Chapter 1 The Video That Shouldn't Exist

POV: Elara

“Elara.”

That’s it. That’s the whole word. My sister’s voice, cracked and small, bleeding out of a twelve-second video I’ve watched forty-three times now.

Rain hits the black umbrella over my head, but I don’t feel it. I’m standing in front of a headstone that says beloved daughter and sister, and my phone is buzzing again in my coat pocket, and none of it makes sense because Wren is supposed to be in the ground under my feet.

Except she isn’t, I know that now.

Twenty minutes ago, when the priest finished talking and everyone walked back to their cars, I finally opened the message that had been sitting there since the funeral started. No text. Just a video file, timestamped three days ago.

The camera was shaking. The room was dark, lit by one bulb swinging somewhere off-screen. A girl was tied to a wooden chair, wrists bound behind her back, a bruise blooming purple under her left eye. She lifted her head like it cost her everything she had left, looked straight into the lens, and said my name.

Then black screen. I watched it until my phone died in my hand. I’m still standing here, forty minutes after the last car pulled away, staring at a headstone with my dead sister’s name carved into it while my actual sister is somewhere out there, alive, bleeding, waiting for me to do something.

My legs finally move. I don’t remember deciding to walk.

The official story was a car accident. Wren’s car went off the cliff road near Blackthorn Academy at eleven at night, no witnesses, no skid marks anyone could explain. The police report closed itself in four days. 

Every time I pushed, every single time a lawyer in a gray suit showed up before I finished the sentence. Vale family lawyers. They didn’t threaten me. They didn’t have to. They just kept saying the word closed until I stopped being able to argue with it.

I believed them. God help me, I believed them.

I let my sister be buried under a lie and I went to her funeral and I didn’t even cry, because some part of me already knew crying wouldn’t bring her back and I was right, because crying was never going to be the thing that saved her. This is just the real fact.

The apartment we shared still smells like her shampoo. I haven’t been able to wash the pillowcases. I go straight to the loose floorboard under her bed, because if Wren was scared of something, this is where she’d hide it. My hands are shaking so bad it takes three tries to pry it up.

Her journal is exactly where the shape of the space says it should be. I sit on the floor and open it and my whole body goes cold.

Pages of sketches, hallways, a locked door with a symbol carved into it, a floor plan labeled restricted wing in her handwriting. Names, twelve of them, each one crossed out and marked the same way: transferred. Next to three of the names, in smaller writing, like she didn’t want anyone to see it even in her own notebook: never enrolled anywhere else. checked.

And at the bottom of the last page, underlined twice hard enough to tear the paper a little: Cassian Vale knows.

I don’t know who that is. I’m going to.

There’s one more thing the police never found, because I never told them about it. I dug it out of the bottom of my jewelry box a broken silver locket, the chain snapped, the hinge bent. Inside is a photo of me and Wren at fourteen, arms around each other, both of us missing the same front tooth.

I flip it over out of habit. There’s a scratch on the back. Fresh. Thin and deliberate, like someone dragged a key across it on purpose. It wasn’t there before the accident. I would know. I’ve held this locket a thousand times.

Someone touched this after she died. I stand up so fast the room tilts.

I go to the bathroom mirror and I look at myself for the first time in months. Same face as my sister. Same eyes, same jaw, same crooked left eyebrow we both got from our dad. The only real difference right now is four inches of hair.

I picked up the kitchen scissors.

I don’t let myself think about it. Thinking is how people talk themselves out of things. I just start cutting, watching brown hair fall into the sink in uneven clumps until the length matches the girl in the video, until the mirror shows me someone who could walk into a room and make people say her name instead of mine.

Then I go through every photo in the apartment, the ones on the fridge, the ones in frames, the one tucked in the corner of the mirror and I pull out every single picture that has both our faces in it. I don’t look at them long. I can’t. I feed them one by one into the sink and light a match and watch us burn together, twin by twin, until there’s nothing left that proves there were ever two of us.

There’s only one girl going into Blackthorn Academy. And she’s going to look exactly like the one they think they buried.

I pack one bag…

~~~~~

At 2:17 in the morning, I’m standing in front of iron gates taller than my apartment building, a camera mounted above them already swinging toward my face like it’s been waiting for me.

My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my throat. I make myself stand still. I make myself lift my chin the way Wren always did, that stubborn, unbothered tilt that made teachers back down and boys stare.

I open my mouth and I don’t use my own voice. I use hers.

“I’m back.”

For three full seconds, nothing happens. Just rain, and the camera’s small red light, and my own pulse roaring in my ears. Then the gate gives a soft, metallic click and starts to open.