“Thanks,” I said with a nod as I moved past him.

“Thank me when you’re back on this side of the door in one piece,” he replied as he gave the door a push.

The barrier thumped closed behind me with the dull finality of a coffin lid slamming shut. I don’t know if it was a product of the eerie sound or simply because I had a very good idea what was coming next, but at that exact moment every hair on my body stood painfully at attention.

Some nightmares are measurably worse than others. In my personal estimation, on a scale of one to ten, the terror sitting across the table from me at this very instant was at the minimum an eleven. Of course, I’ll admit I was biased. After all, she had tried to kill me on more than one occasion. But, she wasn’t the first, and I suspected she also wouldn’t be the last. The thing that truly colored my perception of her was the psychological scarring she had left on my wife. That was my personal line in the sand, and she had crossed it without apology.

The all too familiar thud of my otherworldly headache was continuing to pound out a painful rhythm at the base of my skull. However, the prickling gooseflesh that had accompanied me into the room was finally dying down, not that such turned out to be a true reprieve. One pain had simply faded away only to be replaced by another, that being my intestines twisting into a knot as bile churned deep in my gut. It seemed my body was just full of involuntary responses tied to my current struggle to maintain composure, and apparently it was determined to give them all a chance at an audition. Lucky me.

I tried to ignore the discomfort and focused my attention on the woman opposite me. Even up close and personal, as we were now, Annalise Devereaux’s resemblance to my wife was a full three steps beyond uncanny. The fact that they shared the same father and their mothers had been identical twins made it a bit easier to imagine from a genetic standpoint, but even then the doppelganger effect was still at best a one in a billion occurrence. Extraordinary as it was, they were almost as indistinguishable in physical appearance as their biological mothers had been; and as we had found out through intensely trying circumstances, their DNA was very close to being just as eerily mirror-like.