Page 125 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Masen doubles over with a howl of pain, and the gun clatters away.

Something inside me snaps, I feel it like a physical blow. I don’t fight against it, what’s the point? This is kill or be killed. Fight or flight and I’m so sick and tired of running. Being terrified daily and wondering if this is the last day I’ll feel the sun on my skin. I feel a darkness working its way through me like a flood, I choose to embrace and allow it to claim control.

I don't think.

Just grab the cast iron skillet from the stovetop and swing.

The skillet connects with his temple with a sickening crack.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Each impact is punctuated by rage, terror and desperation.

Masen crumples to the floor, blood pouring from his head.

A battle cry tears out of me as I hit him another three times, unable to control myself or the rage pulsing through my body. I’m not in control, I’ve surrendered to my own monster and allowed her to have her freedom. She’s no longer lying dormant inside me. She’s free to reign havoc and cause misery and pain against those who have wronged me and want to harm my innocent child.

The skillet is still in my hand.

I don't remember tightening my grip on it. I don't remember deciding to keep holding it after Masen went down. My knuckles are white around the handle and my arm is shaking, not from fear, not yet, but from the residual current of adrenaline that is still moving through my muscles, demanding that they keep going, keep swinging, keep defending.

I made myself stop.

That is the thing I will remember. Not the sound of the impact—though I will remember that too, the sickening specific crack of cast iron meeting bone that I will hear in the dark for the rest of my life—but the moment I chose to stop. The moment I looked at what was happening and pulled myself back from the edge of it. The darkness that had been moving through me, that cold empowered thing I had surrendered to, receded in the same second the threat did. It left like a tide pulling back from shore and what it exposed when it went was just me. Just Toren. Shaking. Standing over my brother's body in a kitchen that smells like gas and blood.

I lower the skillet.

My legs fold.

I don't mean to sit down on the kitchen floor. My knees just stop being reliable and the marble comes up to meet me and I stay there, because getting up requires a decision I can't make yet.

Masen is not moving.

The blood is already spreading, finding the grout lines between the tiles, following the geography of the floor the way water always finds its lowest point. My father built this kitchen to be beautiful. Marble flown in from somewhere European, fixtures that cost more than most people's annual income, every surface designed to communicate the particular language of wealth that Steven Kellar spoke fluently and believed in absolutely.

None of that matters now.

None of it ever did.

I look at my brother's face. I make myself do it because looking away feels like a cowardice I can't afford. I owe him nothing, I owe him less than nothing, I know that. I owe him the dignity of being seen by the person who ended him. He looks younger. That is the thing that lands hardest, stupidly, irrationally; that the man who tormented me, used me and let me rot in Walter House and aimed a gun at my unborn child looks, in this specific moment of absolute stillness, like the brother who taught me how to ride a bike. Like the boy who sat beside me at our mother's funeral and held my hand so hard his knuckles went white.

I killed him.

Three words that my brain produces without flinching, which means the flinching must be happening somewhere deeper, somewhere the words haven't reached yet. I killed my brother. I took the life of the only sibling I ever had, the only blood remaining in the world who shared a childhood with me, who existed in the past… before the war and the cartel and the warehouse and Xaden, all of it, and I did it with a kitchen implement in the house our father built.

I did it because he was going to kill my baby.

I hold onto that. I press both hands flat over my stomach and I hold onto it, the way you hold onto something solid when the ground shifts, not because it makes what I did clean, simple or without cost, but because it is the truth and the truth is the only thing I have left to stand on.

He was going to kill my child.

He had a gun pointed at my stomach.

He looked me in the eyes and told me exactly what he intended to do and why.