I straighten, pulling away from the wreckage of her face, from that single tear now tracking a slow path through the grime and dried blood on her cheek.
"And no matter the challenge ahead that I'll need to fulfill, the satisfaction of your end will push me onward to reclaim everything I wholeheartedly deserved."
She can't speak.
Can't form words without a tongue, can't produce sound without a voice box that's been rendered permanently nonfunctional. But that eye—that single, defiant, terrified eye—screams everything her mouth no longer can. Regret. Rage. A desperate, animal plea for clemency that she never once extended to me when she watched me go over that cliff edge with nothing but gravity and betrayal to break my fall.
Did you feel this?
When you pushed me?
Did you watch me fall and feel nothing, the way I feel nothing now?
Or did you feel relief?
Is that worse?
I rise to my full height and stare at her one final time.
My sister.
My twin.
The other half of a pair that was never meant to be divided but was shattered anyway by ambition and jealousy and a world that told us there could only be one.
There can only be one.
And it was always supposed to be me.
I lift my leg.
The kick connects with her midsection—solid, forceful, final. The impact reverberates through my boot and up into my shin, and the chair tips backward with a metallic shriek against the concrete slab. For one frozen heartbeat, it teeters on the edge, balanced between the cliff and the void, between existence and oblivion.
No sound comes from Vivian.
Not a gasp. Not a moan. Not even the faintest exhalation of air being forced from damaged lungs.
Silent.
The way the world thought I was when she pushed me.
The chair goes over.
I turn away before the descent is complete, my boots pivoting on stone with military precision. I don't need to watch. I've replayed this moment so many times in my mind—during rehabilitation, during the months of learning to walk again, during every night I spent in safe houses with nothing but my rage and the phantom pain in my spine for company—that the reality of it is almost anticlimactic.
Almost.
Instead, I listen.
The wind carries the sound upward like a grotesque offering—the whistle of displaced air as the chair and its passenger accelerate through empty space, followed by the distant, wet crack of a body meeting rock. Then the secondary impact as the ocean swallows what the cliff didn't destroy, the waves accepting their tribute with the same cold indifference they've shown to every broken thing that's ever been delivered to them.
It's done.
It's really done.
The silence that follows is absolute. Even the wind seems to pause, as if the world itself is holding its breath, waiting to see what comes next in a story that just lost its villain.
Except we both know the villain was never really her.
