My Sister’s Murderer Is Protecting

CHAPTER FIVE: ONE SISTER DEAD

POV:Vespera Vale

“Who are you?” I called into the darkness, my voice shaking more than I wanted it to. No answer, just the sound of breathing somewhere beyond the beam of light coming through the broken window.

“Show yourself,” Riven said, stepping in front of me again.

“Your sister did not die because she knew too much,” the voice said. It was calm. Too calm. Like it had rehearsed this moment for years.

“Then why did she die?” I asked.

“Because she remembered who you were.”

The words hit me like ice water. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t listen to this,” Riven said, his hand finding my arm. “Vespera, whatever they say next, it doesn’t matter.”

But it was already too late. The voice kept going, unbothered.

“Seraphine found out you were not the daughter of the people who raised you. Not biologically. She discovered it two months before she died.”

“That’s not true.” My voice cracked. “That’s not possible.”

“Ask your mother,” the voice said. “Ask her what happened on the night of the first murder.”

“The first murder?” My head was spinning. “What was the first murder? What are you talking about?”

The voice didn’t answer that. I heard fabric shift somewhere in the dark, footsteps moving closer, and then the lights above us flickered and died completely.

“Riven..”

Something slammed into me from the side, hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. I hit the stone floor, pain shooting up through my elbow, and for a second I couldn’t see anything at all.

“Get off her!” Riven’s voice, furious, followed by the sound of a struggle, bodies colliding, a fist connecting with something solid.

The lights flickered back on for half a second. Just long enough for me to see a face above me. A face I recognized. One of the five. I knew it, I was certain of it, but the light died again before I could hold onto which one.

By the time the emergency lights kicked in fully, the attacker was gone. The tower door hung open, swinging slightly on its hinge. Riven was on the ground beside me, blood running from a cut above his eyebrow, his arm bent at an angle that made my stomach turn.

“Riven.” I scrambled toward him. “Riven, are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he said, which was clearly a lie, his face pale and tight with pain.

“You’re not fine. You’re bleeding.”

“Vespera..”

“Don’t argue with me right now.” I pulled off my scarf and pressed it against the cut on his forehead, my hands shaking so badly I could barely hold it steady.

He let me. That surprised me more than anything else that had happened in the last ten minutes.

“Your sister didn’t want me to protect her,” he said quietly, watching my face while I worked.

“What?”

“That night. In the tower. She told me to stay away from her. She said it wasn’t safe for me to be near her anymore.”

“Then what did she want?” I asked. “If not that?”

He looked at me for a long moment, something raw and open in his expression that I hadn’t seen from him before.

“She wanted me to protect you.”

The words settled over me like something too heavy to carry. Before I could ask him what that meant, why Seraphine would say something like that about a fourteen-year-old sister she hadn’t mentioned in any of this yet, my phone started ringing.

I almost didn’t answer it. My hands were still shaking, Riven’s blood on my fingers.

“Hello?”

“Is this Vespera Vale?” said a man’s voice. Official. Careful in the way people are when they’re about to deliver bad news.

“Yes.”

“This is Detective Marsh with Blackthorn County Police. I need you to come to school. There’s been an incident.”

My throat went dry. “What kind of incident?”

“A student has been found dead.”

~~~

I ran the entire way there, Riven limping beside me, refusing to let me go alone, even injured. Police tape stretched across the entrance to the east wing dormitory. Officers moved in and out of a doorway, their faces grim, radios crackling with static.

“They’re saying it’s a suicide,” Riven muttered as we pushed closer, close enough to see past the officers into the room. I knew before I saw the face that it would be one of them. One of the five names from Seraphine’s necklace.

Maddox Valehart lay on the floor, his eyes open, staring at nothing. I felt sick. Whatever arrogance he’d carried around the hallways, whatever threats he’d made to me only days ago, none of it mattered now. He was just a boy on the floor, gone. But it wasn’t the suicide part that made my blood run cold.

Written on the wall beside his body, in red letters that hadn’t fully dried, were seven words.

ONE SISTER DEAD. ONE SISTER LEFT.

“That’s not a suicide,” I whispered.

“I know,” Riven said.

An officer moved to block my view, but not before I noticed something in Maddox’s outstretched hand. A photograph, half curled from where his fingers had gripped it.

I don’t know what made me do it. Instinct, maybe. Or the same reckless curiosity that had gotten me into that bell tower in the first place. I ducked past the officer and grabbed it before anyone could stop me.

“Hey!” someone shouted.

I was already backing away, staring down at the photograph in my hands, and everything else in the hallway went silent. It was Seraphine, standing beside Maddox. Beside Riven. Beside Celestine, Elara, and Dorian, all of them younger, all of them smiling like the photo had been taken on some ordinary happy day.

But there was one more person in the picture.

A little girl. Not older than three or four with dark hair and a face I somehow recognized even though I had never seen this photograph in my life.

That was Mee. My hands went numb. I flipped the photograph over, searching for a date, and when I found it printed in faded ink along the bottom edge, my whole body went cold. The photograph had been taken two years before I was born.

Underneath the date, in handwriting I now recognized as my sister’s, were six words that made the hallway spin around me.

SHE WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO SURVIVE.