บททั้งหมดของ A SISTER’S REVENGE : บทที่ 1 - บทที่ 10

Chapter one - She is dead

The 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.

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Chapter Two - Westbrook

The bus pulled into Westbrook at 8:17 PM. The station was small, a single platform, a vending machine humming its lonely fluorescent hymn, a bathroom with no lock. Alexa stepped off and breathed air that smelled like lake water and pine, clean and indifferent, the way places smell when they haven't yet learned to mourn.A woman in a wool coat approached. Detective Cross. Forty-five, tired eyes, a wedding ring that had left a pale band on her finger…recently removed. Not divorced, Alexa thought. Not yet. Just someone who'd stopped pretending in the mirror each morning."Alexa?""How did you know?""Saw a photo." The detective's breath fogged in the cold. "I'm sorry we have to meet like this."Alexa didn't respond. She followed the detective to an unmarked car, a Ford Taurus with coffee stains in the cup holders and a child's sock wedged between the seats. The campus rolled past the window. Red brick. Green lawns still wet with evening dew. Students laughing, walking in groups, holding

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Chapter Three - The killer

Detective Marlene Cross stands in the doorway of the Westbrook Police Department's interview room, a manila folder in her hands. Her face is the color of oatmeal,neutral, professional, but her eyes betray something softer. Empathy. The kind that comes from seeing too many families shattered.Alexa sat at the metal table. She hadn’t moved in forty-seven minutes. Not since they brought her here from the morgue, still wearing the same clothes she'd worn for fourteen hours of travel. Her duffel bag sits on the floor beside her chair, unzipped, Alice's sweatshirt visible at the top."She has visible marks on her wrists," Detective Cross says, stepping into the room. She closes the door behind her, a gesture of privacy that feels almost kind. "Which means she did try to struggle. Your sister was murdered."The words land like stones dropped into still water.Alexa stands frozen in her chair, her face emotionless. The only thing she can grasp from what Marlene said is that her sister was mur

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Chapter Four - Taking her place

POV- AlexaThe motel room smelt like bleach and regret, old cigarettes, and the faint, sweet ghost of someone else’s perfume. A single lamp, its shade bruised and listing, casted a jaundiced glow across a room that had forgotten how to be a home. The bedspread was a masterpiece of institutional beige, its surface pilled and scarred with tiny burns, like a map of small, forgotten disasters.On the nightstand, a ring of water had dried into a ghost, and the clock radio blinked an unanswered accusation: 12:00, 12:00, 12:00.In the corner, the thin curtains, the color of a bad cough, failed to fully meet, leaving a sliver of neon light from the parking lot to slice across the floor like a blade.The air itself felt borrowed, heavy with the silence of a hundred whispered arguments. The room was dark with a lonely click of a television left on for company.I sat on the edge of the bed, a mattress so thin I could feel the springs through the synthetic sheets. Staring at Alice’s phone.The sc

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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