Allia had always told herself that moving in with Elia was never a whim born of twin-like fusion. It was… an obvious choice.
After graduation, they had tried, for a few weeks, to live separately, but very quickly something had started to grate. The silences. The nights that stretched too long. The unanswered messages. The unpleasant impression that an invisible distance was settling between them.
So they ended up taking a larger, brighter apartment near the center. A shared space where their lives could overlap without suffocating each other. And every evening, without really noticing it, Allia waited for Elia to come home. It had become a reflex, almost a ritual: a light left on, a cup on the table, two silhouettes adjusting themselves in the same space.
That night, however, Elia still hadn't returned.
Allia felt it before she even checked the time: something was wrong.
She looked at her phone.
Still no notification.
She tried calling. Straight to voicemail.
A shiver barely perceptible but sharp skimmed along her spine.
She knew this silence now.
It wasn't simple lateness.
It was an "absence moment."
A void.
A hollow in which her sister sometimes disappeared… to kill.
Allia drew a long breath, fighting the acidic rise of adrenaline already twisting in her stomach, and opened her laptop. The room shifted into a blue halo, almost surgical.
She knew exactly where to look.
The district they lived in was part of a recent municipal program: about thirty public cameras accessible through an OpenData API, installed to analyze traffic or prevent nuisances.
Allia never used them officially. But her work as a cybersecurity analyst had taught her two essential truths:
— most of these systems were poorly secured,— and she was faster than anyone responsible for monitoring them.
Sitting in front of her machine a computer she had built herself, optimized to the bone she launched a few personal scripts. Nothing illegal in itself: she wasn't hacking police data, only civil surveillance feeds whose protection was mostly… decorative.
In under two minutes, she was pulling footage from three angle-cameras around a parking lot near the center.
The police weren't even alerted yet.
Allia scrolled through the recordings, used to spotting anomalies with a precise, almost mechanical eye.
At 1:16 a.m., a movement caught her attention: a slim figure, hood up, walking with purpose.
The step was too recognizable.
Even blurred, even distorted by the light it was Elia.
Allia's heart tightened.
She zoomed in on the sequence.
Two minutes later, a man appeared in frame.
Then another angle showed his body tilting backward.
And finally, in the last fragment of footage, a shape on the ground. Motionless.
There it was.
The murder.
Allia leaned back slightly from the screen. One second. A single second.
Just enough to let rise… what she hated feeling.
That warmth.
That pulse in her chest.
That sharp, almost exhilarating surge that felt too much like excitement.
Shame flooded her.
A deep, tight shame.
But she regained control immediately.
"Okay…," she whispered. "Okay, alright…"
She jumped to her feet, grabbed a jacket and a pair of disposable gloves she kept in a drawer for "emergencies."
As if one could call this emergencies.
The parking lot was deserted when she arrived. Cold wind slid between the concrete pillars, carrying a metallic scent she knew too well.
The body was exactly where she had seen it.
On its side.
Eyes empty.
The wound was tiny: a discreet puncture beneath the angle of the jaw, almost invisible in the dark.
The perfect strike: the exact spot where a scalpel or thin blade can touch the carotid without rupturing the artery.
A precise hand.
Elia's hand.
Allia crouched down, her stomach twisting.
Not from disgust.
From… recognition.
As if she were reading a familiar handwriting only she could decipher.
She collected a small trace of mud, likely fallen from her sister's shoe.
Then she carefully wiped a partial shoe print on a discarded piece of plastic.
She searched the area in an arc, identifying the cameras' angles, imagining Elia's trajectory.
She picked up a crushed cigarette butt not left by Elia, but a misleading element that the police might mistakenly associate with a fleeing suspect.
She stood up.
Calmly.
Without shaking.
Her heart was beating fast. Too fast.
Not only from fear.
She hated herself for that.
She then approached the nearest camera and brushed a light film over the lens. Just enough so a technician would assume a temporary malfunction.
She moved quickly. Too quickly. As if she were made for this.
"It's for her," she repeated. "For Elia. Always for her."
But a small, silent part of her murmured something else.
A part she refused to face.
She finished her work in under ten minutes and walked away from the parking lot, finally breathing something that resembled air.
When she returned to the apartment, she found the living-room light still on.
Elia wasn't there.
Her room was empty.
But Allia, strangely, did not panic.
She knew.
She felt it.
Elia would come home soon, as if nothing had happened.
And she, she would be there.
As always.
To clean what her sister left behind.
To protect her.
To preserve her.
And, despite herself…
to feel that forbidden adrenaline eating at her a little more each time.