Page 130 of Pucked Around and Found Out

Then I return to the kitchen.

To Masen's body.

I sink down beside him, my back against the cabinet.

The hiss of gas fills the air.

I should leave.

Should run.

But I don't want to.

I'm so tired.

So tired of fighting.

So tired of everyone hurting me.

My hand goes to my stomach.

“I'm sorry,” I whisper to the baby. “He wanted to kill you to hurt your father. And she wanted to kill you to hurt everyone. I couldn't let them. But now... now I just want it all to stop.”

The lighter sits heavy in my hand.

One flick and it's over.

I close my eyes.

Take a breath of gas-laden air.

And flick the lighter.

The fire moves faster than I expected.

I have never set fire to anything before tonight and I didn't know that it would be beautiful. That is the word that arrives and I hate it and it is true, the way the accelerant trails ignite in sequence, one catching and passing it to the next, a chain of small decisions becoming one large unstoppable thing. The kitchen is illuminated in a second. The walls go orange and then the cabinets catch and the light turns to something rich and unsteady and I sit against the island and watch it spread with my arms around my stomach and my knees pulled in as close as they'll go.

The heat arrives quickly. It should hurt more than it does.

I think my body understands what I have decided and has made some agreement with the situation, not fighting, not fleeing, just settling. There is a quality to the air that is already changing, the oxygen thinning, replacing itself with something thick and wrong, and I know from the reading I did at Walter House, the months of consuming everything the library had because it was the only place they couldn't touch me, that the smoke will come for me before the flames do. That this is how it works. That the body goes quiet before it goes still.

Good.

Quiet sounds like something I have been chasing for a very long time.

I look at Masen.

The fire is moving toward him. The glow is catching the blood on the floor and turning it colors it shouldn't be. I watch the light move across his face, that still, younger-looking face, and I think about my mother. About the fact that she died in this house too. Not in this kitchen, not by fire, but in a room two floors above me, by a man who is already gone. I think about growing up in a place that was always a ruin waiting to happen, a house built on corruption and violence and the slow grinding certainty that love was conditional and could be withdrawn the moment it cost something.

I chose differently.

That lands with a clarity that surprises me, that through all of it, through every terrible decision and every compromise and every moment I stood in the wrong room with the wrong people, I chose love. I chose it stubbornly, stupidly, past all reason. I chose it for Kenna, for Harper, for Carnage, who has stood by my side. I chose it for a man who couldn't say it back and chose me anyway in every way that wasn't words.

The smoke is thickening.

My lungs are starting to notice.

I tip my head back against the cabinet door and stare at the ceiling through the haze and think about the baby. This is the thing that has been sitting at the back of everything tonight, the thing I have been making decisions around without fully acknowledging it. Every choice I made in this kitchen was the choice of a woman protecting something. Every swing of the skillet. Every shot I fired. Every second I spent clawing at Fiona on the floor.