Summary:

Ilya feels like a zombie; he’s an approximation of something living.

He knows what this is, of course. He isn’t stupid. He was just a child when he watched the life bleed out of his mama, long before she stopped breathing. He watched her sweet smiles grow hollow, and her kind eyes fall blank. He felt her slipping through his fingertips like grains of sand in an hourglass; her time was up before Ilya had truly even realised that it was running out.

When he looks in the mirror, he sees her staring back at him: blond hair, and blue eyes, and an emptiness that kills.