Primal Pursuit

I freeze, the whiskey bottle almost falling from my hand.

What did my dad do? How did he fuck up?

“Oh, my God,” I whisper as my mind slides in all directions.

The memory must have been buried too deep, drowned out by my father’s pleas and my mother’s tears, and the deafening sound of death. How my mother begged Davian to kill them right there in the hall. Shedidn’t want to risk him taking them into my bedroom, but he did. In a house with four other bedrooms, he chose mine.

I start pacing, trying to get air into my lungs, but it burns and catches on the giant lump that forms in my chest.

Davian said lots of things to my parents that night.

Likeshut your fucking mouth, to my mother.

Andone more fucking promise of money and I’ll make you suffer instead of doing it quick.

You screwed up. This is the price.

My breaths are loud, like a wounded animal, and I almost fall as I stagger to the couch. I don’t think I can make the bedroom.

Over my speaker pod, Nick’s singing about bullets in brains, and it’s so on the mark, it’s eerie.

You know the rules.

This is the price.

You fucked up.

I pressed my face close to the slats that night, and I swear Davian looked at me, but only for a second. Or maybe it was the fear, the paranoia. I can’t be sure. But I was frozen solid as I watched him screw on the silencer, made my parents kneel, hands behind their heads, and shot them dead. Execution style.

That’s when I moved to the back of the closet, pressed against a box, hand to my mouth as screams and vomit wanted to hurl forth. I knew if I made a sound he’d kill me too. So I stayed there, swallowing my tears and hardly breathing through the shock and fear.

When he was done, he sighed and wiped everythingdown, not that I remember him touching anything, and then he stared at the mirror.

Those vivid green eyes. Cold. Hard. Cruel.

A monster.

A murderer.

A home destroyer.

He shot my mother first, mid-plea. And then my dad. He wanted my dad to see my mother’s execution. He wanted my dad to feel that pain, die with that pain.

Jesus.

My vision blurs, and a single tear slides down my cheek. I grit my teeth and clench my jaw, struggling to contain the grief and agony that washes over me as I remember that night—my parents’ lifeless bodies lying in a pool of their own blood, me standing there numb with horror.

I never spoke about it. Didn’t even tell the police. My lips were welded shut because I couldn’t bring myself to say what had happened, that I was too much of a coward to try to save them. That I hid in that closet while a man murdered them. And all I could do was…nothing.

Another tear falls, and I lift the bottle to my lips, swallowing the rest of the booze until there’s nothing left.

I scream with rage and hurl the bottle against the wall, watching as the glass shatters in every direction. I stumble my way to bed and collapse beneath the sheets as sobs escape from my lungs. The pain I’m feeling is more than I can bear, a deep hole in my chest that agony caresses with aching tendrils. With each breath, my anguish grows. I wish it were something I could pull out of me, something I could tear off me like bark from a tree. Instead, I’m forcedto live with it, have it shape and mold me into the fucking mess I am today.

And now, Davian is there, too. I can feel him. Right where I don’t want him, nestled against bone.

Starting to drift asleep, he comes at me. But not with a gun or a knife, with his arms to hold me, lips to kiss, and the more I push that image, the more it pulls me down into sleep.

I leave the light burning.