My knife is in my hand before I know it. I don’t remember pulling it back out. I don’t think as I slash at him, anywhere I can, until his hands aren’t on me anymore. Until Imake himlet me go.
I’m running again.
Iosif,I think.Iosif, Iosif. Please.
I’ve never heard my father move so fast. His hand fists in the hair he’d stroked so gently moments ago. He wrenches me backward, the force knocking me to my knees, and dragging me back up the street.
My knife hits the pavement with a clang drowned by my scream.
“You fuckingslut,” he shouts in my face, blood dripping down from his face onto mine. “You owe me fucking everything!”
He raises his fist. My eyes squeeze shut, just in time.
But his blow never lands.
I look up, and he isn’t there anymore. He is ripped away from me with an intensity so ferocious, I hear his shoulder pop out of its socket. His howl is syncopated by the sickening crash of his body falling through the window of a bakery-to-be, almost done being renovated.
Iosif’s stature blocks the scene when he steps in after him.
My Iosif, with his hands finding Cillian Driscoll’s throat. Whose hands tighten, relentless, no matter how much his hands are clawed at. “You don’t deserve to walk the same earth as her,” Iosif condemns, my angel of vengeance. “I should have ended you the night you sold her.”
He lifts Cillian Driscoll with a single-handed grip and throws him up against a counter.
This man isn’t my father. Was he ever? Would a father do this to their child? Would a father sell you? Not once, but twice. Would a father use you as currency for his next hit?
How many times had I begged him to be my dad?
It’s him who begs now.
Iosif pays those cries no heed. “You’re going to wish you had,” he vows.
His knife glints beneath the sun, a brilliant silver. He soaks it in red.
Iosif could just subdue him. He can just knock him out and leave him here for the police.
But he won’t.
I know he won’t.
“I—I’m sorry,” Cillian Driscoll whines, clutching at Iosif’s wrist.
Calmly, Iosif shakes his head. “No. But you will be.”
I don’t remember getting to my feet. I don’t remember walking up to them, entering through the broken window. I only hear the glass crunching beneath my feet, cutting them up.
I only see Cillian Driscoll’s desperate pants turning wet, gurgling, until blood is pouring out of his mouth one hacked cough at a time. I see his body drop to the ground with a thud. His eyes go glassy until they stare off into nothing at all.
And then there is Iosif, his blood-streaked palms cupping my face. I am lost to the storm swirling in his eyes. My feet find steady ground when I feel his forehead press flush to mine, and his kisses against my lips, salty with tears that could be his or mine.
“He willneverhurt you again,” Iosif swears against my lips, over and over.
The buzzing beneath my skin finally stops.
Confronted by atrocity, by the blood on my husband’s hands, I wait for the horror to flood me. I’d done so much to keep him from this, and then I’d just watched him do it. I’d watched him kill my father.
I wait for the guilt to submerge me for it.
But it never comes.
