The last thing I heard before darkness swallowed me was my twin sister, Chloe, screaming my name in the hallway.

The last thing I saw was our stepfather smiling as if her terror were a performance he had paid to witness.

Edric Kaine never struck us because he lost control, as control was the entire point of his existence.

He chose the hour, closed the heavy velvet curtains, removed his gold wedding ring, and told our mother to turn up the volume on the television.

Then he made Chloe and me stand side by side while he deliberated on which one of us would suffer first.

We were seventeen and identical enough to confuse every teacher we ever had, but Edric always knew exactly who was who.

Chloe begged for mercy, but I simply stared at him with everything I had left in me.

He hated my silence more than anything else in this world.

“Are you still pretending that you are brave, Faye?” he asked that night while pacing in front of us.

I tasted the copper of blood in my mouth and answered, “No, I am simply remembering everything you do.”

His predatory smile faltered for a fraction of a second because he was not used to being watched back.

He did not know that three months earlier, I had found an old smartphone hidden inside a dusty box of Christmas decorations in the attic.

Its camera lens was cracked, but the microphone worked perfectly for our purposes.

Every single night, I hid the device beneath the loose floorboard near the heating vent in our bedroom.

The recordings uploaded automatically to a private cloud account our late father had created for us years ago.

Our father, David Morgan, had been a brilliant forensic accountant before his sudden passing.

Before he died, he placed his life insurance money and company shares into a protected trust for Chloe and me, payable the moment we turned eighteen.

Edric firmly believed our mother controlled the funds, and she was terrified enough to let him continue believing that lie.

After his funeral, our Uncle Alan had warned us that large sums of money often attracted dangerous predators.

He was stationed overseas at the time, and our mother, Brenda, gradually cut off every single call he tried to make to us.

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Edric told the neighbors that we were unstable, ungrateful girls who needed a firm hand to keep us in line.

By the time we finally understood why he kept us so isolated, he had built a physical and psychological cage from locked doors and believable lies.

That night, he became reckless in his arrogance.

Chloe tried to shield me from his reach, and he knocked her hard into the wall.

I lunged at him with every ounce of my rage, but the room spun violently after his fist caught my temple.

When I eventually woke, harsh fluorescent lights burned above me in a cold, sterile room.

Chloe lay unconscious on the hospital bed right next to mine, her face pale and bruised.

Edric stood near the privacy curtain, calmly washing his hands as if he were just finished with a long day at the office.

Our mother, Brenda, clutched her expensive purse and whispered to the emergency doctor, “They just fell down the stairs at home.”