The words landed like precision strikes—soft, controlled, devastating.
“As long as my son needs you,” he said, “my hands are tied. You get to live.”
I swallowed hard, my mouth dry.
He stepped even closer now—too close. I could feel his presence like heat, like gravity.
“And do not ever—ever—judge me again about how I’ve raised my son,” he said, voice deadly calm. “Understood?”
I nodded quickly. Small. Instinctive.
“Yes.”
For a long second, he searched my face, as if deciding whether I was worth the air I breathed.
“Now come with me,” he ordered.
He turned and left the kitchen without another glance, his stride unhurried, certain I would follow.
I did—heart hammering, steps uneven—as the corridor closed around us, long and dim, swallowing sound and thought alike. My pulse roared in my ears, each footstep echoing with questions I didn’t dare voice.
As I struggled to keep pace, my mind betrayed me, drifting to the one person at the center of all this—my sister. Elena Senior. The reason his hatred had found a home in me.
Could she truly have done what he claimed?
Or was this another error, another piece of evidence twisted until it fit the shape of his grief and rage?
The accusations replayed themselves, relentless. One of them—brutal, undeniable—had been proven true. His sister. Dead. Beaten beyond recognition.
But his pregnant wife?
That accusation splintered differently. What would Elena gain from that? From killing an unborn child? From destroying a woman who had never wronged her?
That wasn’t my sister.
Was it?
I quickened my steps, dread coiling tighter with every pace. Love had always defined us—fierce, unshakable, forged long before the world taught us how cruel it could be. Blood, loyalty, protection. We had survived too much together for me to believe she could be capable of something so calculated. So monstrous.
Yet doubt crept in anyway, poisonous and unwelcome.
I followed him faster now, uncertainty clawing at my chest, not knowing where he was taking me... or whether I was walking toward answers, or the final burial of everything I believed about my sister—and myself.
I remembered my sister at fourteen—not as a headline or an accusation, but as a living, breathing presence that once filled every quiet corner of my life.
Elena Senior stood barefoot in our old kitchen, her long hair pulled into a messy ponytail that refused to stay neat no matter how often she retied it.
The linoleum floor was cold beneath our feet, the kind of cold that seeped upward and lingered, but she didn’t flinch.
She never noticed discomfort when she was happy.
Sunlight slanted in through the narrow window above the sink, catching dust in the air, turning it into something soft and almost magical.
She was laughing—full-bodied, careless laughter that came from deep in her chest—as she whisked eggs far too aggressively in a chipped white bowl we’d owned for years.
The fork clanged against the porcelain, egg splattering onto the counter, onto her wrist, onto the front of her shirt as I reached for the salt shaker.
“You always add the salt at the end, Elena Junior,” she said, tapping my forehead lightly with the back of the spoon, her smile crooked and fond. “Otherwise it gets tough.”
