I was nineteen when I pulled the trigger on my father.

  His hands were already on my throat when the thought finished forming.

  The living room lights swam in and out of focus as his fingers dug into the soft places beneath my jaw. I tried to pull them away, but his grip was iron, thick cords of muscle standing out in his forearms as he squeezed. The result of a lifetime of hard work, hate, and steroids. His breath washed over my face, sour and hot, carrying all the old rage I had known since childhood.

  Blackness crept in at the edges of my vision. The world narrowed to the pounding in my ears and the pressure crushing my windpipe. My feet scraped uselessly against the carpet as he forced me back against the wall.

  I remembered that I was a terrible shot.

  Any time my cousins took me shooting, I couldn’t hit a thing. Soda cans at twenty yards might as well have been ghosts. They’d tell me to stop anticipating the kick, to squeeze the trigger instead of yanking it, but the gun always jumped in my hands like it was alive, and the target always stayed untouched.

  But my father's temple was inches from my face, a flat, pale patch of skin above his cheekbone, adorned with salt and pepper sideburns. A bead of sweat slid down from his receding hairline.

  Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard creaked. My sister, maybe, frozen in her room. My mother’s voice echoed faintly from the kitchen, calling his name, already too late.

  I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t known where he kept the gun.

  The sock drawer. Second from the top. A nine millimeter hidden away, but not locked. Easy access if a prowler ever came to the house.

  I had taken it before I came downstairs, ready for the confrontation for sins I'd committed six years prior. My deception. The day that my sister was violated, and I, in my foolishness, kept the matter quiet. When she told me he knew, I realized I had very little chance to escape with my life. I’d slid the weapon into the back of my jeans, my hands shaking so badly I could barely pull the drawer shut again.

  Now the cold iron pressed against my spine, suddenly heavier than anything I’d ever carried.

  His grip tightened.

  The pressure was too much. My fingers went numb. My lungs burned.

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  My frightened fingers found the gun.

  It came up between us in a blur of panic and instinct.

  His eyes widened, and when I think back to the look on his face all I can see is a terrified child. A moment where he finally felt what he'd made me endure my whole life.

  The bang was deafening in the small room, a sharp crack that split the air. Something wet and warm sprayed across my face, and his hands loosened and slid away from my throat. I took in deep breaths, the air both sharp as razor blades and yet welcome in my throat.

  He collapsed in front of me, his weight hitting the floor with a dull, final thud.

  The smell of burned powder and copper filled the air. My ears rang. I stood there, gasping.

  My mother screamed.

  I turned and saw her in the doorway, one hand clamped over her mouth. Red speckled her cheek and blouse. Remains of the man she once swore to love the rest of her life.

  Til death do us part, right?

  She didn’t move toward him. She didn’t move toward me. She just stared, eyes wide and empty, as if she'd glimpsed Medusa's face and turned to stone.

  From upstairs came the sound of a door slamming shut.

  I waited for someone to tell me what to do. For a voice to cut through the madness and give me instructions. For my mother to grab the phone and call the cops. For anything.

  Nothing happened.

  The gun was still in my hand. I became aware of it the way you become aware of pain after an accident. Suddenly, horribly. My fingers were locked around the grip, my knuckles white, my whole body trembling.

  Dread rolled in, thick and suffocating.

  Even now, part of me knew what had happened would be called self-defense. A man strangling his own son. A gun fired in desperation. The law would have seen it.

  But fear doesn’t listen to reason. I had sought the weapon before the shouting began. Perhaps the jury would see "pre-meditated murder" in that simple choice.

  Fear had been my constant companion for as long as I could remember. Fear taught me to lie, to hide, and to run. Fear taught me that no one was coming to save me. Not teachers. Not neighbors. Not family. Not the people whose job it was to protect. Father is the first protector, and nigh every time he grew furious with me he said he was going to kill me.

  So when I finally moved, it wasn’t toward the phone.

  It was toward the door.

  I stumbled outside into the cold night air, the house behind me still glowing with yellow light. With one pull of a trigger, I'd transformed my childhood home into a mausoleum.

  I got in my car.

  I don’t remember backing out of the driveway. I don’t remember turning onto the road. I only remember driving, faster and faster, the headlights carving tunnels through the blackness as mile after mile disappeared behind me.

  Family. Girlfriend. Job. School. All of it fell away as if it had never been real. Vincent Castle was as dead as his sire. Shadows of mountains enveloped me as I fled into the passes between them.

  The gun lay on the passenger seat beside me, like one of those friends whom you know is a bad influence. The sort that reminds you of the terrible things you did together, and begs you to do it again. No different from the boy who violated my sister.

  Guilt snaked its way around my throat like a noose, threatening to finish what my father started in that living room.

  I didn’t know where I was going. A new life under a new name, perhaps? Or would the firearm's cold kiss be the only relief waiting for me? All I could do was put as much distance between myself and the scene of the crime as possible.