Elara Vance never kept anything on her refrigerator. No photos, no magnets, no scraps of grocery lists. Just a blank silver door that matched the rest of her empty apartment.

So when she walked into her kitchen that morning and saw a lottery ticket pinned there, bright, yellow, smug, her first instinct wasn’t confusion. It was dread.

She didn’t buy lottery tickets. She especially didn’t buy winning ones.

Black coffee in one hand, she peeled the ticket from the metal. The numbers were unmistakable. Same draw date. Same sequence. Half a billion dollars.

A normal person would celebrate.

Elara sat down.

Someone had planted it. Someone who knew exactly what this would look like to the agency she worked for. A sudden, unexplained fortune? That was the classic red flag for illicit dimensional enrichment. The kind of crime they erased people over.

She pulled up the convenience store’s security feed using her clearance.

There she was.

Walking in.

Buying the ticket.

Laughing.

She didn’t laugh. Not anymore. Not since Michael died. The woman in the video looked like her, sounded like her, even moved like her, but something tiny, subtle, lived in the edges. A softness she hadn’t carried in years.

She drove to the store anyway. The owner remembered her vividly.

“You said it was time for your life to finally turn around,” he said. “You looked happy.”

Happy. Right.

On the drive home, her chest felt tight, not with fear, but with recognition. She’d seen this level of precision only a handful of times. The Rosini smugglers. A dimensional cartel with a talent for identity work.

But why her?

She reached her apartment and checked the security logs.

Her biometrics.

Her DNA.

Her voice pattern.

But she hadn’t come home at 10:13 p.m. the night before. She’d been asleep.

She stared at the door panel until her reflection blurred.

Someone had used a double. A parallel Elara.

And if someone had accessed another version of her… what else had they accessed?

She pulled up known interdimensional traffic pings. One anomaly. A small, flickering signature brushing close to her own timeline only hours before the ticket appeared. And then disappearing again. Not a smuggler signature. Not a cartel signature.

This one was personal.

Elara closed her eyes, forcing her breath to slow. There were infinite versions of her out there. Some better. Some worse. Some who had made choices she didn’t. Some who still had Michael alive.

Her throat tightened.

That’s when the message came in.

An anonymous drop.

An audio file.

She played it.

A woman’s voice, her voice, whispered through static.

“I did it for you. They told me you were alone. They said you had nothing. They said helping you was helping myself. I just… I couldn’t imagine losing him.”

Elara’s hands went numb.

Her double. Her other self. A version of her from some nearby timeline, one where Michael hadn’t died. One where she still had a home that didn’t echo.

Someone had manipulated that version of her. Convinced her that slipping into this dimension and buying the ticket for Elara was an act of mercy.

A mercy that would get her killed.

The message ended with a soft gasp, cut off abruptly, like someone had pulled her away from the recorder.

Elara sat very still. Half a billion dollars was never the point. It was bait. A way to turn her into a criminal in the eyes of the agency. A way to erase her without anyone asking questions.

And the one who delivered the trap… was a version of her who had everything she lost.

She knew what would happen next. The agency would already be running background flags. A random lottery win of that magnitude was a blaring alarm.

She didn’t have time, minutes possibly.

Elara grabbed her coat, her badge, and her weapon. She checked the anomaly logs again, tracing the flicker of her double’s last known coordinate. Close. Too close. Whoever orchestrated this wasn't done, and they think they have already won.

They didn’t know her.

She locked the apartment door behind her and walked into the hallway. For the first time in years, the building felt smaller. She felt smaller. Like she was being forced to measure herself against a version of her life she could never reclaim.

Elara Vance had lost her husband, her peace, her future.

But she hadn’t lost her purpose.

Someone wanted her erased.

Someone wanted her out of their way.

And someone had used her happiest self as the weapon.

Fine.

They picked the wrong version of her.

The elevator dinged at the end of the hallway.

Alarm bells screamed in her head.

She turned and pushed through the stair door just as she heard “Hey!” from the direction of the elevator.

She didn’t stop.

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