He stumbled backwards, surprised that I was standing up to him for the first time in my life, his hold on the gun tightening.
The gun went off for the second time, then a third, but I wasn’t scared of the sound this time. His aim was off and the bullets hit something behind me just as the bat connected with his shoulder. He fell to the ground, his face a mask of fear and pain. That same look had been on my mother’s face, probably on my own for my entire life.
Never again.
I lifted the bat over my head and swung again. It hit his leg. The bat connected with so much force that my arms ached, but I welcomed the pain when my dad screamed in agony again. I swung it again, hitting him in the head. The bat cracked in my hands, a huge splinter breaking off and hitting the floor, but it had done its purpose. Dad fell back on the floor, blood oozing from the gash I had left on the side of his head.
Only when he was lying unconscious on the floor did I drop the bat. I kicked him in the gut once, twice, a third time, but my rage was quickly evaporating. “You killed my mom,” I whispered one last time before forcing myself to turn away from him.
Tears blinded me as I crossed to where my mom was lying lifelessly on the floor. I fell to my knees beside her and grabbed her hand, the one she was still protectively holding over her stomach.
I didn’t move when the police broke the door down. I didn’t speak when they asked what had happened. I couldn’t breathe.
My mom, the only person who had ever loved me, was gone.
***
With a jerk, I shot upright in bed, wiping sweat and tears from my eyes. My heart was pounding against my ribs, the blood rushing through my ears so loudly that it was impossible to hear anything else for a few seconds. I shot my gaze around the room, realizing only after a few seconds that I wasn’t home, but in the new room my aunt had given me in her house.
Slowly, the fear and rage and loss disappeared, leaving me almost shivering with the aftereffects, and I fell back against my pillows, knowing I wasn’t going to go back to sleep. Just as I hadn’t slept the night before or the one before that.
The last few days had been long and difficult. The cops had shown up at my house not long after the second shot had gone off. The neighbors had called them for once. In no time, they had taken my mother’s body away and handcuffed my still unconscious father before loading him into the back of an ambulance to take to the hospital, and then had taken me down to the police station for questioning.
I hadn’t talked. Not to the cops or anyone else. So they had called my aunt, the woman I hadn’t seen since I was five because my father had forbidden Mom from having contact with her. He had said that it was because she was jealous of his money, but even then, I had known the truth. He was scared of her. Of what she could do to him if she ever found out he was hurting us.
As soon as she had walked through the door, Alicia St. Charles had taken charge and made everyone in the police station jump if she so much as looked at them wrong. She was some hot-shot assistant district attorney or something, and everyone had whispered that she was a ballbreaker.
From there, things had happened pretty quickly. I was taken to the hospital to be looked over. I had the full works, even a few x-rays because I had blood on me. It was my mom’s blood, maybe even a little of my dad’s too, but I still hadn’t talked, so they didn’t know that. The x-rays only showed the few breaks I had gotten over the years, the ones my old man had inflicted.
That only made Alicia angrier. I had to spend the night in the hospital for observation, but I figured that it was because they thought I was going to snap and start hurting people with bats again.
“You’re safe now, Grayson,” Alicia promised me as she sat beside my hospital bed that night. “I promise you that your dad is going to go away for a very long time.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” I finally whispered. “Mom wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know.”
When her face tightened, she looked just like my mom, and my stomach hurt with how much I missed her. But Alicia gave me a small smile that was oddly reassuring.
“Don’t worry about that, sweetheart. I’ll keep it as quiet as I can. And you don’t have to tell anyone unless you want to.”
“Thanks,” I whispered and then clammed up again. I had no words.
Now that the rage had calmed down and the fear was gone, another emotion swirled around inside me.
Guilt. It was slowly killing me that I hadn’t saved my mom.
But there was something else. Something I had no idea what to call. It was eating a hole in my stomach, and no matter what I did, it just wouldn’t go away. It scared me, but in a different way than how I had been scared of my dad. It made me scared of … me.
The sound of a door opening had my head snapping in that direction. I sucked in a sharp breath when a little ghostlike figure tiptoed into my new bedroom. From the glow of the moon through the window, I saw long, blond hair and a beautiful little face. She was wearing a long, white nightgown and holding a stuffed bunny close with one arm while carrying a bowl of something in her other hand.
Kassa.
Alicia had adopted her and her brother, Jace. She was only seven, and her brother was eleven. I had seen him around school but had never talked to him since he was in a grade below me. They hadn’t been at my mother’s funeral that afternoon, but I was glad for that. I didn’t want anyone to know the truth about my mom and dad. Didn’t want them to think I could turn into a monster just like my old man—even though that was what I was afraid of.
As soon as I set eyes on the little girl, she smiled so trustingly up at me. It felt like something inside me was being calmed. I didn’t understand it, but after the craziness of the past week, I kind of liked it. That fear I had of myself—it wasn’t there when she smiled at me like that.
“Grayson?” Kassa’s soft voice called out to me as she slowly crossed to my bed. “Are you awake?”
“I’m awake. What are you doing, little girl? You should be asleep.”