The world splinters in a vicious severing of indigo and red. Her cry is strangled, and she squeezes her eyes shut as she clutches at his wrist, trying to ease the ferocity of his grip in her hair. But he yanks her forward, and for a sickening second, she thinks he’s going to smash her head into the bed frame hard enough to split her skull open.
Instead, he bends her neck to the side slowly, the angle unforgiving and terrifying. He will snap her neck as if she is a doll.
His jaw unhinges, and all she can see is the iridescent glow of hell in the back of his throat.
She’s sobbing, incoherent as she tries to pry his fingers from her curls. “Please don’t kill him.Please please please.He’s just a baby. He’s my baby—”
Mucous stretches in long strands from his swollen lips and splatters on her face.
this is not real it is not it is not real
A high, keening wail leaves her mouth.
“Shut. Up.” He slams her head backward again into the bedside table and pain explodes through her in a pounding wave.
She is breathless, limp, slithering toward the carpet as logic detaches and she swims in a lucid pool of agony.
“I havenever hurt him,” Bren snarls. “All I ever did was try to save my son from his murderer of a mother. Because he’smy fucking son too.”
Her eyes squeeze shut, and she can’t look at him, tears slipping down her cheeks quick and sharp. If she looks she will see—
Not a monster.
Just her own monstrousness reflected back at her.
“You can’t still be alive,” she whispers.
He lets out a sound that could have been a laugh if not for how it drowns in blood. “You fucking bitch.”
In the basement, she hadn’t looked at him properly, hadn’t felt for his pulse, because it was easier to think he was dead. She needed him to be dead.
Her eyes open, spiderwebs of tears clinging to her lashes.
She stares at him.
The momentum of the circular saw sent it flying up his chest, eating up his left shoulder and then slashing his face before the blade jammed. But it hadn’t sunk deep, not with those worn-out, bent metal teeth. It has still slashed him; he is a catastrophe of blood and gore leaking from the torn-open wounds. Blood soaks his shredded shirt, and it sticks to every outlined muscle of his chest, wet and glistening. His face is hardest to look at, and she tilts her head away. But he jerks her back toward him, his fingers twisting again until it feels like her hair will rip from her scalp.
Look at what you did.
She’s crying.
The gash on his face runs from chin to forehead, right through themiddle of his left eye. The skin parts like wet lips, the blood so rich and endless that it looks black. What’s left of his eye is perforated jelly.
He will bleed out like this, though slowly. He must be upright only from adrenaline.
“It was an a-accident.” She’s babbling, choking on her own tears. “The f-faulty switch. I swear. Iswear.”
“Shut thefuck up.” He yanks her forward, and their mouths are a breath apart, the ruin of his bleeding face almost touching hers. She can smell it: raw, moist flesh, the sharp taint of butchery.
He’s shaking, so close he could kiss her.
“Is this”—his voice is a low growl—“how you survive your shitty life? The lies. The delusions. I know youdid this to me!”
“Bren—” It breaks in her mouth.
“SHUT UP.” He shakes her and she gasps. “I figured it out about your parents, you know.” He chokes then, blood bubbling between chapped lips. “They were found dead onlydaysafter we left. And I know you went upstairs. I thought you were in shock that day in our kitchen when you read that article about their deaths—but you were terrified your secret would come out.”
“I’ms-sorry.”
