1 The first time I saw the cluster of angry red sores blooming on the corner of my sister’s mouth, I made the mistake of caring. I had gently pulled her aside, whispering that it looked like a severe STI, urging her to see a doctor. She had just smiled—a thin, dismissive curve of her lips—and walked away. But behind my back, she began a quiet, deliberate campaign of ruin. She secretly used my toothbrush, dried her face with my towels, and even wore my underwear. By the time I realized what was happening, the infection was already coursing through my veins. When her fiancé, Harrison Montgomery—the heir to one of the city’s oldest fortunes—contracted the virus, he showed up at our estate, his face pale with fury, to call off the engagement. And Harper? She had wept. She fell to her knees, eyes bloodshot, and swore to Harrison and our parents that I was the one who had brought the disease into the house. She claimed I had infected her, turning the Kensington family name into a filthy punchline. When I marched up to the rooftop terrace to confront her, she didn’t argue. She just shoved me over the ledge. As I lay dying on the marble patio below, my spine shattered and breath failing, I heard her weeping over my broken body. “It’s my fault,” she sobbed to the authorities. “I caught her hiding the disease, and she was so ashamed… she jumped. She just jumped.” My biological father, Richard Kensington, had looked down at my corpse with cold disgust. “Sloane was always reckless. She brought this on herself.” My mother, Eleanor, had simply wrapped her arms around Harper, burying her face in her golden hair. “Hush, darling. You are our only daughter. You always have been.” My biological brother, Connor, made sure the security footage disappeared. He told the detectives I had a history of instability, sealing my death as a tragic, guilt-driven suicide. But Harper wasn’t done. Posthumously, she used burner accounts to leak fabricated stories to the press, painting me as a degenerate who slept with hundreds of men. The internet tore me apart. The vitriol bled into the real world—strangers threw red paint on the front door of the working-class family who had raised me, stringing up banners calling me a whore. The stress and public shaming gave my adoptive parents consecutive, fatal heart attacks. Then, I blinked, and the suffocating darkness gave way to the sharp, blinding light of the Kensington estate’s living room. “…Sloane? What did you just say?” The phantom pain of shattering bones was still echoing in my nerve endings, but Harper’s voice grounded me. I stared at her. At the pristine blonde hair, the innocent eyes, and there—right at the corner of her lip—the unmistakable cluster of angry red sores. A cold shock washed over me. I was back. I had been found by the Kensingtons a year ago, the biological daughter they lost two decades prior. Harper was the girl they had adopted to fill the void I left behind, the golden child who had seamlessly stolen my life. Right now, we were in the exact moment before the nightmare truly began. I looked at the sores, then up at her carefully constructed expression of confusion. I smiled, letting my face fall into a mask of placid indifference. “You misheard me. I was just reciting a line from my thesis.” Harper exhaled, her shoulders dropping in palpable relief. “Oh. For a second there, I thought you were diagnosing me with something awful.” I didn’t humor her with a response. I turned on my heel, walked straight past her, and headed for the cramped, un-air-conditioned storage room they called my bedroom. I pulled my duffel bag from the closet and started throwing my things into it. Her infection was highly contagious. If I stayed, the entire Kensington household would be crawling with it by the end of the month. When I zipped up the bag and wheeled it into the hallway, Harper was waiting. Her eyes darted to the luggage, a flash of genuine panic crossing her face. “Sloane, where do you think you’re going?” “Sloane? What is this?” Eleanor, my biological mother, stepped out of the parlor, a delicate frown marring her perfectly botoxed forehead. “I’m heading back to campus, Mother,” I said, my voice steady. “My biomedical thesis is entering the final trial phase. It’s easier if I stay at the dorms.” “I don’t think this is about a thesis, Sloane.” Harper stepped forward. In her hand, she held a crisp white document. It was a LabCorp diagnostic report. At the top, in bold black ink, was my name. Below it was a positive result for a highly communicable, chronic STI. “That isn’t mine,” I said. My heart hammered against my ribs, but my mind was icy clear. She already knew. She knew she was infected, and she was already laying the groundwork to frame me. Eleanor snatched the paper from Harper’s hands. As she read the results, all the color drained from her face. “Sloane,” she gasped, her voice trembling with horrified revulsion. “You are a young woman. How… how could you contract something so filthy?” “Mother, it’s a forgery. That isn’t my bloodwork.” Calling her ‘Mother’ still felt like chewing on glass. “It has your name right here!” Eleanor’s voice rose, laced with profound disappointment. “We are the Kensingtons. You are supposed to be a lady of this house. Do you have any respect for yourself?” It had been like this for the entire year I’d lived here. Whatever Harper said was gospel. If Harper claimed she was missing a thousand dollars, I was the thief. If Harper’s couture gown was ruined, I was the jealous vandal. If my father’s prized antique vase was shattered, I was the clumsy brute. And every time, regardless of my protests or logic, Richard and Eleanor would look at me with that same devastating mix of pity and disgust, gently lecturing me on how a “proper” girl behaves. Now, Harper had forged medical records, and Eleanor didn’t question it for a second. “If you don’t believe me, let’s go to State Medical Center right now,” I challenged, looking Eleanor dead in the eye. “Watch them draw my blood. We’ll get the results together.” Eleanor sighed, rubbing her temples as if I were giving her a migraine. “Harper doesn’t lie, Sloane. I know you spent twenty years away from us. I know growing up poor… limits a person’s moral education. Maybe you thought you needed money and sold yourself—” “Mother!” “—but from this moment on, you will cut ties with whatever trashy men you’ve been associating with!” “She’s right, Sloane,” Harper chimed in, stepping closer, her voice dripping with counterfeit sympathy. “You need to listen to Mom. You can’t just sleep around and ruin the Kensington name.” My own mother was standing in her million-dollar foyer, calling me a prostitute. “I don’t have a boyfriend, and I don’t sleep around,” I said, my voice dropping an octave, cold and absolute. I gripped the handle of my bag and moved toward the front door. “Are you running away because you want to hide your disease in the dorms?” Harper blocked my path, her eyes gleaming with malicious intent. “Sloane, you know whose test this is.” “And you know exactly whose blood is actually tainted, Harper,” I shot back. “You’re not leaving!” Harper insisted, grabbing my arm. “We have Dr. Gallagher on retainer. He’s an excellent private physician. I’ll call him to the house to treat you!” The trap was so obvious it was suffocating. First, fake my test results. Then, confine me to the house under the guise of “treatment,” trapping me in the same space as her so she could deliberately cross-contaminate my things. When Harrison inevitably found out and broke the engagement, she would point to the house arrest as proof that I was patient zero. “Let go of me.” I didn’t even push her. I simply yanked my arm back to break her grip. Before I even fully retracted my hand, Harper shrieked. She stumbled backward, her arms flailing theatrically, and collapsed hard onto the marble floor. “Ow! Sloane, why would you push me? I’m just trying to help you!” she cried, tears instantly pooling in her eyes. A shadow fell over me. Connor, my biological brother, had been reading in the adjacent study. He stormed into the hall, didn’t ask a single question, and swung his hand. Smack. The sound echoed off the vaulted ceiling. My head snapped to the side. The left half of my face burned with an intense, stinging heat. I stood there, hand pressed to my cheek, completely paralyzed. Growing up, the Davises had next to nothing. We ate generic cereal and wore thrifted clothes, but in twenty years, my adoptive father had never so much as raised his voice at me, let alone struck me. Connor stared at his own palm, a flicker of hesitation crossing his features. “Sloane… I—I panicked. I shouldn’t have hit you. But how could you shove Harper like that?” The heavy oak front door clicked open. Richard Kensington walked in, pausing as taking in the scene: Harper on the floor crying, me clutching my face, the suitcase between us. His face hardened into that familiar, crushing disappointment. “Sloane. Sisters are supposed to protect each other. What is wrong with you?” “How could you hit your sister?” Eleanor murmured, rushing to Harper’s side, pulling her up and cradling her like a fragile porcelain doll. “Oh, my sweet girl, are you alright?” “I didn’t touch her!” I yelled, the injustice tearing at my throat. “She threw herself on the floor! Pull the security footage! Look at the cameras!” Richard let out a long, heavy sigh. “Harper is a good girl. She has no reason to lie.” “Right. Of course,” I choked out, a bitter, broken laugh escaping my lips. “She’s the perfect golden child, and I’m the feral stray. Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted?” I didn’t wait for an answer. I grabbed my bag, shoved past Connor, and sprinted out the door. “Dad, don’t let her leave!” Harper’s voice spiked with genuine panic. “Sloane!” “Sloane, it is pitch black outside, where do you think you’re going?!” I heard their footsteps pounding against the portico behind me. Connor was the fastest, yelling my name, trying to grab the back of my jacket. I ran like my life depended on it—because it did. I hit the wrought-iron gates just as an Uber I hadn’t even called was dropping off a neighbor next door. I threw myself into the backseat, shoved a fifty-dollar bill at the driver, and screamed at him to drive. Through the rear window, I saw Richard waving off the estate security guards who had started running after the car. He looked exhausted. I sank into the leather seat, gasping for air, but the crushing weight on my chest had already begun to lift. I booked a cheap, nondescript motel near my university. I knew Harper would try to find me. She needed to infect me to make her alibi work. The next morning, I went straight to the biomedical sciences building. My advisor was thrilled to see me, congratulating me on securing my Ph.D. funding. I used the goodwill to request an emergency ten-day leave of absence through the university portal, claiming a family crisis. He approved it immediately. To be safe, I called my adoptive brother, Mark. I told him to take Mom and Dad to his wife’s cabin in upstate New York for a couple of weeks. No exceptions. That night, alone in the dim glow of my motel room, I opened the app on my phone connected to the hidden nanny cams I had installed in my bedroom at the estate a week before I died. The infrared feed was grainy, but the audio was crystal clear. Harper was sitting on the edge of the sofa in the den, muttering frantically to herself. “Why are there more of them? God, they itch. Harrison keeps looking at me like I’m disgusting. What the hell is this?” Three days passed. My phone lit up constantly. Richard, Eleanor, and Connor called in rotations. I answered a few, giving vague, noncommittal responses. I told them I was deep into my lab work. Eleanor left a voicemail demanding I come home to “start my treatments.” I deleted it. Then, Harper called. “Sloane, are you still at the dorms?” “Yes.” “I need to talk to you. Please, just come home.” “I’m running trial data. I can’t leave.” Her voice turned sharp, panicked. “Are you really at the dorms? Because I just talked to your roommate, and she said you haven’t been back in days. Where are you? I’ll come to you.” She had actually gone to my campus to hunt me down. “I’m at the off-campus library,” I lied smoothly. “Don’t bother.” “Sloane, please don’t hold onto a grudge about the other night. It’s not safe for a girl to be out alone. Mom and Dad want you home,” she pleaded, playing the concerned sister to perfection. “I’m not coming back yet.” “Mom bought you that designer dress you liked!” “We’ll see,” I said, and hung up. That evening, I opened the camera feed again. The footage showed Harper creeping into my cramped room. She opened my drawers, pulled out my clean underwear, and put it on. Under the harsh overhead light, the camera captured the gruesome reality of her condition. Her pale skin was mottled with severe, blistering lesions. Some were weeping. When she discarded her own underwear on my floor, I could see the distinct, sickly discoloration of the discharge. Then, she walked into my attached half-bath. She took my toothbrush, ran it over her infected gums, and put it back. She opened a box of my tampons, tampered with them, and neatly closed the lid. My stomach violently rebelled. I scrambled to the motel bathroom and dry-heaved into the sink. If I had stayed—if I had blindly used my own things—I would already be ruined. Realizing the motel was too close to campus, I packed my bag, went to the station, and bought a ticket for a Greyhound bus headed three states over. I had barely checked into a new, run-down inn when my phone buzzed. Harper. “Sloane, you must be sleeping terribly in whatever cheap place you’re in. Just come home.” Her tone was urgent, laced with a saccharine desperation. “I miss you.” She misses me? The pathological ease with which she lied was terrifying. “I’m not coming back anytime soon, Harper.” “Which motel are you at? I bought all those snacks you like. I can bring them over.” My blood ran cold. She brought up the motel. She must have tracked down the first place I stayed at, only to find I had checked out. Until the Kensington family realized what she was carrying, I couldn’t let her anywhere near me. “Don’t look for me. I’m busy.” I hung up. Minutes later, it was Eleanor. “Sloane, darling, where are you? Your mother misses you.” “I’m out of town for school, Mother.” “Harper feels just awful about the misunderstanding. She says she won’t hold the fact that you pushed her against you. She wants to be sisters forever. She even bought you gifts.” Eleanor’s voice was sickeningly sweet. “Your brother bought you a brand-new BMW. And your father and I redesigned your room. Look.” My phone dinged with photos. The cramped storage room was gone. In its place was a sprawling, sunlit suite. The walk-in closet was lined with haute couture. The next photo showed a gleaming black BMW parked in the estate garage with a bow on it. I had been back for a year, and this was the first time they had ever offered me anything of substance. Yet, even a standard BMW paled in comparison to the custom Porsche they had gifted Harper for her birthday. I could see the guilt working on Eleanor. But I also knew, with the clarity of a woman who had already died once, that this guilt was shallow. When push came to shove, they would always choose Harper. They proved it when they let my adoptive parents be hounded to death by the press just to protect Harper’s reputation. “I appreciate the thought, Mother, but I’m swamped. Goodbye.” For the next few days, I lived. I went to the movies. I drank iced lattes. I sat on a pier and watched the sun sink below the horizon, letting the ocean breeze wash away the suffocating stench of the Kensington house. When I returned to my room one evening, Connor called. He informed me that Harrison Montgomery was hosting an exclusive dinner for the younger elite the following night, and I was expected to attend. Harrison’s inner circle wasn’t something you just casually crashed. This was Harper’s doing—using her fiancé’s status to lay out bait I couldn’t refuse. I gave a polite, noncommittal laugh and told him I’d pass. Two days later, I checked the living room cameras. It wasn’t just Harper anymore. Richard, Eleanor, and Connor were all sitting in the parlor, subtly scratching at their necks and wrists. “Must be an allergy,” Richard muttered, rubbing a raw, red patch on his collarbone. “Damned detergent.” The next morning, Harper called again. Her voice was uncharacteristically tight. “Sloane… you don’t know something, do you?” My pulse spiked. “Know what?” I played dumb. “About the rash on my mouth.” “I told you, it’s just a cold sore. You’re stressed. Take some vitamins.” “You really think it’s just a cold sore?” “What else would it be?” Silence hummed over the line. Then, her voice dropped, chillingly casual. “Well, I figured since you’re so busy, I might take a drive upstate. Go visit your adoptive parents at their cabin. I even bought them some lovely gifts.” Ice flooded my veins. Mark had taken my parents to his wife’s rural cabin. If Harper couldn’t find me to act as her scapegoat, she was going to infect the people who actually loved me, and blame the outbreak on the “dirty, lower-class” family that raised me. “Don’t go up there,” I said, my voice dangerously level. “I’m coming home tonight.” “Perfect. I’ll be waiting. Tonight is my official engagement gala with Harrison.” She was hosting her engagement party, and she wanted me there? She wasn’t afraid I’d ruin it. She was planning to ruin me in front of everyone. I packed my bags and caught the first Amtrak back. The moment I stepped out of the transit hub into the bustling city street, a black SUV pulled up sharply. Two men in surgical masks grabbed my arms, hauling me halfway into the vehicle. Before I could scream, one of them produced a syringe. Inside was a small amount of dark crimson blood. Harper’s blood. He jammed the needle into my left arm, depressed the plunger, and violently shoved me back onto the pavement. The SUV tires squealed as it tore off into traffic. The entire assault took less than thirty seconds. I stood on the sidewalk, the city moving around me, staring at the pinprick of blood on my arm. They had injected less than two milliliters, but my body reacted instantly. A burning heat crawled up my bicep, and a wave of severe dizziness hit me. Thirty minutes later, my breathing grew shallow. A fever spiked, and angry, raised hives began exploding across my arms and chest. I stumbled into a nearby pharmacy, bought a bottle of water, and swallowed the heavy dose of Post-Exposure Prophylaxis (PEP) and high-grade antihistamines I had managed to secure from my medical contacts days prior. I sat on a bench until the severe systemic shock mellowed into a manageable burn. By the time my taxi pulled up to the Kensington estate, it was glowing with life. Valets were parking Bentleys, and the sound of a string quartet drifted onto the lawn. I walked through the side entrance and was immediately intercepted by a maid, who ushered me upstairs to the newly renovated suite to change. The closet was full of exquisite designer gowns. I ignored them all. I fixed my hair, washed my face, and walked downstairs in my own clothes—jeans and a black turtleneck. The ballroom wasn’t as crowded as I expected. It was an intimate gathering of the Kensington and Montgomery inner circles. Harper was seated beside Harrison. He looked devastatingly handsome, but rigid. He kept a distinct physical distance between himself and his fiancé. I noticed the collar of his tailored shirt was buttoned high, but he couldn’t completely hide the red sores crawling up his neck and wrists. Harper was wearing a backless black evening gown, looking radiant, but she had paired it with opera-length black silk gloves—perfect for hiding the lesions covering her arms. Her lip was heavily concealed with makeup, the sore temporarily masked. Richard, Eleanor, and Connor were wearing high collars and long sleeves. They smiled at the guests, but every so often, their hands would dart to their necks, scratching at the unbearable itch beneath their expensive clothes. The Montgomery family, normally warm and effusive, sat across from them with expressions of barely concealed disgust. After a heavy, suffocating silence, Harrison stood up. “Richard, Eleanor,” he said, his voice carrying over the string quartet. “I’ve come to realize that I am not the right man for Harper. I am officially calling off the engagement.”
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