The gesture was unguarded, almost human, and it unsettled me more than his rage ever had.
“Your sister played a fast one on us,” he continued, voice level but threaded with something darker than anger. Disgust, perhaps. At himself. At being fooled.
“She killed Maria,” he said simply. No dramatics. No pause. Just truth, delivered like a blade. “And she made it look as if you were the one who did it.”
The world tilted.
“The picture... and the video evidence,” he went on, voice steady, every word deliberate, “the same evidence that first made me think it was you...” He paused briefly, letting the weight of that accusation settle before continuing. “We studied it again. Slowly. Methodically. My team, the professionals I trust, analyzed every detail. And what we found... revealed a new truth.”
He finally looked back at me.
“It was your sister.”
My knees threatened to buckle. My chest tightened, breath caught somewhere between my lungs and my throat.
“No,” I whispered, barely audible. “My sister... she can’t... she couldn’t...”
The denial felt instinctive, desperate—like trying to grab smoke with bare hands.
Elena Senior had been many things: distant, cold, ambitious. But a butcher? A woman who could beat another to death, carve her open, murder an unborn child?
“There’s video evidence,” Ruslan said flatly. No cruelty in it. Just certainty. “She’s the one.”
Relief should have come then.
Vindication. Freedom. The release of a weight that had crushed my lungs since the altar.
Instead, horror bloomed—slow and poisonous.
Because if my sister had done this...
Then she wasn’t dead.
She wasn’t imprisoned.
She wasn’t gone.
She was still out there.
Somewhere in the world, breathing, moving, calculating.
And she had framed me.
My hands began to shake. I clenched them into fists at my sides, nails biting into skin as though pain might anchor me to the ground.
Ruslan watched my face closely, his expression unreadable.
I should feel relieved
I should feel free. But I don’t.
Because that means my sister is a monster.
Ruslan didn’t argue.
Didn’t offer false comfort.
“No one knows if your sister is dead or alive,” Ruslan said, voice low, controlled, irrevocable.
