All the Lies I've told

27 ; Chapter Twenty Seven

My heartbeat picked up as the situation finally hit me. Here I was, pissing a murdering psychopath off. Maybe I wasn't cowering because Jake was my brother. Brothers don't kill their sisters.

All of a sudden, he turned around in a flash and pulled a glock from the back of his jeans. He aimed at me and walked towards me briskly before the gun was placed against the centre on my forehead. My breath caught in my throat as I was frozen in place, staring into the familiar green eyes of my older brother.

   "I didn't want to do this, but you leave me no choice. You don't listen without threats - hell when I threatened you last month you still didn't listen," he said, making reference to the note that was left in my locker, "so Viv, I think you should stand very still while I explain to you how killing Pandora was an accident."

I made no movement or sound, the only thing I was able to hear except for his voice was the pounding of the blood in my ears as panic found its way into every nerve.

Jake ordered me to walk ahead of him.

"I need to show you where it happened. Maybe then you will understand that all of this," he paused before continuing as thought he wasn't so sure of the truth in his own words. "That all of this wasn't my fault."

He led me down the stairs and jabbed his gun in the direction of the dining room. The very room where his life properly imploded for the first time with my accusation at the family dinner.

     "She kept shouting and was making it hard to think. Pandora said that she wasn't prepared to pretend anymore and threatened to tell the school," he said before pausing to make eye contact with me, "do you know what would have happened? I would have lost my job, all those years at college for nothing. I had already lost you and Marie because of her filthy little mouth so as you can probably understand, I was feeling a little wound up."

Jake paused before looking over towards the window in the dining room, the view obstructed by the thick glass vase on the table below it.

    "We were in the dining room and I noticed the curtains were open," his voice started to slow in pace as though he was reliving the event in his head and my body started to shake as I prepared myself to hear about my best friend's last living moments. "I closed them because I didn't want anyone to see her shouting and get suspicious. She just kept screaming at me and all I wanted was for her to shut up."

    "I saw the decanter sitting there on that table and next thing I knew Pandora was lying on the wooden floor just over there," he said, motioning to the place with his gun. "She still wouldn't shut up so I just kept hitting her with the top. And then she was quiet - probably for the first time ever in her life."

There was a silence as I repeated his words over and over in my head. Jake had admitted to killing her. Not only had he faked the letters that I had spent ages using as clues to who murdered her. He had set up Jack Evans to take the light off of him. He counted on me not going to the police out of a misplaced loyalty to him because having sex with a student was just as bad as raping one in the eyes of the board of governors. My gaze was drawn to what I thought was a vase. I remembered Christmas Day and the whiskey that had been put in the decanter. It wasn't a vase, it was a decanter meaning it had a stopper. I had missed so many clues in my own home. 

Jake Lively had totally manipulated and played me throughout this whole case and I would never have realised if I hadn't of needed stationary and checked his old desk.

I raised my hand to my mouth as the sobs were unleashed from my throat. My stomach was churning and before I knew it I had bent towards the fireplace as vomit made its way onto the wooden floor beneath me.

I heard Jake come up behind me as I continued to gag and cry and he began to beg me to be quiet, his voice getting more frantic. Alarm bells started to ring at the familiarity of the situation. I knew that this was it. If I didn't do something, my own brother who I had grown up with was going to kill me. The boy who had taught me to swim and ride a bike was now prepared to kill me to cover up his own mistakes.

Without hesitation, I used my position to grab a fire poker from the rack and shot up. I smacked him over the head with it, and he fell to the ground in a daze. Unlike the slasher movies I didn't run away initially, instead I took another swing at his head, hating the sound of the metal clanging against his skull.

I took this as my opportunity to get out and ran out of the dining room and into the hall before pulling the front door open. I stumbled on my way down the steps, poker still in hand as I struggled to get past the hedge that blocked me from the lawn.

    "Viv!" Through my tears I could make out a car and two people standing at the bottom of the grass. I recognised Freddie's voice and struggled to run towards him as my heeled boots stuck into the soggy grass as the rain pelted down around me, making it difficult to gain any speed.

I heard the front door swing open from behind me as it banged against the wall of the house. I continued to run while turning my head to look in Jake's direction. He had made it down the steps and was now raising the gun, pointing it straight at me.

A shot blared out, muffled by the rain. I felt myself catapulting through the air before everything went quiet and all that could be heard was the continuous beating of the rain and frantic voices around me.

A/n
Short and sweet
Almost over - not long to go now
If you're still reading - thankyou

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