Page 40 of Eat, Slay, Love

“You,” Jonah says, and it isn’t loud, but it shakes the room with the weight behind it. His finger lifts, steady, accusatory, and aimed directly at my mother. “You’re the slayer who killed my wife.”

Silence swallows us whole.

My heart drops so violently it feels like I’ve fallen through the floor. “Oh, no.”

Jonah steps forward. Every muscle in his body draws tight, coiled and trembling. Dark claws slide from the tips of his fingers, gleaming and terrible.

“Jonah,” I whisper. “Jonah, no!” I grab his arm, but it’s like grabbing a boulder tumbling in the other direction. He doesn’t even feel me.

My mother advances. “I suppose,” she says coldly, “it’s time for you to meet her.”

“HEY!” I plant myself between them, arms outstretched.

Jonah presses forward against my hand, heat radiating off him. “I’ve been dreaming of killing you for forty years.”

Forty. The number detonates in my chest. The bench. Ten seconds.

My mother doesn’t waste breath. She lunges.

I react before I think. Both hands fling outward—one toward Jonah, one toward my mother—and my magic tears through the room in a violent surge of pure force.

Jonah is thrown backward, slamming into the wall hard enough to shatter my television in a rain of glass. My brothers catch my mother mid-flight, their boots screeching against the hardwood as they brace.

“Stop!” I scream, my voice breaking. “Listen to me! I have information that changes everything⁠—”

Jonah is already on his feet.

He doesn’t look at me.

He doesn’t look at the broken television.

He doesn’t look at anything except my mother.

“I’m out,” he says, and the hurt in his voice is worse than the rage. “Goodbye.”

“Jonah—”

He doesn’t even grant me a glance.

“The only reason I’m not tearing you apart,” he tells my mother, voice shaking with the effort of restraint, “is because your daughter showed me more empathy in seven days than I’ve seen from your kind in eighty-seven years.”

The words gut me. My chest feels like it’s being torn apart.

“I’m walking out of here,” he continues, deadly calm now. “Unharmed. If you have any modicum of respect for your daughter, you will let me.”

My brothers stare him down. Tension vibrates between them, a live wire stretched too tight.

For one terrible second, I think they’ll attack, anyway.

Then, slowly, they part.

Jonah clenches his jaw and strides past them. Past me. His hand twitches, just once, as if every instinct in his body is screaming at him to reach for me.

But he curls it into a fist instead, and then he’s gone.

The door slams behind him, and the silence that follows is the final dagger in my chest.

For a few long seconds, no one moves. My television crackles faintly, a thin curl of smoke rising from behind the fractured screen. The air still smells of ozone from the burst of my magic.