SISTERLY SECRETS

MALIA KILSYTH

The quiet in the eastern wing of the estate was a fragile thing, brittle as ice and just as easily shattered.

I stood by the window of Elena’s conservatory, watching the rain beat a relentless rhythm against the glass. Below, on the gravel driveway, the dark sedan carrying Jarrah Calaby had long since vanished into the Melbourne fog, but the ghost of his touch still burned against my skin. My lower lip still felt heavy, warm, and branded by his thumb. My blood was a chaotic storm of hatred, disgust, and a sickening, electric pulse of awareness I refused to name.

Behind me, the soft rustle of silk drew me out of the spiral.

"Malia?"

I turned to see Elena standing in the doorway. In the dim, amber light of the conservatory’s floor lamps, my sister looked like a watercolor painting left out in the rain delicate, washed out, and entirely out of place in a family built on blood and narcotics. Her pale, porcelain skin seemed almost translucent under her soft cream cardigan, and her wide hazel-green eyes were rimmed with red.

"He's gone," I said, my voice rough. I cleared my throat, stepping away from the glass. "You don't have to stay hidden in your room anymore."

Elena didn't walk toward me. Instead, she darted a frantic look over her shoulder, down the long, empty hallway that led back to our father’s wing. The tension in her small frame was so tight it looked painful.

"Did he... did Jarrah do something to you?" she whispered, her voice trembling as she finally stepped into the room, pulling the heavy oak doors shut behind her. She turned the brass lock with an agonizingly quiet click.

"Nothing I can't pay back ten-fold when the time comes," I spat, my jaw tightening as I crossed my arms. "Father traded me off like a piece of livestock to save his own skin. But he thinks I'm going into that estate as an obedient bride. He has no idea what I'm taking with me under that dress."

Elena flinched, stepping closer and grabbing my hands. Her fingers were ice-cold, trembling violently against mine.

"Malia, stop," she pleaded, her voice dropping to a frantic whisper. "Listen to me. You can't do this. You can't play hero, and you cannot go into the Calaby house thinking this is just about a truce."

I frowned, reading the genuine terror written across her soft features. Elena was always the quiet one. After Callan died, she had retreated inward, hiding behind her paintings and books while I picked up a gun and threw myself into our family's dirty work to keep her safe. But right now, there was something else in her eyes. Something sharp. Something terrified me.

"What are you talking about, El?" I asked softly, my posture softening just a fraction. "Father threatened you. He explicitly used your care, your safety, to force my hand. I have to do this. I don't have a choice."

"That’s what he wants you to think!" Elena pulled her hands away, pacing back and forth across the hardwood floor, her cream cardigan wrapping tight around her shoulders. "Father... he's changing, Malia. Or maybe he was always like this and we were just too young to see it."

"He's a sociopath," I said flatly. "That isn't news to me."

"No, it's more than that," she insisted, stopping dead in her tracks. She looked toward the locked doors again, as if expecting Alastair to burst through the wood at any second. "Ever since Callan died, Father hasn't been acting like a man who lost his eldest son and heir. He's been acting like a man who is clearing a board."

A cold draft seemed to sweep through the room, making the hairs on my arms stand up. "Clearing a board?"

Elena swallowed hard, her throat bobbing. She stepped closer to me, bringing her lips so close to my ear I could feel her warm, panicked breath.

"Three weeks ago, before the port war escalated, I was coming down to the kitchen late at night to get some water," she whispered. "Father’s study door was cracked open. He was on an encrypted satellite phone. The kind he only uses when he’s dealing with international brokers outside Victoria."

My chest tightened. "And?"

"He wasn't shouting. He wasn't negotiating. He was laughing, Malia," Elena’s voice cracked, tears welling in her eyes. "He was talking to someone on a dark web channel. I saw the blue glow of his secondary monitor when I peeked through the hinge. He was transferring vast sums of money out of the Kilsyth main accounts into offshore shell companies in the Caymans. Millions. Money that wasn't flagged in the syndicate's weekly ledgers."

"He’s embezzling from his own family?" I murmured, processing the information. It made sense for a greedy man, but why now?

"It’s not just money," Elena whispered, her hazel eyes wide with a horrifying light. "Late last night, after the docklands hit the one where three of our men died I heard him in the study again. He wasn't angry about the lost shipment. He was typing on a modified military terminal. I managed to clone the local network ping from my tablet before the security sweep scrubbed it."

She reached deep into the pocket of her cardigan and pulled out a tiny, silver micro-USB drive. She pressed it into my palm, her cold fingers wrapping around mine until the metal bit into my flesh.

"What is this?" I asked, looking down at the small piece of metal.

"It’s a partial log of his outgoing transmissions," Elena said, her voice shaking so hard it was barely audible. "The encryption is heavy military-grade stuff that Callan used to warn us about. But I managed to catch the routing headers. Malia... he wasn't sending messages to our syndicate lieutenants. And he wasn't messaging our legal team."

My heart began to hammer against my ribs, a dull, thumping echo of foreboding. "Elena. Who was he talking to?"

"The messages were being routed directly to an unlisted IP address inside the Victoria Police Department’s internal homicide network," Elena whispered.

The air left my lungs all at once. The room seemed to tilt beneath my boots.

"That's impossible," I breathed, my mind wildly trying to make sense of the words. "Father hates the feds. He's spent thirty years bribing precinct captains just to keep our operations off their radar."

"He isn't bribing them, Malia," Elena sobbed quietly, a single tear spilling over her lash line and tracking down her pale cheek. "The transmission logs showed an automated file exchange. He was receiving encrypted updates on an archived, unredacted murder investigation. The file tag was KILSYTH-C-0419."

Callan’s case file number.

The blood in my veins turned to liquid nitrogen. My fingers closed tight around the micro-USB drive until the edges bruised my skin. Callan's murder file was supposed to be sealed, a cold case locked away because the police claimed they lacked physical evidence to indict the Calaby syndicate. Why would my father be receiving real-time, encrypted updates on his dead son's murder file from an internal police server?

"Why would he have that?" I demanded, my voice a harsh, panicked whisper. "Unless..."

"Unless he’s not trying to fight the Calabys," Elena said, her voice dropping into a terrifyingly cold register. "Unless this whole war... this whole marriage... is a setup."

"A setup for what?"

Before Elena could answer, the heavy brass door handle of the conservatory rattled violently from the outside.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

We both froze, total silence falling over the room like a heavy shroud.

"Malia? Elena?"

Our father's dark, gravelly voice echoed through the thick oak wood of the locked door, cold, smooth, and entirely unhurried.

"Open the door, girls. Now."

Elena let out a tiny, terrified gasp, her face draining of what little color it had left. I reacted instantly, shoving the micro-USB deep into the inner hidden lining of my leather jacket, right beside the sheath where my blade usually rested.

"Just a second, Father!" I called out, forcing my voice to sound annoyed, mapping over the sheer panic surging through my chest.

I looked at Elena, taking her by the shoulders and giving her a firm, reassuring squeeze. Act normal, I communicated with my eyes. Don't break.

I stepped to the door, unlocked the heavy brass latch, and pulled it open.

Alastair stood in the threshold, framed by the dark wood of the hallway. He looked down at me, his obsidian eyes scanning my face, then shifting slowly to Elena, who stood stiffly by the window, her hands clasped tightly in front of her.

"What is going on in here?" he asked softly, his tone dangerously calm.

"Sister talk," I said smoothly, stepping into his line of sight to block his view of Elena. "She's upset about the wedding. Which you would know if you possessed a single grain of human empathy."

Alastair didn't take the bait. He didn't yell. Instead, his gaze dropped down to my right hand.

I looked down. In my hurry to hide the drive, I hadn't realized that the inner lining of my jacket was slightly flared exposing the dark handle of the carbon-fiber tactical knife I had strapped to my ribcage.

My heart stopped.

Alastair slowly raised his eyes back to mine. A cold, chilling smile spread across his thin lips.

"You always were transparent, Malia," he murmured, stepping forward until he was right in my face. "You think you're preparing for a war against Jarrah Calaby. But you don't even know what board you're playing on."

He leaned in, his voice dropping to a whisper that made my blood run cold.

"Give me the drive your sister just gave you. Or I call the port guards in to search her room right now.”