“Shut up.” His voice cracked, high and wild. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. You never got to tell me what to do. You were nothing. You and your junkie mother—you were nothing. And you took her from me?—”
Behind Todd, tied to a tree with rope that bit into her wrists, was Mia.
I forgot how to breathe.
She was crying. Silent tears streaming down her face, her whole body shaking, a strip of duct tape across her mouth. Her eyes were wild with terror, darting between Todd and Riley and the gun—the gun, always the gun.
Twelve years old. She was twelve years old, and she was watching a man point a gun at her sister.
“She was never yours.” Riley’s voice stayed level, but I could hear the strain underneath—the fear she was fighting to hide. “Mia was never yours, Todd. She’s my sister. My family. You have no claim to her.”
“I have every claim!” Todd’s arm swung wide, the gun tracking with it, and for one horrible second, it pointed at Mia. She flinched, pressed herself back against the tree, a muffled sob escaping past the tape. “I raised that brat. I fed her, I clothed her, I put a roof over her head. And you stole her. Just like you stole everything else.”
The gun swung back to Riley. Todd’s finger tightened on the trigger.
“You were always the problem, Riley. Always. If you’d just stayed gone, if you’d just left well enough alone?—”
His knuckle whitened.
Time stopped.
I saw the small details with terrible clarity. The sweat beading on Todd’s temple. The tremble in Riley’s hands she was fighting to control. Mia’s eyes, wide and wet, fixed on her sister. The gun—black and cold—and the finger curling around the trigger.
The space between heartbeats stretched into eternity.
And then I moved.
No thought. No plan. Just motion.
I launched myself from the tree line. My hand closed around his wrist just as his finger squeezed the trigger. The gun fired as I hit him. The crack of it split the air—deafening, a sound that would live in my nightmares for years.
We went down hard. Todd’s back hit the ground, the breath exploding out of him, and I was on top of him before he could recover. The gun was still in his hand. I grabbed his wrist, slammed it against the dirt once, twice, until his fingers loosened and the weapon skittered away into the leaves.
Todd fought back. Of course he did. He’d been hurting people his whole life, and he knew how to do it. His fist connected with my jaw. His knee drove into my ribs. He clawed at my face, my eyes, my throat—fighting dirty because that was the only way he knew how to fight.
I barely felt it.
The adrenaline had taken over, flooding my system, turning pain into something distant and irrelevant. All that mattered was ending this.
My fist connected with his face. Once. Twice. The satisfying crunch of cartilage as his nose broke, blood spraying across my knuckles, across the leaves, across the golden afternoon light.
Todd’s struggles weakened. His hands fell away from my throat. He lay beneath me, dazed, beaten, blood bubbling from his ruined nose.
I reared back for another blow.
He was still breathing. Still conscious. Still capable of getting up, finding the gun, finishing what he’d started.
I could end it here. End him. Make sure he never threatened Riley or Mia again.
My fist hung in the air.
“Murphy! Stand down!”
The voice cut through the red haze. Sheriff Daniels, emerging from the tree line with deputies fanning out behind her, weapons drawn and trained on us.
“Hands where I can see them! Both of you!”
I raised my hands. Stepped back from Todd’s bloodied body. A deputy kicked the gun farther into the brush while two others kept their weapons fixed on Todd, shouting commands—stay down, don’t move, hands behind your back.
