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not being there that night, and she wasn't about to do it again.
    She touched the picture of Cyndi's crumpled and broken body in the middle of her board and felt the familiar cold surround her heart. The murder pictures were gruesome, but she made herself look at them frequently so she wouldn't forget what her sister went through. The ligature marks at her wrist made it clear she was tied up at some point. The dark welts across her stomach and thighs were most likely made from a cane or something like it. But what she couldn't see from this picture became the biggest break in the case as far as she was concerned.  
    In one of the reports, the coroner mentioned seeing a partial mark on her hand under the black light. The kind bars often used to identify people under age or, in this case, someone who has VIP access to Purgatory.
    That had not been easy to identify from the hastily drawn image on a faded piece of paper.  
    The original image was captured eight long years ago and after the trial, the evidence was carelessly stored. The memories still haunted her. When the police were hot to solve it, they painted her sister in a horribly negative way and even went so far as to suggest their father caused her death.  
    Everything about their family fell apart almost immediately. Even after the trial, none of them were the same and Rebecca took her guilt and grief and morphed into a selfish teenager doing things she had no business doing. All in the name of making the pain go away.
    When she finally stepped back, she realized Cyndi was dead, her mom was gone and her father sat on the couch drunk every night not caring about anything anymore.  
    All she had left were her sister's words.  
    Night after night, Rebecca devoured that journal, learning the secret life her sister had led. So much of her life had revolved around pain. Both emotional and physical. One had apparently led to the other. All of which she hid from her family and friends.  
    At least her real family.  
    Purgatory became her second home and essentially another family. She stepped into the world of BDSM and never came back out. Rebecca wanted to learn more. Hell, she needed to understand what her sister had gone through and there was only one way.
    First she forced herself through college to obtain her investigative journalism degree, where she studied the fine art of patience. Or so she thought.
    Fresh out of school, she expected something to happen. Something to lead her to her sister's real killer. When nothing magically appeared, she started digging. Newspaper articles on the murder, online stories about anything connected, current events at the same time and on and on and on, until she'd cross-referenced anything and everything that could have touched her sister's life.
    Eventually, all roads led to Purgatory, the club where her sister apparently spent her last night alive. Then when her gut told her she was close, she met Mason and he tested her resolve every time she saw him. She reached up and touched the grainy, long-distance picture she managed to take before she met him. When she finally got into a position that gave her easier access to a few police records, she read through them and memorized every detail about her sister's case.
    The killer was meticulous in his effort to leave no trail. Not a shred of DNA evidence was found and the coroner's examination resulted in no substantial leads. It seemed planned and possibly personal. The man they convicted showed up out of the blue and, as far as she could tell was convicted on nothing more than circumstantial evidence.  
    The courts deemed her sister's case as another tragic death from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A crime resulting from the desperation of a man who didn't even remember his name.
    Rebecca didn't believe it.  
    She was the last person to speak to her and her sister was desperate to come home that night, not find more trouble. Rebecca did everything in her power to