Dots scatter across my vision, everything going blurry. I sputter and cough despite how hard I try to hide my desperation for air. Both my hands hit the counter behind me, flailing around for some semblance of reprieve, as if touching stone might stop my lungs from burning. Agonizing pain slices up the arm he injured earlier. My braced hand catches on an object, and the chopping board clatters to the floor, the vegetables a rainbow mess across sparkling marble.
Tommy doesn’t react, too lost to whatever sick fantasy is playing out in his head. My stomach drops like a boulder in a landslide.
I’d rather die than live through this again.
He and his family have taken so much from me when I’ve given them everything. All they’ve left is a faint glimmer of the person I was before he swept me off my feet and made me feel like a princess, only to then throw me in the dungeons, a crown of poisoned thorns on my head.
His heated breath skitters across my skin, sticky and cloying. He shoves my sweats down my legs before he fumbles with his belt, undoing his zip. “No one will love you like I do.”
I hold his stare as I rasp, “Thank God.”
His eyes widen when I raise my arm. Scarlet bursts from his skin, crimson dots splatter onto my top and part of his favorite meal.
Oxygen slams into my lungs, making my knees buckle. Hot tears stream down my face as I watch the man who made me believe the devil exists stumble back, gripping the knife protruding from his neck. My hand trembles in my wrist brace as I relive the feel of skin and tendon parting under the blade.
“You were always pathetic,” I croak, voice raw, body shaking. Fury has found a home in my heart. I want to scream. Riot. Take the knife out just to plunge it into him ten more times.
But I’m better than that. Stronger.Smarter.Violent men aren’t violent because they lost their temper—they’re violent because they know they can get away with it. If it was an issue of emotional control, his entire family would have met his fists as frequently as I do.
No, I’ll bottle this rage up and use it to survive.That’show I’ll make my father proud.
“You made me do this,” I whisper.
Those moldy green eyes widen when I echo the words he has used on me more times than I can count. He hip checks the kitchen island and tips sideways, smearing red around the once-pristine kitchen, making this place as rotten as it is on the inside.
It’s fitting this way. White was never his color.
“You…” He tries to speak through the blood sputtering from his mouth.
“Learn to enunciate,” I mock, itching to grab the knife.
He backhanded me while saying that once.
Tommy slumps to the floor in a tangled mess of limbs, sight still fixed on me. I want to imprint the image of the life draining from him into my memory. It’ll be the picture I fall asleep to at night, my first thought when I wake in the morning.
“You killed me, Tommy,” I whisper. Tears trickle down my cheeks as I recall everything I’ve endured the past four years. “And, in return, I’m killing you. A corpse iskillingyou. Isn’t it funny how that works? A bit ironic, no?”
My entire body trembles as I stare at him, his blood threading through the pattern of my skin, drying into a crust.
I feel nothing.
Regret nothing.
He had it coming.
My sock-covered feet step back across the slippery tile floor. “Goodbye, Tommy,” I rasp. “I’ll see you in hell.”
They’ll come for me. His brother, his parents. They won’t rest until I pay for taking Tommy away from them. From this day until I take my last breath, I will never be free, a tagged bird forever flying faster than the wind. But I’ll take that over a gilded cage. I’ll paint the trees with blood if I have to.
This isn’t just an escape. It’s retribution.
My murder made me silent. All that’s left for them to do is put me in the dirt. But Tommy made one grave mistake: he forged me into a weapon.
A tarnished blade can still cut.
1
Cindi
