That it doesn't fill the void.
It just gives the void a name.
"What a true pity."
My voice doesn't waver. Doesn't crack or soften or carry even a fragment of the sisterly affection that once existed between us—back when we were children, back before the rivalry poisonedeverything, back when sharing a face meant sharing a soul rather than waging a war over which version of it deserved to survive.
Those days are so far gone they might as well be someone else's memories.
"You thought you'd won." I tilt my head, studying the wreckage of her with clinical detachment. "That you'd get the pack. Win this hidden, waging war that I actually wanted to protect you from."
A bitter laugh escapes me, sharp and hollow as a cracked bell.
Protect.
What a foolish word to associate with anything that involves a Sinclair.
"You became the villain in a story that was never meant to be your domain to claim." My gloved fingers flex at my sides, the leather creaking softly. "But alas. Your suffering will end, and I'll have to carry that burden onward."
I shake my head, and the motion feels rehearsed even though it isn't. Everything about this moment should feel monumental—the climax of years of planning, the crescendo of every sleepless night spent tracing the scars she left on my body, every morning spent relearning how to walk after what the fall did to my spine, every second of existing as a ghost in a world that had already eulogized me and moved on.
Victoria Sinclair: dead at nineteen. Tragic accident. Fell off a cliff.
Case closed.
Except I didn't die.
I just stopped being alive in every way that mattered.
I lean forward.
Close enough that the remnants of her scent—sour now, corrupted by infection and decay and the chemical compound still metabolizing through what's left of her system—fills mynostrils. Close enough that I can see the slight, almost imperceptible movement of her pupil beneath the swollen, bruised lid of her left eye.
It shifts.
Finds me.
Locks on.
There you are.
The last bit of Vivian Sinclair—the real her, the conscious, thinking, comprehending fragment that still exists somewhere behind the destroyed exterior—stares up at me from that single functioning eye. And I watch, with the same detachment I've carried for the last seventy-two hours, as tears begin to pool against the damaged waterline.
Slow.
Thick.
The kind of tears that come not from pain—she's well beyond pain at this point—but from the absolute, crystalline understanding that death is here.
That death has my face.
How poetic.
"I'll never forgive you."
The words come out steady. Low. Final.
"For the scars upon my flesh that were all thanks to your selfishness." My hand rises, almost of its own accord, to trace the faint ridge of scarring along my collarbone where the rocks caught me during the fall. A memento I can't remove. A permanent record of the moment my twin sister decided I was expendable. "I'll walk this savage path and reclaim the empire you sought to ruin. The one I deserved to claim."
