Chapter 2

The first image was the day Mia and I were rescued.

We'd been dumped in the corner of an abandoned factory.

That day, Mia was covered head to toe in burns and barely alive.

My arm had been scorched in the same fire, the scars still there to this day.

When our parents found us, I was lying on the ground, holding Mia, sobbing so hard I couldn't breathe.

Everyone grabbed me and kept asking what the kidnapper looked like, where he'd gone. Then Mia woke. The first word out of her mouth was "sister."

Then she was gone. When they asked me what the kidnapper looked like, I shook my head and said I hadn't seen anything.

No one believed me.

Mia had been the Family heir. I was merely the backup, and our parents hadn't even wanted that. The only reason was that Beth had been ill at the time.

I hadn't named the killer, so they all assumed I was hiding it on purpose.

They took Mia away. I was left behind.

I dragged myself through the wreckage, crawling forward as the rain poured down, blurring my vision, hammering against my wounds.

I curled into a ball on the ground, hugging my knees, face twisted in agony, sobbing.

The memory extraction made me weep tears of blood.

Beth scoffed.

"You deserved it. If you'd named the killer, no one would've left you there. Even if you'd died on that spot, nobody would've felt sorry for you."

The elders backed her up. "She's right."

"Covering for the killer is no different from doing it yourself!"

"An ungrateful snake like her deserves to die. Poor Mia. Even in her last breath, she was still calling for her sister."

Then the screen suddenly jumped to another scene.

It showed a wild rose garden, overgrown and abandoned from neglect. Mia had chosen it as the site for a weapons cache.

She stood in the middle of the garden and told me, her chin lifted with pride, "Once the armory is built here, we can move the whole stockpile. That'll solve a lot of problems."

At this, my mother, Catherine Turner, started to cry.

She broke down sobbing. Mia's intelligence, her competence, only made Catherine hate me more. She had never been able to let go of what happened.

She had tried everything to find the killer.

Dominic had hunted down and killed every suspect. None of them turned out to be the right one.

Even Beth's position as heir had only been given to her much later, when there was no other option.

When Mia and I were kidnapped, every surveillance camera in the area had malfunctioned. Then an explosion destroyed whatever footage remained.

No one knew who had done it.

Only I survived. I was the only one who knew the truth.

Mia took my hand and walked me through the entire garden. She picked the most beautiful wild rose and gave it to me, smiling. "I'll always give you the prettiest things, Selena."

Watching this memory, I couldn't hold back my sobs.

Beth's fury only grew. She stormed over and slapped me across the face. "You make me sick! Mia poured her heart out for you, and you won't even name the person who killed her!

"How can you be so selfish? You never cared about her at all."

The moment she finished, the screen showed Mia turning away from me.

I had taken the rose she gave me and thrown it away the instant her back was turned.

The Family members shot to their feet, pointing and shouting. "I knew it!"

"She was faking it the whole time! Mia treated her like a real sister, and she's nothing but an ungrateful snake! The Family can't tolerate someone this selfish!"

"Exactly!"

The louder they screamed, the higher the current in the chair surged.

Beth knew full well that I was allergic to pollen.

But she didn't say a word in my defense. She joined them, cursing me along with the rest.

"Thank God for Beth. Otherwise, with Mia gone, this snake would've been heir."

"Keep watching. Finding the killer is what matters."