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"NO! There's no other way to end this," Kevin seethes, trying so hard to sound mocking, but his voice holds too much pain to hide. "You need to die. With you dead, I can finally live."
"It doesn't have to be this way," I whisper, my hands shaking at my sides. "You don't have to kill me. We can both walk out of this room alive. You can choose to let me live and then choose to live for yourself."
Kevin laughs without humour, his gun waving in front of him. "You don't get it. You'll never get it." His voice is so broken with years of agony and anger. "You got to live. YOU GOT TO HAVE A LIFE! People cared about you. They bent over backwards to help you. The pretty girl with the sad grey eyes! I bet everyone fell over themselves to help you! Me? I had no one and nothing. I have a dead man's voice in my head that can only be silenced when your heart stops beating."
“Kevin,” I whisper, my heart racing with fear while my tears fall for the man in front of me. “Let me help you. Let me help you find what everyone else failed to give you; support.”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare say my name!” Kevin screams at me, his own tears filling his eyes. “You stupid fucking slut! You have no right to say my name. Not when you walked away when I NEVER COULD! I hate you so fucking much.”
With a quick movement, I reach behind me and flip off the safety. With every word that falls from his lips, I see the tormented soul that he is. Years of abuse with no end in sight has made him into the man he is today. There won’t be any talking him out of this. It will end with his death or mine.
Kevin keeps ranting and raving, his sanity fracturing into unrecognizable pieces right in front of me. “I’m going to kill you and then I’m going to kill all three of your fuck toys. Those two babies of yours will get a first hand experience of the foster system, just like you did. I hope they’re never saved. I hope they fucking suffer!”
Those words are the beginning of the end. He will not make my children suffer what I had to or suffer what made him like this.
My hands are shaking as I slip my left hand behind me, gripping the handle of the gun I stashed behind me when I felt him come in. He signed his death certificate with that last threat. There’s only one person dying here today and it’s going to be him.
He raises his gun, a sick, angry smile on his face that emphasizes the pain in his eyes. There’s a moment of hesitation on his face before his finger moves to the trigger. That second of hesitation is all I need. I use the training that Adam and Rhys gave me, pointing my gun at him, stabilizing my arm and bracing for recoil. The loud, explosive sound of my gun going off a split second before his own does, has my ears ringing and my balance going off kilter.
His bullet goes wide as my own shot hits true to aim in his chest, the spray of blood that flies outwards makes my stomach flip.
Kevin drops to the ground, his gun clattering on the ground next to him. Without thinking too much about it, I race over to his side, tears falling down my cheeks.
The anger inside of me rejoices in what’s happening, but the humanity in me hates it. I never wanted to take a life. Especially not the life of someone barely past adolescence.
Placing my hand over the wound on his chest, I try to slow down the bleeding. The last thing I want is for him to die. No matter what he’s done, he doesn’t deserve this. Death is final, it has no chance of redemption.
“No,” he begs, his voice quiet and weak. He’s propped haphazardly against the leg of a table, his eyes half closed, blood splattered all over his clothes and face. “Please, don’t.”
“I need to slow down the bleeding until an ambulance comes,” I explain, sniffling as the tears continue to fall my eyes.
“Please. I want to die.” He closes his eyes tightly. “Death seems peaceful. For once, there’s no voices in my head. It’s quiet and I really like the quiet,” Kevin whispers, tears falling down his cheeks silently. “Let me go so I can finally feel what it’s like to be saved.”
Choking on tears, I nod my head, taking my hands off of the wound and biting my lip hard to hold back my sobs. I shift my position, wanting to be ready to run to the door when help arrives. Kevin’s hand reaches out, pain streaking across his face.
“Stay with me. I don’t want to die alone,” Kevin whispers, his voice sounding so much like a lost child. “I’ve been so alone. I want— I want. To. Die with. Someone. Here.”
“I’ll stay here. You won’t die alone,” I whisper, taking his hand in my own.
Every instinct inside of me screams that I should hate this man, and there’s a part of me that definitely does. Yet my heart still breaks for me. That sad, broken girl I used to be only feels sorrow and pity for the young man. If life had been even a fraction kinder to him, I don’t think we would have ever been in this position.
Does that change the fact that he hurt people I love? No, not at all. It doesn’t change any of what he did to me. He tried to kill me and my family multiple times. What it does do, however, is bring me to care for the scared little boy that’s been hiding behind the angry young man that committed those acts.
The system failed me countless times growing up, but he’s right that it screwed him over more. Between myself, Kevin, and Declan, there’s three different endings to the same broken, abusive situation. Declan couldn’t cope and took his own life, choosing death over living with the nightmares that happened to us. I chose to fight, to find a way to heal from the shitty hand I was dealt and build a life I could be proud of. Kevin chose to follow in the footsteps of our abuser.
The differences in all of us started with who we were to begin with and ended with who got more support in the end.
I was saved by a beautiful soul who made me see, at least in part, that the world wasn’t always bad. Declan ran from help at almost every turn, until he settled, far too late, with the three men who became a huge part of both our lives just at different times.
Kevin had none of that, stuck in the cycle of abuse, with no one to help him or his mental health. Kevin was a victim who became a killer. The cycle will seemingly end with him. If only it wasn’t with his death.
Kevin’s breathing is harsh and laboured in front of me. There’s so much blood everywhere yet somehow even more is pouring from his chest and mouth. His eyes fall shut, his breathing slowing until it stops altogether.
Sitting on the floor of the bar, I cry over the body of the man who’s made my life hell for the last year. I killed him. It was my bullet that ended his life, but in the face of death, Kevin believed it was his chance to be saved.
I once sat on a bridge, contemplating death and wondering if I ended it all, right here and now, would I be reincarnated as someone else? Maybe even something else. Death wasn’t what I needed in that moment, it was a hand to help me through the pain.
Kevin didn’t want a hand reached out to save him, he wanted the hand of death. Maybe in a different life, he won’t need to be saved at all.
