Sighing, I turned my back on them, meeting my wife’s gaze momentarily. She gave me a small smile of reassurance. It was all I needed.
Turning back around, the dialogue dwindled into a thick silence. Each breath from my family felt like a clock ticking. Their faces were pleading, but I’d already found my resolve.
Fuck them. Fuck them all.
“Time’s up,” I muttered, pulling the gun from my waistband, feeling its familiar weight—cold, but comforting in my grip.
I started with my youngest brother, his eyes wide with terror as I pressed the barrel to his forehead. He wasn’t pleading. He was frozen. He fucking knew. My finger tensed on the trigger.
“For every time you ignored my cries as a child,” I whispered, and his breath shuddered out just as I pulled the trigger.
The shot split the silence. The force knocked his body backward, blood painting the ground behind him, his head lolling at an unnatural angle.
One down.
My next brother, always the smart one, tried to reason even now, “Maverick, please! Don’t do this! We can work this out!”
“Intelligence without loyalty is just cunning,” I said coldly, the second shot resonating like thunder. My hand didn’t shake; if anything, it felt steadier with each pull of the trigger.
By the time I reached my eldest brother, I saw something that resembled respect—or was it resignation?—in his eyes. His wife and kids wouldn’t miss him; they’d live a better life without his abuse. Nevertheless, he met the same fate. “For never being the ally you should’ve been,” I told him as his lifeless body crumpled to the ground.
I stood before my mother then, tears streaming down her cheeks. But there was no maternal love there, not really. I lowered the gun. “Live with this,” I said darkly, sparing her the bullet but condemning her to a lifetime of nightmares by shooting both of her knees.
My father was last. Him, I approached with methodical steps, my heart hammering against my chest. He was the architect of my pain, the one who had orchestrated this betrayal from the start. My body acted with a mind of its own. With every punch I threw, blood splattered, both his and mine, until his features were unrecognizable.
“Should’ve loved me, Dad,” I spat out between gritted teeth, finally stepping back, leaving him gasping in a broken heap. I raised the gun, aiming at what was left of his face, and fired. The blast echoed, a period at the end of a tragic sentence.
“Jesus, Mav!” Paulie’s voice broke through the haze of adrenaline.
But then I looked at my sobbing mother. Her fake fucking tears. Her lack of empathy and compassion. The worst mother on the planet. She hated me, always had. Resented me. Wanted my entire existence to be scrubbed from her life.
And that feeling of her never loving me?
“I changed my mind,” I snapped, not thinking twice about landing a bullet between her eyes. Because fuck that bitch.
Suddenly the gun felt heavier in my hand now, like it had taken on the weight of what I’d done. Of what I’d become. I looked down at them—all of them. Blood pooled at my feet, the air thick with the sharp sting of gunpowder and death. It should’ve felt satisfying.
It didn’t.
It just felt quiet. A different kind of quiet than before. Permanent.
And then, my body gave up before my mind did. I blinked, the room spinning as the wound on my side, forgotten in my rage, pulsed with fresh pain.
“Fuck,” I hissed, my legs giving way beneath me.
“Gotcha,” Sophie’s voice cut through the blur, her arms wrapping around me as she and Paulie hoisted me up. Her touch was fire, somehow igniting a flicker of life in me despite the pain, the bloodstain growing on my shirt the more I pulled at the wound.
“Stay with us, Maverick,” she urged. She was my lifeline as they dragged me from the warehouse. Her concern, coupled with the sharp jabs of pain, barely kept me tethered to consciousness.
“Can’t… pass out…” I mumbled, trying to focus on her face, the one thing in this world that hadn’t betrayed me.
“Damn right, you can’t,” she retorted, her strength surprising as she helped carry my weight. “You’re not leaving me to clean up your messes.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, darling,” I managed, a twisted smirk tugging at my lips as darkness crept at the edges of my vision. Even now, with my family dead behind us, her presence was the only praise I needed, the only affirmation that mattered.
Through the haze in my brain, I felt Sophie’s hold on me tighten.
“I’m right here with you. Like calls to like,” she said, and I huffed out a weak laugh.
