Chapter 4 - The Digital Confession
The room seemed to tilt on its axis. I looked down at Sophie, who was still trembling, and then back at the memory card clutched in her small hand. “It shows what happened before Mommy died,” she had whispered.
"Sophie," I said gently, crouching down to my daughter’s eye level, ignoring the horrific tableau unfolding behind me. "Honey, can you give Daddy that card? The little chip from your pillow?"
Sophie nodded mutely, her wide, terrified eyes flickering toward Vanessa. She extended her palm. I snatched the micro-SD card, stood up, and strode straight to the nightstand. My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the adapter twice before finally jamming the card into the slot on the side of my laptop.
"Mark, do not plug that in!" Vanessa shrieked, lunging across the bed toward me.
Before she could reach the desk, the woman from the wall lunged with shocking, desperate agility. She grabbed Vanessa by the ankle with her frost-bitten fingers and dragged her hard to the floor. Vanessa let out a feral shriek, kicking and clawing at her attacker, the two of them tumbling into a violent, thrashing tangle of limbs and torn fabric.
I didn't look back. I slammed my fingers onto the trackpad, opening the media player app. A single video file populated the screen: REC_0412_FINAL.mp4.
I hit play.
The screen flickered to life with grainy, high-definition footage shot from the very corner of this master bedroom. The timestamp in the corner read five years ago—just two weeks before I had ever met "Vanessa."
On the screen, a woman who looked identical to my wife was tied to a chair in the center of the room. Standing over her with a cold, surgical precision was... Vanessa. But she wasn't wearing makeup; her hair was pulled back tightly, and her expression was completely vacant of human emotion.
“You think Mark will ever love you if he knows what you are?” the tied-up woman snarled on the screen.
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“He won’t have to know,” the other Vanessa replied smoothly, her voice a chilling clone of the woman currently wrestling on the floor behind me. “Because after tonight, there won't be two of us. There will only be me. And he loves me already.”
On screen, Vanessa raised a heavy glass paperweight and brought it down hard against the victim's temple. The video cut to black with a sickening crunch.
