But in the end, I never really stood a chance.
Brandon charges.
I swing Excalibur again with everything I have, but this time, he’s more than ready. His hand clamps around the shaft mid-arc and wrenches it from my grip with a twisting force that sends white-hot pain shooting through my wrists. He tosses it aside and the cane clanks somewhere far away, useless, lost.
Then his palms slam into my chest and I’m airborne.
My back connects with the coffee table. Glass shatters beneath me and the edge catches my hip as I tumble sideways to land face-first on the floor. Shards bite into my palms. Warm blood wells between my fingers.
I scramble backward, opening more lacerations in my hands, but I don’t know up from down anymore. The room’s geography has been scrambled by panic and pain.
Brandon’s boots thud closer. Closer.
My hand finds something smooth and heavy. A lamp, funnily enough. I hurl it toward the sound of his breathing.
It misses.
“Mom!” I scream, grabbing a book, throwing it wild. “Sage! Get out! Call someone!”
A decorative bowl. Another miss.
“Help us!Someone help us!”
But my mother is taped to a chair and Sage is trapped on the floor and Zeke is bleeding out and nobody is coming.
Nobody is coming.
When Brandon is close enough, I go to rake my nails across his face. If I’m lucky, I’ll gouge his eyes and plunge him into the same darkness that’s become my home. I feel skin tear beneath my fingertips, feel the wet give of something soft, and Brandon screams.
He recoils, his grip loosening for just a fraction of a second.
He staggers, stunned, and I hit him again with anything I can grab. A porcelain vase shatters against his skull with a sound like breaking ice. A coffee table book. A shoe.
“Stay down!” I scream. “Stay the fuckdown!”
I hear him groaning, the liquid plash of blood in his throat or his sinuses or wherever I’ve managed to wound him. My chest heaves. Glass crunches beneath my feet as I stand over him, trembling, victorious.
It’s over. It has to be over.
I try to catch my breath and force my racing heart to slow down. The room is thick with the metallic stench of blood and the acrid bite of fear-sweat. Somewhere behind me, Mom is making muffled sounds through her gag, and Sage is still struggling on the floor.
But then Brandon’s groaning stops.
And I hear himlaugh.
It’s a wet, ugly sound, phlegmy and wrong, like something crawling up from a drain. “Well, well,” he slurs through what I hope is a mouthful of broken teeth. “Looks like Yas has been busy.”
I don’t understand at first.
Then I hear Yasmin’s strangled breath. The whisper of fabric as she wraps her arms around her midsection.
Oh, God.
He’s figured out she’s pregnant.
The shuffle of his body against the floor tells me he’s scooting away from me, putting distance between us. Meanwhile, I’m blind and disarmed and utterly fucking lost in my own living room. I dive toward where I last heard him, hands grasping at empty air, but he’s already somewhere else.
“You know,” Brandon muses thoughtfully, “I always wondered what it would be like to be a father.”
