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1
Sienna
Something was wrong, but I couldn’t place it.
A sense of dread filled my stomach as I stared at myself in the mirror. The same rusty-red hair dangling in rivulets down my shoulders and back caught my eyes first. I stared into a pair of wide blue eyes surrounded by too-pale cheeks. The fear that drenched the room felt out of place, and the paleness in my cheeks hadn’t been there a moment ago.
Had I been this afraid a few seconds ago?
I didn’t think so.
I couldn’t understand why fear crushed my chest. Why my face looked years younger than the mature face I usually saw in the mirror.
The gun I held in my hand felt out of place in the scene. It didn’t matter how many years I’d carried and wielded it. It didn’t matter how many times I’d felt the cool steel in the palm of my hand or how it felt when I fired it and the reverberating kickback sent shockwaves of numbness all the way up to my shoulders.
Right here—right now—it didn’t belong.
And I knew that. I couldfeel the wrongness of it.
I pushed away from my mirror and turned toward my bedroom door—or what should have been my bedroom door. Instead, there sat the center island of my family’s kitchen, and the smell of ham, potatoes, and bacon wafted through the door.
My stomach soured as I finally recognized the same sequence of events that had haunted my nightmares for years.
My fingers tightened on the gun, knowing that within moments, I’d have to use it. Ialwayshad to.
My feet felt leaden as I strode deeper into the kitchen, instinctively knowing what I’d find there—the bacon popped and sizzled over the stove, the half-drank glass of orange juice off to the side, forgotten—but I kept my eyes downcast.
I tried closing them.
I tried avoiding the sight before me, but that wasn’t how this dream played out. It never went that way.
My heart became a thunderous boom in my ears as I stared down at my mother’s unseeing eyes.
The smell in the kitchen transformed into the stench of burning meat.
I didn’t move. Icouldn’t. She was already dead.
I’d seen death. I’d worked alongside it my entire life.
My sweet, caring mother lay in a pile of spilled slaw, and I could do nothing to save her.
My feet worked on their own accord as I turned away from her, my entire body drenched in sweat as I shook profusely and strode back through the doorway. This time, the door carried me into an unfamiliar house on the south side of the city.
I knew what I’d have to do here, too. My eyes drifted down to where the gun sat cradled in my hand, and I clicked off the safety and strode into the room, lifting it.
A tall figure stood over a familiar body, and I pulled the trigger twice, somehow missing each time. He flung himself through a window, and I emptied my weapon, trying to land a shot. It wasn’t like me to miss. Not after years of training. But when I was a child—when I’d been holding this gun for the first time with my small and fragile hands—I didn’t know the first thing about landing a shot.
Here, I was no more experienced than an eight-year-old girl.
I looked down at my father’s body, half covered in blood. His head looked malformed from the bullet that had torn his life away.
But that was his nose—the same one as I had.
Those were the hands that had rubbed soothing circles on my back so long ago.
There was the mouth that hummed sweet melodies to the little girl I used to be.
I felt the tingle of my toes that slowly traveled up the rest of my body. Relief encompassed me as I stared at my second dead parent and knew the scene would quickly fade. The ringing in the back of my mind soothed me as it pulled my consciousness from memories I’d long hoped to forget.
