1
ELIANA
fire /'fi(?)r/: verb
1: the command given in a professional kitchen to begin cooking a dish.
2: the moment you stopenduringand finally fuckingact.
The world has been gutting me piece by piece.
Now, it’s come for Yasmin, too.
I stand frozen in my best friend’s bedroom doorway, watching Brandon’s hands wrapped around her throat. Everything that has led to this moment goes tumbling through my mind in jagged, gruesome fragments.
The rain on my face and Sage’s frantic call.
Bastian in that alley with blood on his hands and a corpse at his feet.
Running and screaming and screaming and running until my vision narrowed to nearly nothing.
And before that, another shower of broken glass memories: weeks and months of falling in love with a man who turned out to be exactly what everyone warned me about. The black sedan on every corner. Wires dangling like dark, treacherous seaweed in the empty caverns of Project Olympus.
Every moment of tenderness and violence blurs together, each melting into the other like paints in the rain, until the world is nothing but a blackened wash of things that no longer have shape or form or rhyme or reason.
I’ve endured it all. I endured and endured and endured again, when what I should’ve done from the start is stand up and say,No more. No fucking more.
I’m done enduring.
It’s time for me to act.
My hand closes around the first thing I can reach: a ceramic lamp on Yasmin’s dresser. Heavy. Solid.Perfect.
Brandon is too focused on choking Yasmin to hear me coming. His back is to the door, shoulders hunched, all his weight bearing down on her throat. She’s clawing at his wrists, her face going purple, her eyes bulging.
I swing the lamp as hard as I can.
It connects with the back of Brandon’s skull with a sound like a ripe melon splitting open. The ceramic shatters and Brandon’s grip on Yasmin’s throat goes slack as he crumples sideways onto the bed.
Yas gasps and coughs, sucking in air. Her hands fly to her throat as she rolls away from Brandon’s body.
I drop what’s left of the lamp, just the base and a jagged shard still attached, and grab Yasmin’s arm. “We have to go. Now.”
She’s still coughing too hard to speak, but she nods. I haul her to her feet and we go stumbling toward the door together.
Behind us, Brandon groans. “You b…bitch,” he slurs. “You f-fucking c-cu?—”
I don’t wait to hear the rest. I drag Yasmin through the bedroom door, down the hallway, past Zeke’s still form in the living room.
“Wait! We can’t leave him,” Yasmin rasps, her voice destroyed.
“We have to.”
“Eliana—”
“We can’t!” I scream. I’m still pulling Yasmin toward the door, my bloody feet leaving prints across her carpet. “Yas, I just saw Bastian. He—he did something. Something awful. We have to go.”
“What? What does that mean? What are you talking about?” She’s still trying to twist back toward Zeke, but I yank her harder.
