Page 213 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
His eyes flick past me toward the room behind me, toward where she must still be, maybe hoping I’ll look back, maybe hoping he can say something that matters.
I do not look away from him.
He does not get my attention anymore. He gets my blade.
Something like a smile touches my mouth, but there is nothing warm in it.
“Do you want to see how my father died?”
The question lands between us like a dropped match.
Recognition sparks in his face then. Not full understanding, maybe, but enough. Enough to know that what is in front of him is no longer a boy trying to save a girl. No longer some bleeding rich kid half-drugged on the motel floor.
Just a son.
Just a man.
Just the wrong person to leave alive after touching what he touched.
“I’ll show you.”
The first thrust goes in low and hard.
His body jerks around the blade, every muscle seizing at once, eyes going wide with the kind of shock that only comes from finally discovering the world is not arranged around your survival. Pulling the knife free before he can fold around it, I drive it in again, higher this time, controlled enough to be almost clinical. There is nothing frantic in me. No wasted motion. No blind rage.
This is not a loss of control. This is clarity.
Blood pours over my hand, hot and slick, fresh over old. He makes a horrible broken sound, a drowning animal trying to become a man again just long enough to beg.
“This is for her,” I say, striking again.
Another wet gasp.
“This is for every time you thought fear made you powerful.”
Another deeper thrust.
“This is for thinking you were entitled to survive her.”
His hands are weak now, batting uselessly at my arm, no strength left in them. His breath hitches, catches, stutters apart. I lean closer, close enough to smell the copper flood of him, therot beneath the cologne, the panic finally breaking through all that old composure.
“I want you to understand something before you go,” I tell him softly. “You were never the worst thing that happened to her.”
The knife sinks in one last time.
“She lived.” I whisper, leaving him there with that.
Whatever is left in his face loses shape almost immediately. The light behind the eyes gutters. His mouth falls open on one final broken exhale. Then nothing. No more choking. No more movement. No more him.
Silence does not follow. Not really. The motel still hums with bad electricity. My own breath sounds shredded. Somewhere a faucet drips. But the room changes anyway, as if some pressure has finally burst and gone out of it.
Turning around, the world ends again.
Octavia is standing a few feet away, swaying so faintly I almost miss it at first because I am too busy seeing her smile.
It is the smallest smile I have ever seen on her. Not fully attached to the room, like it reached her from very far away before landing on her mouth. One hand is pressed to her side. Her dress is torn open there, the black fabric dark and soaked, blood pouring through her fingers in a steady, dreadful sheet that has already slicked down her hip and leg. There is so much of it.
God, there is so much.
