Chapter 34 Violet #2
In another life, maybe I would have felt sorry for him. He was just as broken as I was, ruined by two people who should have never been parents and a system that didn’t work.
But it was impossible to feel anything but thick, stabbing hate. “You’re sick,” I whispered.
He laughed like the maniac he was. He’d kept it hidden well while we were in public, but now, surrounded by the evil that lingered in this house, it was all out on display. “I am what you made me.”
But I wasn’t taking that. Maybe once upon a time I would have. I would have let a narcissist blame me for their poor choices. Blame me for the shitty hand they’d been dealt. But I wasn’t taking that anymore. “You are who you chose to be,” I seethed.
“I never had a fucking chance.” Spit frothed at the corners of his mouth that he didn’t bother to wipe away.
“You know what they fucking did to me? They kept me in a fucking box beneath the floor. Shoved me in there for hours at a time, in the dark and in the cold. You were the fucking lucky one, Violet! You think you had it bad? You should have seen what they did to me!”
I didn’t doubt it. Didn’t doubt his claims of abuse and neglect.
But that didn’t mean I could forgive him.
“Where’s Nyah?”
He laughed bitterly. “You’ve known that bitch for two fucking minutes and she’s all you talk about.” He stood and crossed the room, pointing the shotgun at my head. “What about me, Violet? What about your brother?” He shoved the gun between my eyes.
I didn’t fucking flinch.
I couldn’t look away from the pain and torture in his expression.
Levi growled behind me in warning, and I was vaguely aware of X and Whip storming in, weapons drawn.
I held my hand up, stopping all three of them from going farther.
This was my fight.
Mine and Travis’s.
“You killed my best friend,” I whispered.
He barked out a laugh, his fingers trembling over the trigger.
“Who, Toby? He killed himself. Watched it with my own two eyes.” His eyes narrowed at me.
“And yet you still came up golden, didn’t you, Violet?
Still came up with a family who loves you.
A best friend to laugh with.” His voice turned into a snarl.
“What the fuck do I have? I thought I had a woman who loved me too, but you fucking ruined that as well, didn’t you? ”
I didn’t know what woman he was talking about. Nyah? Maybe the girl he’d attacked and gone to prison for? I didn’t care.
One thing was clear.
Travis had made his own bed. And now he was going to have to lie in it.
“Where’s Nyah?” I whispered again.
“Dead, bitch! How many times I gotta tell you! She’s as dead as you are!”
His finger didn’t even get a chance to squeeze the trigger. Levi’s gun exploded, his bullet catching Travis in the shoulder.
He jerked, the gun slipping from my forehead and pointing up at the air.
Someone grabbed me.
I was barely aware of it in the tussle of arms and legs and gunshots.
Each one splintered through my brain, bringing with it the pain of everything this man had taken from me. Safety. Toby. Nyah. Any sense of worth.
A scream ripped from my mouth, and I charged forward, staring down the man I’d hated for as long as I could remember.
Levi and X held him, waiting for me for a decision on what to do. Travis howled indignantly, his shoulder bleeding, the wound nasty but unlikely to be life-threatening if treated.
“What do you want to do, Vi?” Levi asked, his eyes ablaze.
X practically vibrated with the scent of an impending kill in the air but held himself in check. Barely.
Blood seeped from Travis’s gunshot, a mesmerizing spread of red across his dirty T-shirt. I stepped in close, and without any forethought or planning, I brought the tip of my knife to his wound and pressed it.
Hard.
His scream of pain would probably be heard blocks away, and for once in my life, I was glad that Saint View was the sort of place where screams in the night were common and people were smart enough to mind their own business.
I dragged the knife across his shoulder, cutting through flesh and tendons, blood spilling beneath my blade like it was an extension of my body.
“That’s my girl,” X encouraged, almost panting at the sight of me with his knife in my hand, drawing another man’s blood.
I was his girl.
His and Whip’s and Levi’s.
And Travis was never going to take another person from me.
I plunged the knife into his jugular.
X crowed in victory as Travis slumped between him and Levi. He hit his knees, the knife sticking out of his neck.
Levi and X dropped him to the floor.
But I wasn’t done.
Something stirred inside me. Something strong and rich and…powerful.
Like I wasn’t even in control of my body, I drew the blade out, letting blood spurt like a fountain.
Then slashed the knife across his neck, slitting his throat.
More blood.
I did it again and again. Opening him up.
Making him bleed. Making him pay for the fear I’d lived with my entire life.
Making him pay for the lives he’d taken from me.
Making him pay for every shitty thing our foster parents had done, because he’d taken away the opportunity to confront them myself when he’d killed them.
Maybe he’d been owed those kills.
But so had I.
The darkness that had opened up in me demanded them.
I turned, facing the three men who’d brought me here.
I knew what they saw. A woman covered in blood. A woman with crazed eyes.
A woman who’d taken her first life and suddenly realized why they liked it.
Whip’s forehead furrowed. His gaze skipped from X to Levi, and then back to me. “Vi, sweetheart. Give me the knife.”
I didn’t want to. Couldn’t.
I stepped over Travis’s bleeding body and slammed it blade first into my foster mother’s chest. Over and over. Until it was a pulpy, disgusting mess.
And then I did the same to the man slumped beside her.
It didn’t matter to me that they were dead long before.
“I hate you,” I whispered while I stabbed them.
Travis’s blood smeared my face. The stench in the room was overwhelmingly vile, but I couldn’t stop.
“I hate you for what you did to me. Always making me feel like shit. Always making me scared.” I glanced down at Travis, his dead, unseeing eyes.
“And I hate you for what you did to him. None of us deserved this. None of us deserved you.”
All the fight went out of me.
And I stared in horror at what I’d done.
“Please don’t hurt us,” the tiniest whisper came from the doorway.
I spun. The knife clattered to the floorboards as my knees crumpled.
And all four of us stared in horror at the two little faces peering up at us.