Marty screamed and frantically swiped at his face with his hands. His face was steaming.
Vincent was groaning and rubbing his head with the heel of his palm. His hands were mangled, his thumbs twisted inward. That’s when I realized what happened.
The two loud cracking sounds I heard were from Vincent breaking his own thumbs to escape his handcuffs.
I rushed over to Vincent to try to help him up. He was dazed and couldn’t stand up on his own. I hooked my arms beneath his shoulders and tried to drag him to the apartment door but it was difficult to move him. He’s so damn heavy. I thought about escaping just by myself but I knew I couldn’t leave Vincent alone with Marty. Not like this. By the time I came back with the police, Vincent would probably be dead.
Marty blindly reached in front of him, knocking over a jar of sugar and a spice rack on the kitchen counter. White dust and parsley spilled across the counter and the kitchen tile. I’d dragged Vincent a foot when Marty found a towel hanging from the oven. He wiped his face vigorously and opened his eyes.
Before I could react, Marty lunged at us, landing on top of Vincent. I fell backward and smashed into a kitchen table chair.
“You bastard!” Marty cried as he began wailing on Vincent.
Vincent snapped out of his daze and raised his arms to shield his face, shifting his head from side to side to avoid a direct blow.
Frantic, I stumbled to my feet and picked up the kitchen chair with both hands, raising it over my head. Marty leaped from Vincent and rushed me. He swatted the chair out of my hands, making it crash across the kitchen table into the corner. “Don’t fight me, Kristen!” he shouted. “I don’t want to hurt you.” Then he shoved me away. I toppled over the coat rack and into the pile of shoes.
Sprawled over a bed of flats and heels, I spotted the a silver object lying beside the couch. The pistol. It must’ve flown out of Marty’s hand when Vincent tackled him. Crawling on my hands and knees across the sea of footwear, I neared the couch and reached for the gun.
The sound of a punch landing on flesh and the sound of a male voice groaning in pain made me realize Marty had mounted Vincent again and was attacking him.
I picked up the gun with shaky hands.
“Stop it or I’ll shoot!” I screamed.
Marty continued pounding and shouting at Vincent. He wasn’t listening.
“I said stop!” I shook the gun in their direction, but neither of them seemed to hear me. I’d never fired a gun before but I knew how to pull a trigger.
Fearing Marty was going to kill Vincent, I fired a round at the kitchen wall. The sound was almost deafening. The force from the recoil was stronger than I’d expected and I staggered backward, tripping over the coffee table and landing on top of it. The glass shattered under my weight. The back of my head hit something hard. Was it the ground? The broken frame of the table? I laid on a bed of broken shards, the air knocked from my lungs.
The last thing I remembered before blacking out was that the unexpected weight of the gun combined with the shakiness of my hands made the barrel shift downward the moment I pulled the trigger.
The gun had been aimed at Vincent and Marty.
Chapter Eleven
Vincent
Six years prior
My fist was throbbing. I successfully fought the urge to look at it, but I knew it was fucked up from how bad Jim’s face had been. Once he was awake, he was going to have some decisions to make about how to fix his features. That nose would never be the same.
I held Giselle as she cried in the same living room our parents had once held us. Even though they were gone, it was still our home.
“You’re going to be okay,” I said. “I’m going to take care of us.”
“Vincent, look at your hand! I’m so sorry,” Giselle cried.
It killed me to hear her feel guilty about what had happened to her. As much as my fist hurt, I put the pain to the side. “Stop it, Giselle. You don’t have to be sorry about anything. What that bastard did to you wasn’t your fault.”
She shook her head. “I should have handled it myself. I should have gotten out as soon as it started. I don’t know how I let it keep happening.”
“It’s not your fault, and it’s over now.” I squeezed her tighter as she sobbed into my shoulder. It was over. That was the only thing that mattered at that moment.
“What if he does come back?” she choked out.
My jaw clenched. She didn’t want to know the honest answer to that question. “He won’t. If he does, I promise you he’ll regret it for every second of the rest of his life.”
She stopped crying for a moment and pulled back to look at me. “Vincent, you can’t always be around. You have your company to worry about.”