Page 172 of Kill Feed

But a brutal reminder pulls my attention, and I look up.

I expected the mechanical voice to blast from the speakers. Instead, a woman’s voice fills the room, smooth and unmistakably amused.

“Congratulations, Adrian,” Selene announces, and my stomach drops. “You’ve made it to the finale.”

Chapter 47

Adrian

“You don’t have to be strong all the time, sweetheart. Sometimes letting someone love you is the strongest thing you can do.”

I’ve lost count years ago at just how many times Mom used to say that to me. Even now, I can remember the exact softness in her tone.

I never understood what she meant by it.

At least, not then.

I was young enough to believe that love was something simple, something that belongs in the warm places of the world. It is Mom’s hand ruffling my hair when I came home from school, the smell of roasted veggies drifting through the kitchen, the sound of my sister, Evelynne, laughing from the living room because I’ve agreed, once again, to help her make bracelets.

She spread the contents of a little plastic box across the carpet, and I sat beside her while she sorted through cheap beads in colors so saturated they look almost too artificial beneath the afternoon sun. Pink, turquoise, yellow, purple. Tiny charms and plastic stars scattered between us.

“This one,” she said, holding up a ridiculous little heart.

I would stare at it and call it ugly. Not that it stopped her from dragging me into her world of crafts day in and day out.

I would thread it onto the string for her, even though my fingers are too big for the tiny beads and she’d keep correcting me whenever I put them in the wrong order. I don’t particularly care about the jewelry, but she asked me to help, and somehow that has always been enough.

Mom photographed everything.

Even as we sat cross-legged on the carpet. My sister was holding up her finished bracelet to the camera as the sunlight spilled through the windows at just the right angle.

Even as a professional wedding photographer, she spent most days outside among the flowers growing along the fence, camera in hand. She’d photograph rain collecting on leaves, birds perched on telephone wires, down to the butterflies bustling during spring. The ordinary things nobody else seems to notice.

Whenever she catches me watching her through the camera, she lowers it just enough to smile.

“Look,” she would say, turning the screen toward me. “Do you see what I see?”

I’d look and see mere objects, but eventually, I started to understand.

I started to notice the way light settles against someone’s face. The way a shadow can change the shape of a room. How something ordinary can become beautiful simply because you changed the angle.

Back then, there was always sunlight. Rays of light that seemed so precious and vulnerable.

It pours through my mother no matter the weather. A light so graceful it turned the beads in my sister’s hands into a kaleidoscope of color and caught in the camera lens.

But the sun always settled, darkened by the shadows my father dragged with him wherever he’d go. Followed by screaming and scolding and throwing whatever object he could get his hands on, and all I could ever do was hold my sister as she sobbed, shielding her eyes as Mom stood between us, taking every fucking blow.

Even when bruises bloomed across her arms and cheekbones, she’d still smile at Evelynne and me as though she could somehow pour enough love into us to keep the darkness from reaching. I clung to that light with everything I had, desperate to believe that if I stayed close enough to it, I could keep it alive.

I swallowed every word my father said, every time I should have stood between them, every moment when I should have fought back. I told myself that enduring it made me strong, when all it really did was teach me to be useless.

And when I finally lost Evelynne and Mom to my father’s wrath, there was only one explanation I could give myself.

I was weak.

I was so fucking weak.

And now here I am, standing in a death game as floodlights fill my vision, distorting reality as I fight my aching and weak body to cooperate before those in control fuck me over a second time.