Page 6 of Overkill

“I understand.” I kept my voice even. “But I just paid for your last dream, so you’re going to have to deal with Film for at least the next two months.”

The $800 DSLR hadn’t been cheap. Brand new, because apparently a used one was cringe. I’d driven down to Albany to buy it after almost forty hours of overtime, but when I’d proudly shown it to him, he’d winced, said thanks, and walked away. A sure sign that it hadn’t been good enough.

How many hours would it take for sports uniforms, shoes, equipment, and whatever team fees there’d be?

“It wouldn’t be this bad if Dad was still here,” Marcus muttered.

I bristled. My hands shook as I put my coffee down. It clattered onto the kitchen counter near a chip on the edge of the granite. I touched the scar on my forehead, hidden by my hairline.

I lifted my eyes to all the reminders.

The pictures on the mantle displayed over the fireplace—a symbolic hearth. The heart of a family.

My fingers twitched as nervousness bubbled like the roiling of boiling water. Hollow, nervous, and uncontrolled.

I couldn’t stop myself from looking at the photos I tried so hard not to look at. Like the elephant in the room.

I always stared at my mother’s face first. Family photos of my mom. Then, a single photo, in a tiny frame, of me and my father—my real father—when I was young. The one reminder that I’d once had something different was dwarfed by the wedding pictures linking my mother to that man. She’d been his nurse, and he’d showered her with gifts, swearing to raise me as his own.

Then there were the family photos where Luke’s hand was a little too low on my waist or a little too high on my ribs. My face changed from joyful smiles of having a family into stiff, forced grimaces as happiness soured into a waking nightmare.

My vision was a pinprick focused right on his face. His blue eyes. His smile. Always on his smile. A smile under the sunlight that turned predatory behind the shadow of closed doors.

And always, his smiling face looked back at me. Square-jawed, blue-eyed, and that stupid, perfect blond buzz cut that made him look like GI Joe.

He was a charming prince; if devils came with forked tails, hooves, and horns, they wouldn’t be very effective, would they?

Seeing him made my airway constrict, as though the silence he’d forced on me was still a real thing. A physical thing. Like he still controlled me from the bottom of Mourningkill Lake, his ghostly hand keeping the secrets stuffed down my throat.

“Are you even listening?” Marcus complained from somewhere in the distance.

Nausea turned the coffee in my empty stomach into bile that burned my throat. I fought the dizziness threatening to take me down. My skin felt tight, my muscles twitched, and I had no control over anything. Just as it had been under his control.

Miriam and Marcus argued.

The world slowed as my stiff fingers tapped on my yellow mug, and I struggled to clench them into a fist. When I did, my arms shook up to my tensed shoulders and to my neck. I shivered all over, my chest heavy as I held in a whimper.

“It’s time for school.” I said it on a breath, trying to steady myself even as my knees felt like buckling from underneath me.

“What?” Marcus asked in that oh-so-fucking teenage voice that was too arrogant. If he had been treated the way I had been, it would have been smacked out of him from the very fucking beginning.

“It’s time for school, idiot!” Miriam’s voice grated on my nerves. Its high-pitched whine made me want to shrink.

I should tell her not to talk to her brother that way, but holy fuck…he was an inconsiderate idiot sometimes. In many ways, he reminded me of our father.

The volume of their argument rose as unrelated irritations were spat at one another. All of it blurred as a buzzing started in the front of my head, spreading until it filled the hollow of my skull like a scream.

“Fuck you!” Marcus snapped.

The buzzing silenced.

“Marc!” I snapped back. “Don’t talk to your sister that way!”

I had so much more to say. Don’t treat your sister that way, don’t treat women that way, don’t become the man I hated most when you share half of my blood!

The doorbell rang, followed by five sturdy, rapid knocks.

I stilled, barely able to breathe. I felt like my entire body was being squeezed by a vise as my heart fell to my feet.