“YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELF, EMILY,” My Mother Said After Watching My Father Beat Me at Thanksgiving Dinner, Never Realizing Her Six Words Would Be the Last She Ever Got to Say to the Daughter Who Kept Their Family Afloat. / Chapter 160 / 161

Chapter 160 - The Six Words Revisited

Sarah lunged from the floor, the silver knife flashing in an upward arc meant to sever my femoral artery.

I caught her wrist with both hands, twisting the joint backward with a brutal torque that popped the radius out of its alignment. The knife dropped, ringing like a tiny bell against the white oak.

She headbutted me.

The impact drove my nose into my skull, a blinding sheet of pain that threatened to knock me unconscious. But I held on. I wrapped my arms around her neck, dragging her down into the broken crystal, our bodies slamming against the wood in a tangled mass of gray wool, sweat, and blood.

Above us, the ceiling speakers continued their mechanical recitation:

*“You brought this on yourself, Emily.”*

"Shut it off!" Sarah snarled, her perfect mask finally slipping. Her teeth were crimson with blood from her lacerated tongue. Her fingers clawed at my eyes, digging into my skin with desperate, manic fury. "Shut it off! You were supposed to die here! You're the decoy! You were always the decoy!"

"I was the check that cleared," I snarled back, driving my elbow into the side of her neck, pinning her down against the dark stain on the floorboards. "I paid every debt your makers incurred. I sat at that table while they bled me, and I took every single hit so that when I finally stood up, nothing on earth could bring me back down."

She fought with the ferocity of a wild animal, her nails tearing open my cheek, her heels drumming against the oak. She was stronger than me—genetically cleaner, faster, younger. But she had never lost anything. She had never spent a night in a freezing car wondering if she would survive until morning. She had never known the absolute, liberating coldness of realizing that the people who gave you life would gladly watch you die for a tax exemption.

I reached out, my fingers wrapping around the heavy, silver-plated gravy boat that had rolled under Eleanor’s chair.

The same heavy silver vessel my father had thrown at my head before the first kick landed.

I brought it down.

Once.

The crack echoed above the speaker’s loop.

Sarah’s body seized, her eyes rolling back into her head, her fingers going limp against my coat. She didn't die, but the fight left her limbs like water pouring through a sieve. She lay there, trembling on the floor, her chest heaving in shallow, ragged bursts, blood pooling beneath her dark hair, mingling with the old, dark stain on the white oak planks.

Silence fell over the room, broken only by the hiss of the ceiling speakers.

*“You brought this on yourself, Emily.”*

I reached out, picked up my fallen pistol from beside Eleanor’s frozen fingers, raised the barrel, and put a single round through the central speaker grille in the ceiling.

The voice died.

The room returned to the soft, rhythmic crackle of forty dying candles.

Outside the heavy doors, the gunfire had stopped.

Three rhythmic taps sounded against the steel reinforcement. Pause. Two taps.

Vance’s signal.

I dragged myself to my feet, my ribs grating against each other with a sickening friction. My suit was shredded, soaked in a mixture of my blood, Sarah’s blood, and melted candle wax.