I couldn’t. I was the only thing stopping him.
I’d been watching him closely, knowing it was going to happen again. The clock had been reset weeks ago with his last violent explosion. I still didn’t have full range of motion back in my shoulder, and my mother had a new scar at the corner of her mouth. She was wasting away before my eyes as if she were erasing herself from reality.
I’d wanted to hurt him that time. Not just stop him but really hurt him that time. I’d wanted to show him what it felt like.
But I’d held myself back. Barely. I’d thought of Mr. Walton and the chessboard as red had bled in on the edges of my vision. Sometimes the best offense is a good defense.
So I’d defended. And then he’d been fine. But I knew he couldn’t stay good for long. The man was a ticking time bomb.
I knew better, yet I’d still fallen asleep. It was my fucking fault.
I flew down the stairs as the sounds of fist against flesh, the dull thud of a body crumpling, and alcohol-fueled shouts tore through the house.
I found them in the living room. He stood over her, right hand clenched in an angry fist. Bicep bulging. Jaw clenched from the rage that ruled him. He’d put on weight while my mother had lost it. Almost as if he were sucking the life out of her like one of those vampires in the books Sloane was obsessed with now.
“I’m sorry,” Mom whispered brokenly. She was crumpled against the baseboard. Blood from her face smeared the drywall and floor. It soaked into the T-shirt that hung limply off her bony shoulders.
He kicked her viciously in the ribs.
“Stop!” The command ripped its way out of my throat.
He turned to stare at me with those dead, bloodshot eyes.
“It’s the booze,” he’d say after he’d sobered up. After Mom had bandaged the knuckles he’d bloodied on us. “It won’t happen again.”
I hated him. In that moment, time froze, and I was so overwhelmed with hate that my knees threatened to buckle.
“What did you say to me?” he demanded. The words were precise and loaded. He didn’t slur when he drank. Everything just got sharper, meaner.
“I said stop,” I repeated as that familiar haze of red began to appear. My heartbeat thumped at the base of my skull, and I reveled in the adrenaline that dumped into my bloodstream.
“Lucian, go,” Mom pleaded, now on her hands and knees.
He kicked her again without even looking at her. The blow of his boot knocked her back to the floor where she curled into a ball, whimpering.
That was when I saw it. The long, jagged cut on her forearm. The glint of metal in his left hand.
“You don’t ever raise your fucking voice to me in my fucking house, boy,” he said.
My eyes were fixed on the knife I’d washed and stowed in the block on the kitchen counter. There was blood on the blade. He’d cut her. And now he was brandishing it at me.
“Fuck you!” I shouted. The snap in my head was like a rubber band breaking. I wasn’t the dutiful teenage son anymore. I wasn’t the peacekeeper or the protector. I was him.
A fury like nothing I’d ever felt before propelled me across the room. My hands fisted in his sweaty T-shirt. They looked like his. Big, bruising, capable of destruction.
It stuck in my head, lodged there like a jagged stone.
He seemed distantly surprised. Because I knew my place. I didn’t fight back. But tonight I did. Tonight it ended before he ended one of us.
I used his surprise to my advantage and threw him bodily into the wall he’d pinned me and my mother against countless times. My fist flew and connected with his concrete jaw. Pain exploded distantly. I could hear my mother screaming from far away.
He was shouting now. Horrible, disgusting abuse. The kinds of things you saved up for the enemy who took everything from you. Not the son who’d once only wanted to make you proud.
He slashed at me with the blade. But I felt nothing except a burning anger that would never be quenched. A need to destroy. It felt so good to finally unleash it all back on him.
Fresh pain fueled me. I snatched the knife out of his hand and threw it to the floor. His fist caught me in the temple, and everything went sideways. But I didn’t crumple. I didn’t fall or beg or cry.
I snapped.
I wouldn’t stop until he fell. Until he begged, he cried.
Like father, like son.
I heard it in my head like a mantra on repeat. Over and over again. Over the faraway sound of breaking glass.
Like father, like son.
Over my mother’s low wail.
Like father, like son.