LOGINShare
Chapter one - She is dead
publish date:
2026-04-25 01:28:48The call came at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday.
Alexa Lean was folding laundry in her home bedroom she'd shared with her sister for eleven years after their parents death . The room was somewhat empty now except for her stuff filling the room.
Alice's bed had been stripped and her posters had been taken down.
Alice's smell…jasmine and pencil shavings and something that was just Alice had faded months ago, replaced by the sterile scent of bleach and neglect.
The phone was a cheap burner. Alexa didn't own a smartphone. Couldn't afford one. Couldn't afford much of anything except the bus fare she'd been saving for two years.
When she picked the call the voice on the other end was a stranger's.
"Alexa Lean?"
"Yes."
"This is Detective Marlene Cross from the Westbrook Police Department. I need you to sit down."
Alexa didn't sit. She leaned against the wall, the same wall where Alice had carved their initials with a safety pin when they were nine. A&A Forever.
"I'm standing," Alexa said.
A pause. The kind of pause that happens before someone tells you your life has ended.
"Your relative, I assume, Alice Lean, was found approximately three hours ago in Lake Westbrook on the campus of Westbrook University. Preliminary investigation suggests accidental drowning or more likely….” She paused bracing Alexa
“…Murder, we are still waiting for the autopsy results. I'm so sorry for your loss."
The words arrived like stones thrown at glass. They shattered something inside Alexa, but she didn't make a sound. She'd learned not to cry when she was six years old, watching her mother's casket lower into frozen ground.
Her father had already been gone before they were born, a photograph, a name, nothing more.
"You're her only listed emergency contact," the detective continued. "Someone will need to come identify the body."
The body.
Not Alice. Not her sister. Not the girl who'd held Alexa's hand during thunderstorms and taught her how to French braid her hair and promised they'd get a bigger apartment together after college, a real home, the first real home they'd ever have.
"I'll come," Alexa said.
The clothes she was folding suddenly became so heavy. She didn’t cry, she couldn’t. She was going through the first stage of grief…denial.
The first bus heading to Westbrooke tomorrow was to leave by 6:00am. She had six hours to pack her entire life into a single duffel bag.
She didn't pack much clothes. She packed Alice's things, the ones that Alice hadn't thrown away. A hairbrush with dark strands still tangled in the bristles. A notebook half-filled with song lyrics. A sweatshirt that still smelled like jasmine.
She stared at the brush as if summoning it to life with her eyes.
**********
(FLASHBACK)
“Ouch! Careful Alice, you might just rip my whole hair out.” Alexa said, teasing.
“Oh relax, I barely even touched your hair yet…. And…done.”
Alexa stared at the mirror grinning from ear to ear
“My magic fingers strike again.” Alice praised herself
“Oh please.”
“Now you’ve got hair all over my brush, keep it.”
“Fine.” Alexa dragged the brush from her hand.
“Fine.”
Alice mimicked her and they both laughed.******************
(PRESENT)
She threw the brush into the bag and she sat on Alice's empty bed and waited for dawn.
She didn't cry.
She would never cry again.
Not for Alice. Not for anyone.
*********
The bus ride took fourteen hours.
Alexa watched the world change through a window streaked with grime. The city fell away first, abandoned buildings, pawn shops, check-cashing stores. Then the suburbs. Then farms. Then trees so thick they looked like walls.
She'd never been this far from home. Neither had Alice, until she got the scholarship. The full ride. The chance to escape.
And now Alice was dead in a lake.
Alexa didn't believe it was an accident. Not for a second. She couldn't explain why, she didn't have evidence or logic or any of the things detectives looked for. She had something else. She had knowing.
When you share a womb with someone, when you spend every day of your life with them, when you finish their sentences and feel their pain in your own bones,you will know when something is wrong.
And something was wrong.
Alice had called her three days before she died. Not the usual weekly check-in, the gossip, the laughter. This call was different. Alice's voice was tight. Her words came too fast.
"Lex, I need to tell you something. But not over the phone. I'll explain when I see you."
"See me? When?"
"Soon. I want you to come visit.
“I need to know what’s wrong now.”
“Just promise me you will come."
"Alice, you're scaring me."
"Promise?”
"I promise."
The line went dead.
Alexa had called back twelve times. No answer. Then thirteen. Then twenty. Then she'd told herself she was being paranoid. Alice was probably stressed about her exams and now she was being dramatic.
“Always looking for an excuse to see me.” Alexa said to her self tossing the burner phone on the bed.
Turns out she wasn't fine, because now she was dead.
And someone had killed her.
Latest chapter
A SISTER’S REVENGE Chapter Ten - The Rusty Spoon
I stared at the screen for a long moment, the words blurring and refocusing as my tired eyes struggled to keep up. MEET ME AT THE RUSTY SPOON. 1AM. COME ALONE. Detective Cross. Calling a meeting in the middle of the night. I typed back: I DON'T HAVE A CAR. A pause. Three dots appeared, vanished, and appeared again. THERE'S A BUS. NORTH GATE. 12:17. BE ON IT. I looked at the time on my phone. 12:09. Eight minutes. No time to go back to the dorm. No time to explain anything to Ashley. No time to do anything except walk fast toward the north gate. The campus blurred past me, the old-fashioned lamps casting long shadows that stretched and twisted like reaching hands. My boots crunched on the gravel path, too loud in the silence, and every step echoed off the buildings like a warning. --- The bus was late. I stood at the north gate, alone, the wind cutting through my jacket like it wasn't even there. The streetlights here were older, spaced farther apart, casting pools of weak
A SISTER’S REVENGE Chapter Nine - The Breaking-in Point
I immediately picked it, tucking it into my jacket.The photograph burned against my chest where I'd tucked it inside my jacket, the paper warm from my skin, the warning still wet in places where the red substance hadn't fully dried. I'd palmed it before Ashley could see, the motion quick and automatic, the same reflex that had kept me alive in group homes where possessions disappeared if you looked away for too long.The room was still destroyed. Still chaos. Still a crime scene that hadn't been declared one yet.I stood in the center of it, my hands trembling at my sides, my breath coming too fast, too shallow. The second heartbeat in my side had become a drumbeat, a countdown, a warning of its own.STOP. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING.Whoever wrote that knew who I was. Knew why I was here. Knew everything. My heart skipped in a hint of fear.That was the thought that froze the blood in my veins. Not that they had found me. Not that they had threatened me. But that they had done it so c
A SISTER’S REVENGE Chapter Eight - STOP
The photograph was lying at the top of Ashley’s hamper.——The hallway stretched in two directions. To the left, a set of metal doors marked STORAGE - AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY. To the right, a narrow corridor that led toward the loading dock, where a rectangle of moonlight spilled across the concrete floor.No footsteps. No shadow. Just the smell of bleach and raw chicken and something else underneath, something chemical, something that reminded me of the nursing home where I'd watched Mrs. Patterson die. God bless her soul.Perfume. Expensive perfume. The kind that came in a bottle shaped like a teardrop and cost more than my monthly rent.Someone had been here. Recently.I moved toward the loading dock, my sneakers silent on the concrete. The door was propped open with a cinder block, the night air rushing in like a held breath finally released. Outside, the parking lot was empty except for a single car,a black sedan with tinted windows, parked beneath the broken streetlight.The engi
A SISTER’S REVENGE Chapter Seven - Shadowed
Ashley grabbed a hoodie from the back of her chair. Westbrook University crest faded to almost nothing,and pulled it over her head. The motion revealed a flash of skin at her waist, and there, just above the band of her jeans, a scar. Small. Circular. The kind a cigarette might leave. I was tempted to ask what it was, but I knew she was already suspicious of me. "The tour," she said, tying her hair into a tighter bun, "starts with the dining hall. Not because it's good,it's not…but because you need to know which tables are safe and which tables will make your life hell." "Safe from what?" Ashley's laugh was sharp this time. "From the wolves." She didn't explain. She just walked out the door, and I followed. --- The dining hall was a cavernous space with fluorescent lights that hummed in a frequency designed to cause headaches. Long tables stretched from one end to the other, each one claimed by a different tribe: athletes near the windows, theater kids in the corner, a cluster
A SISTER’S REVENGE Chapter Six - The first class
The walk back to Morrison Hall took me past the library, the student union, and a narrow footpath lined with oak trees so old their roots had cracked the sidewalk like veins beneath skin. I kept my head down, my hands in the pockets of the jacket I'd bought from a thrift store three towns away,navy blue, slightly too large, the kind of garment that said I don't want to be noticed.But I noticed everything.The couple arguing near the bike rack. The professor smoking a cigarette behind the science building, his eyes darting left and right like he was waiting for someone to catch him. The girl sitting alone on a bench, her phone pressed to her ear, tears sliding down her cheeks in silence.Westbrook wasn't just a campus. It was a stage. And everyone on it was performing.I reached my dorm at 6:47 PM. The hallway on the second floor smelled like microwave popcorn and something chemical;nail polish remover, maybe, or the cheap perfume they sold at the drugstore downtown. Room 217's door w
A SISTER’S REVENGE Chapter Five - The Replacement
The administrative building of Westbrook College was the kind of architecture designed to intimidate. Gray stone columns, brass plaques polished to a mirror shine, windows tall enough to make you feel small just by standing near them. I had arrived at 8:47 AM, seventeen minutes early, because being early meant watching, and watching meant surviving.Detective Cross had made good on her word.Three days of paperwork. Three days of phone calls that stretched into evenings. Three days of me sitting in that motel room, memorizing Alice's phone like it was scripture, until the bleach-and-regret smell had soaked into my clothes, my hair, my lungs.Now I stood on the steps of Prescott Hall, a backpack slung over one shoulder..new, canvas, nondescript;containing everything I owned and nothing I was willing to lose. The morning air had that sharp, clean quality of autumn in a town that wanted you to forget it had teeth.I didn't forget."Alexa Lean is dead," Detective Cross had told me over th
You may also like
