BLOOD OF MERCY

**Chapter 1: The Twin Flame**

*Setswana Proverb:*

**"Ngwana yo o sa utlweng molao o utlwa modumo wa dikgaba."**

*English:* "A child who doesn’t heed advice will feel the pain of consequences."

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Palapye's sun had a way of clinging to the skin like guilt. It was the kind of heat that pressed down on your shoulders and whispered things only the soul could hear. In the dry stillness of late afternoon, Keitumetse sat on the stoep of her grandmother's house, staring into the middle distance as if the dust clouds swirling across the yard had something to say.

Kabelo, her twin brother, lay sprawled on the cool concrete beside her, flipping through an old comic book, legs twitching with the echoes of childhood games.

"Do you remember the time we jumped off the water tank and landed in that donkey cart?" he asked, eyes gleaming with mischief.

Keitumetse didn't answer. Her face, though beautiful, held the kind of silence that screamed. It wasn’t that she didn't remember. It was that she remembered *everything*.

Their bond had always been strange, fierce—like two halves of one heartbeat. As children, they had created their own language, shared bruises from tree climbing accidents, stolen mangoes from MmaRra's neighbor's yard. They had been unstoppable. Until the night Uncle Tshepo came.

He had arrived under the guise of family duty, smiling too wide and laughing too loudly. A man with hands too heavy and eyes too hungry. And when the nights got long, and grandmother's snores began their familiar song, Tshepo would slip into Keitu’s room like a nightmare dressed in daylight.

She had been seven.

She told no one. Not even Kabelo.

But secrets, like rot, have a smell. Kabelo knew something was wrong. He saw it in the way her laughter vanished, in the way she flinched at loud footsteps, in how she started locking the door with a chair against the knob.

When they turned nineteen, Tshepo returned. Older, greyer, more careful. He brought sweets for the neighborhood children. He offered to pay for Kabelo’s driving lessons. He smiled at Keitu like nothing had happened.

She killed him three days later.

It was quick, clinical. Rat poison in his ginger beer. He died in his sleep on the living room sofa, his last breath swallowed by an old rerun of "Generations." The funeral was small. No one asked questions. Death had a way of wearing normal clothes in Botswana.

Since then, Keitumetse had killed five more men. Not at random—only those she believed deserved it. Rapists. Wife beaters. Predators hiding in plain sight. She left a red thread tied around each victim’s thumb, her quiet rebellion against a world that didn’t listen when little girls cried.

She became a ghost in Palapye. A whisper. A shadow. A storm with lipstick.

"You okay?" Kabelo asked now, setting the comic aside. He reached for her hand, and for a moment, the wall cracked.

"I hate the heat," she said.

He laughed. "You hate everything."

"Not everything," she said, standing. Her voice was soft, but her eyes had steel in them. "Just most things."

She walked toward the gate, the familiar creak of its hinges like a cue from an old song. She had somewhere to be. A mechanic on the other side of town had made one too many jokes about schoolgirls and short skirts.

Kabelo watched her go, heart heavy.

He didn’t know exactly what Keitu had done.

But he knew enough to fear what she might do next.

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*End of Chapter 1*