The Twisted Sisters
Malice (Maddyson Matthews)
Maddyson was born smiling, but no one in Mourningford ever mistook it for sweetness. Her beauty was the kind that made people stare too long, the kind that pulled you closer when every instinct told you to run. And always, just behind her back, the gleam of sharpened scissors. She let you notice them at the last moment — a flash of steel that told you the game was already lost.
Where other children played with dolls, she played with bones — not animal bones, not always. Malice doesn’t chase you down screaming; she waits, patient and still, until you step close enough to see that she hasn’t blinked in far too long. She collects things: broken glass, rusted nails, teeth that aren’t her own. She arranges them in patterns no one else understands, and if you shift them, she howls like a mother robbed of her child.
Malice doesn’t fight. She plays. And she never plays fair.
Spite (Sophia Matthews)
Sophia’s beauty is quieter, softer, but no safer. She moves like water pooling in a basement — slow, inevitable, seeping into everything. Her smile is gentle, almost kind, until you realize she’s holding the same scissors her sister carries, the blades just barely hidden behind her back. No one ever remembers when she picked them up.
Spite loves the pause before the scream, the silence in a locked room when you hear a second breath. She waits in corners, under stairs, folded into closets. More than one cousin swore they saw her crawl across the ceiling like a spider, limbs bent wrong, her expression serene. None of them ever spoke of it twice.
Spite doesn’t kill quickly. She peels. She unravels. She whispers your name until you hear it everywhere.
Envy (Emily Matthews)
Some whisper they were triplets. That there was once a third called Emily. That Envy didn’t make it out of the womb alive. But that doesn’t stop her from joining in the games with her sisters.
The air grows colder when she’s near. Dolls lose their eyes. Mirrors fog with handprints too small to belong to anyone living. Sometimes, when Malice and Spite are laughing, you’ll hear a third giggle — thin, wet, impossibly close to your ear. Envy doesn’t need a body. She rides theirs. She pushes the scissors deeper, twists the nails sharper, draws the screams longer.
The sisters never speak of her. They don’t need to. She’s always there.
Together
Malice, Spite, and Envy are not three girls but one nightmare with many faces. Beauty draws you in, scissors close the distance, and the whisper of the third — the one who never lived — slides straight into your bones. Freddie, Jason, even Scissorhands are killers. The sisters are worse. Malice wants your fear. Spite wants your soul. Envy wants your place in the world.
And together, they will take it all.

The next thing I know, I’m waking in a hospital bed.
The doctors tell me it was a heart attack. At fourteen.Meredith doesn’t argue, but I see the way her eyes linger on the twins, sharp and measuring.
She knows.
I know.
Since that day, I’ve carried the certainty that when Meredith dies, I won’t be far behind.
Bobby Matthews – On A Dark & Crooked Path