Maya’s POV
The hospital waiting room smelled like antiseptic and grief.
I was fifteen years old, still wearing my pajamas because no one had thought to tell me to change before the police arrived at our door.
Blue flannel pants with little white stars. A t-shirt I'd stolen from my father's drawer because it was soft and smelled like him.
I remember staring at those stars while the officers spoke in low voices, words like accident and impact and instantaneous floating past me like debris in a river.
My parents were somewhere behind those double doors. Except they weren't my parents anymore—they were bodies, they were past tense.
They were two people who had kissed me goodnight three hours ago and would never kiss me again.
I sat in a plastic chair that squeaked every time I breathed too hard, and I waited for someone to tell me what happened next.
A social worker had tried to talk to me, but I couldn't make my mouth form words. A nurse had offered me water, but my hands wouldn't stop shaking long enough to hold the cup.
Then Lora came.
She ran through the entrance wild-eyed and terrified, still wearing her waitress uniform from the late shift at the diner downtown.
Her apron was stuffed in her purse, half-hanging out. Her mascara had already started to run.
She was barely twenty-two years old, and she looked like someone had reached into her chest and ripped out everything that mattered.
She didn't say anything at first. She just dropped to her knees in front of my plastic chair, right there on the dirty linoleum floor, and pulled me into her arms so tight it hurt.
"I've got you," she whispered into my hair, her voice cracking on every syllable. "I've got you, Maya. You're not alone. You're never going to be alone, do you understand me? I've got you."
"Lora." Her name came out broken, barely recognizable. "Lora, they said… the police said—"
"I know."
She pulled back just enough to cup my face in her hands, her thumbs wiping my tears. I hadn't realized I was crying.
"I know, baby. I know. But you listen to me, okay? You listen to me right now. Whatever happens next, whatever we have to figure out, we figure it out together. You and me. That's how it's going to be."
"But what about…" I couldn't finish the sentence. Couldn't say what about Mom and Dad. Couldn't make those words exist in my mouth.
"We're going to get through this." Lora's eyes were fierce, even through the tears. "I don't know how yet, I don't have all the answers. But I know that I love you more than anything in this world, and I'm not going anywhere. Not ever. You're stuck with me, Maya Rose Morrison. For the rest of your life."
"Promise?" The word came out small, childish and desperate.
"I promise." She pressed her forehead to mine. "I promise on everything I am. You will never be alone. I will always, always be here."
She kept that promise for eleven years.
Lora dropped out of college three weeks after the funeral.
I found out later she'd been six credits away from her degree in graphic design—six credits away from the career she'd dreamed about since she was Nina's age, drawing elaborate pictures on napkins at that same diner where she worked. She never went back.
"It's fine," she told me when I was old enough to understand what she'd given up.
We were sitting in our tiny apartment, the one she'd somehow managed to rent on three different jobs and sheer force of will.
"I can finish later. When things settle down, when you're older."
"But your portfolio," I pressed. "You were going to apply to that firm downtown, the one with the—"
"Maya." She reached across the kitchen table, squeezed my hand.
"There will be other firms, other opportunities. Right now, you need to focus on school, and I need to focus on making sure we have a roof over our heads. That's the priority. Everything else can wait."
Everything else waited forever.
She worked three jobs. The diner in the mornings, a dry cleaner in the afternoons, bartending on weekends.
She slept four hours a night if she was lucky. She wore the same three outfits for two years straight because every spare dollar went into a savings account with my name on it.
"For college," she said when I found the bank statements. "For your future. For all the things I want you to have that I never got."
"Lora, you don't have to…"
"Yes, I do." Her voice was quiet but absolute. "Mom and Dad would have wanted you to have choices, Maya. Real choices. And I'm going to make sure you get them, even if I have to work myself into the ground to do it."
She gave up dating because there wasn't time. Gave up traveling because there wasn't money.
Gave up living in any meaningful sense of the word—all of it sacrificed on the altar of making sure her baby sister had a future.
And then Lora met Gerald Morrison. Then Xander Hale.
And then Lora was dead.
I close the memory like closing a wound—carefully, deliberately, with full knowledge that it will tear open again the moment I stop pressing down.
I'm sitting in my apartment now. Different city, different life, different version of myself than the girl in blue flannel pajamas who lost everything in one night.
My laptop glows on the desk in front of me, the Hale household job posting filling the screen like an invitation to destruction.
My application is flawless, I've made sure of that.
The references will check out—contacts I've cultivated over years, people who owe me favors, identities I've carefully constructed.
The credentials sparkle like they were designed in a laboratory. The work history tells a story of competence and dedication and exactly the kind of person a wealthy family would want caring for their children.
Five years of preparation. Five years of learning everything about Alexander Hale—his company, his habits, his sins.
Five years of becoming someone who could get close enough to destroy him.
I think of Lora's grave.
I think of the rain that day, how it soaked through my clothes until I couldn't tell the difference between water and tears.
I think of kneeling in the mud beside her headstone, my voice raw from screaming, my hands bleeding from where I'd clawed at the earth like I could dig her back out.
"I'll make him pay," I'd whispered to the cold granite. "I'll take everything he loves. He'll know what it feels like to lose someone who matters. I promise you, Lora. I promise on everything I am."
The cursor blinks on the submit button.
Somewhere across the city, Xander Hale is tucking his daughters into bed. He's kissing his wife goodnight, living the life he stole from my sister—the family, the happiness, the future that should have been hers.
He doesn't know I exist. He doesn't know what's coming.
My finger hovers over the trackpad. For one heartbeat, I let myself feel the weight of what I'm about to do—the deception, the betrayal, the long game I've been playing since the day they lowered Lora into the ground.
Then I think of her voice: ‘I've got you. You're not alone. You'll never be alone.’
But I am alone. Because of him. I click submit.
‘I'm coming for you, Xander Hale.’