of perfect white. But the light felt different—softer, diffused, as if viewed through a gauze. He pushed himself up on his elbows, and the movement was all wrong. His shoulders didn’t move with their usual confident heave. There was a lightness, a slight yielding to his frame.
“What the hell?” he mumbled. Or meant to. The words came out slurred, breathy, wrapped in a soft sigh. His hand flew to his mouth.
His lips. They were… swollen. Not from a punch, but full, soft, and impossibly sensitive. His fingertips brushed them and a jolt, weirdly pleasant, shot through him. He recoiled.
He threw the duvet off. The familiar, powerful landscape of his own body was gone. The hard planes of his chest had softened into gentle curves. His arms were slender, his wrists delicate. Panic, cold and sharp, began to prickle up his spine. He swung his legs out of bed, his movements now graceful, almost fluid against his will.
His feet hit the cold marble floor. He was shorter. The perspective of the room was off; everything seemed slightly taller, more imposing. Naked, he stumbled towards the en suite bathroom, his heart hammering against ribs that felt too close together.
He hit the light switch. The LED strips blazed to life, reflecting brutally off the white marble and chrome. He forced himself to look in the mirror.
A stranger pouted back at him.
His strong, commanding jaw had melted into a soft, heart-shaped curve. His once-cold blue eyes were now wide, heavy-lidded, framed by long, dark lashes he’d never grown. They held a perpetually drowsy, inviting look—a ‘just been kissed’ haze that made his stomach turn. His nose was smaller, his brow smoother. And his lips… God, his lips were a obscene pink bow, perpetually parted as if in the middle of a sigh.
He screamed.
The sound that ripped from his new throat was a high, breathy moan. It was a sound he’d heard in bedrooms, dismissively, from the other side. It was not a sound a man made. It was a sound made for a man.
Horror closed its fist around his windpipe. He gripped the edge of the sink, the cool marble biting into his soft palms. His reflection mimicked the movement, the face wearing an expression of helpless shock. He watched, disgusted, as those traitorous eyes welled up with tears.
“No,” he hissed, the word trembling. “This is a dream. A bad fucking dream.”
He turned on the tap, splashed icy water on his face. The water felt electric on his hypersensitive skin, his lips tingling wildly. He patted his face dry with a towel, and when he looked back, the fog on the mirror had left a faint, perfect imprint of those new lips in pink.
Lipstick. He was wearing lipstick.
He scrubbed at his mouth with the towel until the skin burned, but the color remained, as natural as a blush. It was him.
The memories flooded back then, sharp and caustic. The bar last night. The woman. Morrigan. Raven hair with silver streaks, violet eyes that saw right through his bespoke suit.
He’d been holding court, explaining to a junior analyst why the new secretary was probably better on her knees than at spreadsheets. He’d felt her gaze first, like a physical pressure. She was at the end of the bar, elegant and utterly out of place.
She’d approached. Not with a smile, but with a chilling calm. “The poison you drip for fun becomes the air you must breathe, Dorian Vance,” she’d said, her voice low and melodic. “You mock a prison you’ve never visited. I think it’s time you lived behind the bars you’ve built for others.”
He’d laughed in her face. Actually threw his head back and laughed. “Sweetheart, save the poetry for someone who buys it. What’s your rate?”
She hadn’t flinched. Her smile was a knife-slash of pity. “The sentence is life. The prison is you.”
He’d dismissed her, turning back to his drink and his sycophants. He remembered a faint scent of ozone and earth as she left. Then nothing. He must have blacked out, come home.
This was her doing. The witch.
A rage, old and familiar, boiled up in him. Good. This was something he knew. He would fix this. He’d call his lawyer, his doctor, someone. He strode back into the bedroom, his new hips swaying in a way that made him stumble.
His walk-in closet was a temple to masculine power: rows of tailored suits, crisp dress shirts, racks of handmade shoes. He reached for his favorite charcoal gray suit, the one that screamed authority.
The moment his fingers closed on the wool-blend fabric, a searing, white-hot pain erupted across his skin. He yelped—another soft, humiliating sound—and jerked his hand back. The suit jacket fell to the floor. Where his skin had touched it, the fabric was singed, blackened, and melted. A foul, plastic-y smell filled the air.
He stared, dumbfounded. He tried a shirt. The same. The cotton didn’t just burn; it repelled him, the pain instantaneous and profound. Dress pants, a tie, a simple white t-shirt—all the same. Each attempt left a new, small burn on his soft skin and another item of clothing ruined on the floor.
Panic returned, cold and final. He stood naked in the wreckage of his old life, surrounded by smoldering cloth. He couldn’t wear any of it. He looked at the one section of the closet he never touched, the section maintained by a decorator for the occasional, brief female guest.
Silks, satins, soft cashmere sweaters in pastel colors. Dresses.
His stomach lurched. No. Absolutely not.
But the marble floor was cold. The city outside his floor-to-ceiling windows was waking up. He needed to cover himself. To think. Hesitantly, wincing in anticipation of pain, he reached out a trembling hand and brushed the sleeve of a simple navy-blue dress made of a soft jersey material.
There was no burn. No pain. Only a soothing coolness against his fingertips.
A sob of pure, unadulterated fury choked him. He yanked the dress from the hanger. It felt alien in his hands, light and insubstantial. He fought with it, his limbs uncooperative, his mind screaming in protest. The fabric slipped over his head, cool and gentle. It settled against his waist, flared softly over his new hips. It fit. It fit perfectly.
He didn’t need to look in a mirror to know. The feeling of it was confirmation enough—the way it hugged curves he shouldn’t have, the way the hem brushed against thighs that were no longer his.
He was trapped. In every possible way.
The intercom by the door buzzed, a harsh electronic snarl in the silent apartment. He jumped, the movement instinctively delicate. He padded over, the dress whispering against his skin with every step.
He pressed the button. “What?” His voice, that breathy, useless thing, crackled through the speaker.
“Package for you, Mr. Vance,” the doorman’s voice came, tinny and normal. “From a Ms. Blackwood. She said it was urgent.”
Morrigan.
Dorian’s new, soft heart hammered against his ribs. A dangerous, brittle calm settled over him. This was a move. A piece in play. And he was still Dorian Vance. He might be in this… this costume, but he wasn’t defeated.
“Send it up,” he said, and the words, even in that voice, carried the last sharp fragment of his old command.
He stood by the door, waiting, one hand instinctively going to the fragile column of his new throat. The elevator dinged. A small, plain cardboard box sat on the floor of the hallway.
He brought it inside, placed it on his Italian coffee table, now dwarfed by its minimalist scale. He used a letter opener to slice the tape.
Inside, on a bed of black tissue paper, lay three items. A sleek, modern smartphone. A set of brass keys attached to a fob he didn’t recognize. And a single, creamy white card. On it, in elegant, looping script, was written an address in a part of the city he never visited, followed by two lines:
Your new employment begins at 9 AM tomorrow.
The uniform is provided.
Dorian picked up the keys, the metal cold in his warm, soft palm. He looked from the keys, to the dress he wore, to the ruined clothes smoldering in his closet. The fight wasn’t over. It had just changed venues.
He had until tomorrow. And for the first time in his twenty-three years, Dorian Vance, hedge fund prodigy, had no idea what the rules were.