The roar of the crowd was a savage, hungry beast, pressing in on Eve from every side. The platform beneath her feet was rough-hewn and smelled faintly of old wood and spilled wine. But it was the voice close to her ear, a voice that had shared a womb with her, that cut deeper than any noise.
"You should stop when you realize it from the start, dear sister. It would have saved us all this unpleasantness,"
Mary Morgan whispered, her voice honeyed with a smug, sickly sweet triumph that turned Eve's stomach. A smirk played on Mary's lips, a cruel curve Eve had seen a thousand times in the reflection staring back from their shared mirror, yet never directed with such pure malice.
Eve's wrists were bound tight, the ropes biting into her skin. She lifted her head, her gaze meeting the cold, azure eyes of her twin.
"What did I do to deserve such treatments and grudge from you? It's mine to begin with—my achievements, my effort, my life. All I ever wanted was to be noticed for my own sake, not as a shadow of you... yet—"
A sharp, theatrical cackle sliced through the air, silencing Eve's desperate plea. It was a high, evilish sound that Mary didn't bother to stifle.
"Oh, 'notice,' is it? Such an innocent word for such a monstrous ambition,"
Mary purred, leaning in until her perfume—the same expensive scent they both wore—was overpowering.
"Well... You just pissed me off, Eve. That's all. The attention was always supposed to be mine."
A sudden wave of vertigo crashed over Eve. The world swam, the faces of the executioner and the grim-faced guards blurring into formless masks. Her vision was failing, whether from shock, the heavy heat of the day, or a slow-acting poison, she couldn't tell. Her last conscious view was the most devastating.
There, in the front row of the spectators—her beloved family.
Father, his face a mask of disappointment and rigid certainty, never wavering. Mother, clutching a lace handkerchief, not weeping for her daughter, but for the scandal. Her younger brother, barely a man, looking away with a clear expression of betrayal. They were the people who had watched her grow, who had celebrated her first achievements, who had called her their fine, educated lady. Now, they were turning their backs, their unanimous disapproval a sentence heavier than the one passed by the court.
They believe her. The raw, agonizing truth was a spike in her heart.
A strange, serene calm settled over Eve as the executioner's massive shadow fell across her. "If only I realized it sooner than this," she murmured, a solitary tear tracing a path through the dust on her cheek. The words were a quiet, final surrender, not to her fate, but to the bitter clarity of her sister's lifelong deception. A faint, sad smile touched her lips, a final gesture of defiance that Mary could not steal.
Then, the cold weight. The air was split by a metallic whoosh, and the heavy blade of the guillotine, a crescent of polished steel, fell with brutal, absolute finality onto her neck.
And that is how Eve Morgan died. Accused of treason, theft, and forgery—crimes painstakingly and ruthlessly pinned upon her by the person who knew her best, her own twin sister, Mary Morgan. Eve Morgan, who had done all the work, from A to Z, only to have her life stolen from A to Z as well.
Far below the scaffold, already swallowed by the narrow, twisting alleyways of the capital, a solitary figure watched the silent drop of the blade. He wore a heavy, dark-grey traveler's cloak with a deep hood pulled low, shadowing a face etched with thought.
The man paused, his gloved hand gripping the cold stone wall beside him. The festive roar of the public execution seemed muffled, wrong.
"Something just doesn't feel right with this," he whispered, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. His eyes, the color of storm clouds, scanned the retreating crowd, lingering only on the triumphant figure of the other sister, the one called Mary. He waited until the last of the execution party had dispersed, then melted back into the shadows. He had a great deal of work to do.