𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐟 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐞𝐫

Prologue

Avery's face had been so disfigured that Lou had been asked to identify her.

Pictures wouldn't cut it, they'd said with tired sympathy.

No tattoos, no piercings.

Nothing distinguishable, they'd said in softer words.

Nothing remarkable.

You're wrong, Lou had thought, so wrong.

Because Avery was, if one thing in the world, remarkable.

But Lou needn't have seen Avery's bulging dead eyes and purple poisoned skin to confirm that her sister would never exist in the same loud, bright, and obnoxious form again.

Even before she entered the room that caged her twin's last breaths like little broken birds, she knew it was her sister who had been murdered.

And she knew it was all her fault.

It was guilt that held Lou's hand in black gloved fingertips, conveying a subtle but stifling emptiness that Lou had never felt before yet recognised in a vaguely familiar once-friend-but-now-stranger type of way. It was guilt that breathed air into Lou's lungs, pumped blood through her weeping heart and placed one shadowless foot in front of the other.

The air that entombed Avery was thick like syrup. Merciless agonies traded for oxygen atoms seemed a fitting curse for Lou.

Avery had lost her life and Lou would be punished with keeping hers.

Avery's chest was cracked open, caved in. Her skin shrugged aside like a duvet kicked off in stifling midsummer heat.

That, a man in green pyjamas with a scarlet stain on his shoe, informed her, was his doing.

Her skull was also cracked open, caved in.

But that, the man with the bloody shoes said, devoid of natural emotion, was not.

Lou could see Avery's brain —grey and red and butchered and broken— and it made her laugh.

It made her laugh so hard she couldn't breathe.

It made her laugh so hard that she had to sit down on the dirty hospital floor at the foot of her dead sister's bed, knelt like a child forced to pray.

She was level with the green man's red shoes and she reached out with a trembling finger and touched the scarlet stain.

Her sister's blood, forever on her hands.

She laughed and she laughed and she laughed.

I wish I could see inside your head, Lou had always said.

And now she could.