HER BEAUTIFUL RUIN.

The Funeral

The first time I saw Vivienne Moreau, she was standing at my brother's funeral like she owned his grief too one look at her pale skin shows not even the slightest grievance.

Not crying. Not speaking. Not even pretending to mourn the way the others did the hollow-eyed relatives pressing tissues to dry faces, the schoolmates who had never spoken to Daniel performing sadness like it was a school play.

She was just watching. Standing and staring at his coffin like it held answers only she understood.

The rain came down in sheets that morning, heavy and relentless, soaking through coats, skin, bone. Black roses had been scattered across the cemetery at my mother's request. Daniel had loved roses. My mother said it would be beautiful. She had spent three days arranging it, pouring grief into small decisions because small decisions were all she had left.

It wasn't beautiful.

Nothing about that morning was beautiful.

Everyone else huddled beneath umbrellas, shoulders pressed together, heads bowed against the downpour. But Vivienne Moreau stood completely uncovered. Rain plastered her dark hair against pale skin. Her black dress clung to her. She didn't flinch. Didn't shiver. Didn't acknowledge the weather at all, like the storm existed for everyone else and had simply agreed to leave her alone.

Like she was made of different material than the rest of us.

Beautiful. Cold. Untouchable.

Exactly the way monsters are supposed to look drenched in the rain, the water laid flat against her pale skin like a second layer, like armor she hadn't bothered to take off.

I heard her name whispered between the priest's words. Between the sobs and the shuffling feet and the rain hammering against coffin wood. Carried on strangers' lips like something fragile and dangerous at once.

Vivienne. Vivienne Moreau. Daniel's Vivienne.

She wasn't his. Daniel had barely mentioned her by name, which was strange my brother told me everything. We were two years apart, had grown up finishing each other's sentences, stealing each other's food, staying up too late talking about everything and nothing.

He told me everything. Until Blackthorn. Until her.

Then the texts got shorter. The calls fewer. When I asked what was wrong he said nothing in the way that meant everything, but I'm not ready to say it yet. I gave him space because I thought we had time. Because I believed that whatever door had closed between us would eventually swing open again, the way it always had.

We didn't have time.

Three days before he died, my phone buzzed at 2am when the night was at its eeriest, when you could hear the drop of a pin and the snore of the neighbors bleeding through thin walls.

If anything happens to me, stay away from Vivienne Moreau.

No explanation. Nothing. No answer to the seventeen messages I sent back in the minutes and hours that followed. Just silence and then three days later, the call from the school.

There's been an accident, Miss Sinclair. Your brother. The roof of the east wing.

An accident. That was the word they used. Then a note appeared typed, printed, left on his dorm desk in a neat fold and the word changed.

Suicide, the police said. Suicide, the school said. We had no idea he was struggling, the teachers said, looking at their shoes.

Everyone believed it.

Everyone except me.

Because I knew my brother. I knew the sound of his laugh and the shape of his handwriting and the specific way he went quiet when something was wrong. I knew he had plans a university application he'd been working on for months, a photography project he couldn't stop talking about, a promise to take me to the coast for my birthday in spring. Concrete, specific, burning-bright plans made by someone who fully intended to be alive to keep them.

Daniel Sinclair did not give up. He fought for everything. For his future, for our family, for me on my worst days when I had wanted to quit and he sat beside me and refused to let me.

He would not have jumped off a roof.

He would not have left me.

The note sounded like him on the surface the words were almost right, the cadence almost right. But it was wrong in the specific, quiet, devastating way a forgery is wrong when you've spent your whole life with the original. Wrong in ways I couldn't explain to anyone who hadn't known him down to the bone.

He didn't write it. I knew it the same way I knew my own name.

As the priest finished and people began to leave, the crowd thinned slowly, until only two remained at my brother's grave.

Me. And her.

I raised my eyes, and Vivienne Moreau raised hers.

The rain fell between us. That particular electric feeling hit me that she already knew who I was, that she had known before she came, that my presence here was not a surprise to her at all. That she had calculated it, the way you calculate a move in a game you've been playing alone for a very long time.

Neither of us looked away.

Then something happened. Something so small and brief I almost wondered afterward if I'd imagined it.

Vivienne's eyes dropped to the coffin.

And she smiled.

Not a sad smile. Not the relieved smile of someone watching an enemy buried. Something else entirely private, weighted, knowing. Like she understood something about this moment that I didn't. Like the ending of Daniel's story was something she had been quietly, patiently waiting to see conclude.

It lasted less than a second. Then it was gone.

Ice spread slowly through my entire body.

Because in that moment I understood three things: she knew something about how Daniel died. She had come here to see it through to its end. And she was not even slightly afraid of me.

I made him a promise, right there over everything that was left of the person who had loved me most in the world.

I am coming, Daniel. I will find out what happened. I will burn down every lie until the truth is all that's left.

I would get close to Vivienne Moreau. I would make her trust me. I would dismantle her from the inside out. Even if it cost me everything.

What I didn't know then was that she had been watching me too. Not just today for longer than I knew.

And while I was making promises over my brother's grave, she was already three moves ahead. Already planning. Already waiting for me to walk through the gates of Blackthorn Academy and straight into the careful architecture of her design.

Because Vivienne Moreau had made a promise too.

And hers was far more dangerous than mine.

To be continued...