For years, my stepfather kept my twin sister and me living in constant fear, as though our suffering was the only thing that satisfied him. One night, after beating us until we both lost consciousness, he carried us into the emergency room while my mother quietly told the doctors, “They just fell down the stairs.”

Every night after Edric fell asleep, I hid the phone beneath a loose floorboard beside the heating vent in our bedroom. Whenever voices filled the house, it quietly recorded everything. My father had been a forensic accountant before he died, and years earlier he had created a secure encrypted cloud account for important family records. Somehow, the forgotten phone still synchronized with it, uploading every recording automatically without anyone noticing.

Edric never searched our room because he never believed two terrified teenage girls were capable of fighting back. He assumed fear had made us helpless. What he didn’t realize was that we had been collecting evidence instead of surrendering.

Long before Edric entered our lives, my father had trusted Uncle Alan to protect us if anything ever happened to him. Before leaving for an overseas engineering contract, Uncle Alan warned our mother that large inheritances attracted dangerous people. I didn’t understand his warning back then, but everything made sense after Dad died. His life insurance, investments, and company shares had all been placed inside a trust that Chloe and I would receive when we turned eighteen.