Chapter 58: I Wept

"Madelyn?"

I grumbled quietly at being forced to lift my head off Caspian's warm, smooth chest.

"Janet?" I instantly straightened up and clumsily ran a hand through my damp hair, embarrassed at being caught in an intimate moment with my boyfriend by my brother's ex-girlfriend.

"Aren't you guys supposed to be in school?" Janet asked.

"Aren't you?" I asked.

"We won't tell if you don't?" Amber chimed in, making her presence known. The purple of her hair was beginning to fade. She had braided it loosely, and the sway of the stray strands in the breeze made her look like she was a model posing for a picture. "Hey Caspian." She batted her heavily mascaraed eyelashes.

Caspian held up his hand in greeting.

"What brings you to the beach?" I asked, not knowing what else to say.

"It's a free country," Amber replied, rolling her eyes.

"Free town," Caspian corrected her, brushing sand off my shoulders.

"Whatever." Amber looked to Janet, trying to send her some sort of telepathic message.

"I wanted to give this to you." Janet held a flat black object in her hand.

I immediately recognised the phone as Asher's. I turned my brother's phone over in my hand, while I waited for Janet to give me an explanation.

"I got it back, from Asher's friend," she stated. "Thought you might want to have it."

"Thank you," I enunciated, not sure what her intentions were.

I waited until their bodies had become dots in the distance, before I turned the phone on.

"Well, that was weird," Caspian stated. "I didn't even know the two of them were friends."

"Neither did I," I replied. Unless they weren't and Janet was just using Amber to carry out some of her plans. 'Stop it, Madelyn,' I chided myself. 'You can't assume all of Janet's actions are revolved around murdering people'.

"Maybe they're not just friends," Caspian suggested with a shrug.

"Maybe they're fellow serial-killers," I added.

"I was going to say maybe they're dating," Caspian clarified. "But that works too."

"Janet's not a lesbian." I shook my head. "She was dating my brother."

"So?" Caspian asked, raising his eyebrows. I could see that he was fighting the urge to laugh.

"Besides, I think Amber's got her eyes set on you." I thought back to all the flirtatious glances she had given him.

"Hmmm," Caspian pretended to consider that possibility. "What can I say, chicks adore me?"

"And I suppose I'm one of those chicks?" I gushed out, in between hiccups of laughter.

"You definitely fall into that category," Caspian replied, smirking. "Enough talk about my love life. Why don't you check the phone?"

I wanted to think the reason I had not unlocked the phone yet, was because I had forgotten. But the real reason was that I was afraid of what I would find. Although I had already hacked Asher's phone, there was something different about going through the actual phone.

"Ok," I agreed, holding the power button down; and to my surprise the phone wasn't flat. All it took was a couple of seconds, and the phone glowed with life.

The first thing I checked was the photos and sure enough, each album contained a little less than a hundred photos. Selfies of Asher. Selfies of me. Selfies of me and Asher. It felt out of place for present me to look at past me, since I kept thinking about how different things were back then. No murders. No blood. No mysteries. Just two siblings living each day like tomorrow didn't exist. I felt my eyes sting, a sign that tears were on their way. I wiped my hand across my eyes and tried to make it look like I was sweeping my hair back, but there was no fooling Caspian. He saw right through my pretence. But he sensed it wasn't something I wanted to talk about, so he wrapped me up in his arms and let me cry.

I wept for the things I had lost, as well as the things I never got to say to Asher. I wept because of all the horrible things I had said to him, wishing I could go back in time and erase those words from existence. I wept because the man I had trusted with my life was a murderer. I wept, because it was the only way to cleanse the part of me that couldn't accept Asher's death. That part of me was the most prominent part of me. it was what fueled my thirst to prove that Janet was the culprit.

Please vote and comment, if you enjoyed this chapter.