Five years ago...
The sun sagged like a dying ember, bleeding its last light over a landscape gone hollow. Shadows stretched long and grotesque across the cracked earth when Deputy Markson found her. She lay sprawled at the edge of a dirt road, limbs twisted unnaturally, as though flung there by some careless, unseen hand. Her body was a map of violence—purple bruises blossomed across her skin like rot, her once-vivid blue eyes glazed and fixed on the indifferent sky. No scream remained. No breath. Only the silence—the kind that seeps into bones and festers.
The world around her buzzed with the brittle quiet of late summer, but it felt wrong, unnatural. As Markson knelt, the chill that gripped his spine wasn't from the breeze—it was something older, something malignant, something that watched. The stillness was not peace. It was aftermath. A residue of terror so thick he could feel it pressing against his chest like a second skin.
Whoever had done this hadn't simply killed her—they had unmade her. Stripped her down to something less than human. Her body, discarded like garbage, bore not only the marks of brutality but a deeper cruelty, an erasure of identity. She had been someone—laughing, hoping, dreaming. Now she was a shell. A hollow warning.
The anger came first, sharp and sudden. But beneath it, dread. Because something had walked in their town's skin without anyone noticing. Something clever. Something patient. The thought that this was not random—that it had meaning, ritual, purpose—gnawed at him.
In the days that followed, the investigation unfolded like rot beneath floorboards—hidden sickness slowly exposed. The townsfolk whispered. Doors closed tighter. Faces turned away when Markson asked questions. He traced the girl's past like a trail of blood in the snow—her friends spoke of vanished laughter, withdrawn glances, bruises explained away with lies. Her family, pale ghosts of themselves, admitted what they had tried so hard not to see.
She had tried to escape. Once. Twice. But something always pulled her back—something with a voice that sounded like love but held the weight of chains. Her abuser wasn't a monster in the woods. He was inside the town. Known. Trusted. Smiling. And still breathing.
Markson began to feel it then—the suffocating presence that threaded through every home, every field, every hollow smile. The town itself was complicit, stitched together by silence and shared guilt. And the man who had done this still moved among them, invisible in plain sight.
Fear spread. People didn't just grieve—they watched each other with suspicion. The girl had become a name, then a symbol, and finally, a haunting. Her story echoed in the static between phone calls, in the creak of floorboards at night, in the faces of those who had seen too much and said nothing.
And still, her eyes—frozen, cerulean, empty—followed Markson in his dreams.
He saw her at the edge of the woods. In the rearview mirror. Behind the glass of darkened windows. Her gaze no longer pleading, but knowing. Accusing. As if to say: You were too late.
As the sun sank behind the hills in a final, fiery gasp, it stained the sky in blood and gold. Her body, still untouched in his memory, lay against the dirt like a question that had never been answered. The wind moved softly through the trees, carrying no peace—only the thin, sharp breath of something that had been broken and could never be made whole again.
She had fought. God, she had fought. And the earth now held her secrets, silent and cold.
Her blue eyes stared upward, unblinking.
And the world, in its cruel indifference, kept turning.
The sound of tires crunching gravel broke the afternoon stillness. John's head jerked up from his coffee cup. Outside, the sheriff's cruiser rolled to a stop beneath the sagging branches of the old oak tree by the drive. A bad sign. Nothing good ever came with lights off and sirens silent.
John stepped onto the porch, heart thudding.
Deputy Markson climbed out slowly, hat in hand, his face drawn tight with something deeper than fatigue. He walked up the porch steps with the weight of a man carrying something he didn't want to say.
"Afternoon, John," the deputy said, voice low.
John frowned. "Afternoon, Deputy. You, uh... everything alright?"
Markson didn't answer right away. He glanced toward the fields behind the house, the sky beyond them already paling with approaching rain. When he looked back, his eyes held the weight of a funeral.
"Mind if I come in?"
John hesitated, a cold unease snaking down his back. "Sure," he muttered, stepping aside.
Inside, the house was still—too still. The air smelled faintly of coffee, earth, and woodsmoke. Markson didn't sit. He turned to face John directly.
"There's no easy way to say this," he began. "John... it's your sister. Lily. She's gone."
The words fell like broken glass between them.
"What?" John's voice cracked.
Markson spoke slowly, deliberately. "She was found early this morning. Out by the edge of Red Hollow Ridge. It looks like… someone hurt her bad. We're still investigating, but... I'm sorry, John."
John staggered back a step, eyes wide, hand bracing against the kitchen table. "No. No—she was just here. She was just here three days ago, she dropped off that box of old records. We had coffee on the porch—she was laughing—"
"I know," Markson said, voice heavy. "She didn't tell anyone where she was going. But something happened out there, something terrible."
John's face twisted. "Who? Who did this?"
"We don't know yet." Markson's jaw clenched. "But I swear to you—we'll find out."
The room went silent, save for the low hum of the fridge and the sharp breath catching in John's throat.
He whispered, "She was my twin."
"I know."
"She used to beat me at hide and seek every damn time until we were eleven. And then one day, she just let me win, just once, and I thought I was a king." He laughed—short, bitter. "She made me believe I was strong."
Markson nodded, letting the silence stretch, giving space for the storm building behind John's eyes.
"She was the only one left that knew what our mom smelled like," John continued, voice low. "Or how Dad used to hum when he carved wood. Now that's just... gone?"
"She didn't deserve what happened," Markson said quietly. "But we're not going to let her die in silence."
John's eyes burned, rage and sorrow mixing like oil and flame. "You think it was that bastard she was seeing last year? The one she stopped talking about?"
"We're looking into everyone she knew. I won't rest till we know the truth."
John's fists clenched. "Don't ask me to calm down. Don't tell me she's 'in a better place.' Just find whoever left her out there like she was... nothing."
"I'm not here for comfort," Markson said. "I'm here because she deserves justice. And because I know you, John. You won't let her memory rot in a file cabinet."
John's jaw trembled. He looked away, blinking hard, then nodded. "What do I do?"
"Grieve. Let yourself grieve. Then help me. Talk to her friends, look through her things. Anything out of the ordinary. There's a storm coming, John, and we need to be ready for it."
Markson reached into his coat and handed John a folded paper. "Her effects. The evidence bag's still at the station, but… we found this in her jacket pocket."
John unfolded the note with trembling hands. It was smeared, water-stained—just a torn scrap. But scrawled across it in Lily's handwriting were three words: He knows everything.
John stared at it, blood draining from his face.
"Jesus…"
"She knew something," Markson said grimly. "Something someone didn't want getting out."
Silence fell again, heavy as earth. Then John spoke, voice hoarse and dark.
"Then we dig, Markson. We dig until we drag that bastard into the light."
Markson met his gaze. "You sure you're ready for what you might find?"
"I don't care what it is. I'm not letting her be just another dead girl in a small town. I won't."
Outside, the sky had darkened, and the rain had begun—cold and relentless.
As the deputy stepped back toward his car, John remained at the door, the note crumpled in his fist, watching the horizon like a man preparing for war.
The storm had come. And he would meet it head-on.