Page 160 of Shrapnel

Jamie shook his head. “I don’t want to remember.”

Her laugh was horrid. A wheezing hack that expelled blackened flecks of skin from between her white teeth. “You killed me.”

He buried the heels of his hands into his eyes. He didn’t want to do this.

“No,” he mumbled wetly.

“Yes,” she wheezed. “You said he was your first, but that’s not true.”

Jamie couldn’t look at her. But he could feel her. The heat coming off her burnt skin, the saccharine smell of accelerant hidden beneath the stench of roasting skin and hair.

“Admit it,” she demanded.

“I…” he wanted to say he couldn’t remember. That the memories had been locked away behind the walls with all the other things he couldn’t handle. The walls he built the night he looked up into Dominic’s eyes.

Behind the walls he could finally think. He could see his mother’s broken naked body passed out only feet from him. He put his hands around her throat and watched as she twitched, as her body tried to rally through the drugs clogging her system. He had leaned over her face, feeling her spit and snot coat his hand while her breaths grew fainter and fainter. Eventually she fell limp, hands dropping to her side. His mother never even opened her eyes.

“You killed me!” she screeched, her ruined face only inches from Jamie’s. She reached forward with swollen fingers and wrenched his hands from his face.

Jamie stared at her blackened eye sockets. Finally, he nodded.

“I took your life,” he admitted finally. “But Renard killed you.”

She hissed but Jamie shook his head so hard his vision blurred. He held his mother until she stopped breathing, and then like his father, he used fire to clean up his sins. The lighter was just lying beside Renard’s gun. There was no one else around. Jamie had seen his father use fire a thousand times—he always laughed, said it left nothing behind but the ashes.

Jamie lit that shitty duplex on fire. He let the fire soak into the roach invested carpet and let the smoke fill his lungs. It was different from the marijuana and nicotine. This smoke was impenetrable. It made his eyes water and smothered his lungs.

When the fire had consumed his mother’s body, when the hair had fizzled from her head, that’s when he turned to leave. Dominic had begged him not to. But he hadn’t listened to Jamie when he begged him to let him go.

He was done begging.

The gun wasn’t as loud as the sound of the duplex being consumed by the flames.

“I’m sorry,” Jamie whispered, meeting those eyeless sockets. “I tried to save us both.” His voice cracked and he reached for the decrepit creature that had been his mother. “I tried to save us but all I can do is destroy.”

When his arms closed around her, she was gone. He was hugging empty space. The room was bright, dust motes dancing in the sunlight streaming in from the cloudy window.

He dropped to the floor, curling in on himself. He was no longer falling. The aches and pains from his previous beatings returned, blossoming across his skin in pinpricks of increasing severity until he could only breathe shallowly. His lips were dry. He didn’t laugh.

Time passed. Or maybe it didn’t. He might have slept. But he didn’t think so.

Jamie didn’t want to die.

He should. He should want to. To die quietly away from everyone. Away from hurting them. To pass into the void as another nameless victim.

But he wasn’t grateful. He was angry.

Jamie was born fine. An innocent. Life had fucked him. Chucked him into an endless cycle of abuse, then punished him when he tried to claw free. It wasn’t fair. His whole life he had been afraid to take. He had laid down and let them abuse him because he thought it was what he deserved. Because he thought he had no right to stand up.

He pressed his knuckles into the floor and grit his teeth. Fresh pain radiated up his jaw.

Life wanted to make him a nameless victim. But he had a name. Grant had plucked him from the jaws of death and given him a name. Elijah taught him how to smile, how to trust. And Owen had given him his soul back.

Life shouldn’t have given him a reason to fight.

Life shouldn’t have tried to make him a victim.

Because Jamie wasn’t a victim. He was what life made him—a monster.