Page 91 of Girl, Sought

But it was the next photo that shattered her world into irreparable pieces.

Jenna Bradbury. Her former roommate. Her friend. The woman who'd seen her through breakups and breakthroughs, who knew how she took her coffee and which true crime podcasts kept her up at night. Sweet, scattered Jenna. The woman who’d moved in with little more than a beanbag chair and sixteen boxes of self-help books. They'd shared takeout and trashy reality TV, Jenna's eternal optimism the perfect foil to Ella's world-weary cynicism.

No smiles now. Just slack, bloodless features and a hideous criss-cross of black twine sealing those rosebud lips.

Both women she'd been trying to contact. Both gone silent weeks ago.

Now she knew why.

‘Miss Dark?’ Edis's voice seemed to come from very far away. ‘Do you recognize these women?’

She forced air into lungs that had forgotten how to breathe. ‘Yes. My landlord and my old roommate. I've been trying to reach them, but they weren't answering-’

‘When did you last have contact with either of them?’

‘I don't... a few weeks ago? Maybe longer?’ The timeline slipped through her fingers like mercury.

‘That’s funny, Miss Dark, because their phone records show that you contacted them recently via text message.’

'Text? What? I kept calling them, but they didn't answer. I can show you my logs right now.'

A cold, creeping dread slithered up Ella's spine. This was no ordinary murder. No crimes of passion or junkie desperation. This was planned. Targeted. The work of someone with a grudge and the ice in their veins to see it through.

‘Sir, I don't understand. Why are you showing me this? Why the officers outside? What’s going on?’

Edis removed his glasses, polished them with mechanical precision.

‘Because, Miss Dark, take a look at their mouths. They’ve been sewn shut.’

Ella forced herself to look again. ‘I know. I saw it.’

‘And forensics determined that the killer didn’t use ordinary stitching. They used strands of hair. Human hair.Yourhair.’

The room started to spin. Ella gripped the edge of the table, trying to anchor herself to something solid while reality came apart at the seams.

‘That… can’t be…’

'Yes, it can. We have conclusive proof; therefore, starting right now, we need to place you under house arrest.'

She stared again at the photographs, in the accusatory emptiness of their dead-eyed stares, Ella saw her future unspool with merciless certainty. Herself in cuffs, dragged over the coals. Herself in an interrogation room, spitting desperate denials against a tide of damning proof.

Herself locked in a cage - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.

But soon.