Page 39 of Twice as Twisted

“What the fuck?” Duke barks, stopping midstride.

“Take the gun out of your pussy,” I command, my voice sharp. Not a sentence I expected to utter today, but as always, Mabel manages to surprise me in delightful new ways. This time, though, it’s not as enjoyable. I need her alive too—badly.

She shakes her pigtails into place. “What, you can do it to me, but I can’t do it to myself?”

“You’re cheating,” Duke protests, oblivious to the danger as usual. “You can’t destroy our prize. Only we can do that.”

For someone with normal human emotion, he’s exceptionally bad at reading them when he switches into his demon mode. Since learning this about him, I’ve used it to my advantage, but now it could ruin everything.

“We don’t want to destroy you,” I say to Mabel. “We already did that. Like you said, we succeeded. You’re no longer our enemy to defeat. You’re our prize to treasure and enjoy.”

“I’d rather die.”

Her shoulder moves, and there’s a muffled click, hollow and shocking in the silence of the freezer.

“No,” Duke shouts, falling to his knees.

Mabel gasps, her eyes locked on mine, her breath fogging from her lips, as if her own recklessness shocked her. She looks stunned, and for one horrible second, some irrational part of me is afraid there’s a bullet lodged inside her that I can’t see. A cold panic claws at me, and I want to rush to her, to lay her down and dig it out with my bare hands, to keep it from being real.

“Fine, you want me to say you won?” she asks in a rush, pulling the gun out and spinning the cylinder again. “You won. Last time, I lost, because I wanted you to like me. This time, I want you to hate me. So I’ll ask you this one time. Are you sure you want to play again?”

She shoves the gun back into herself, glaring at me with a defiance that is beyond anything she’s ever shown before. She’s not just defying me this time. She’s defying death.

“No,” Duke chokes out like a sob. “Don’t shoot again.”

“Why not?” she asks. “I’m playing fair. I spun again. There’s one empty chamber. I’m not playing a countdown to death. Maybe I’ll get lucky again this time.”

“You won’t,” Duke protests, his voice ragged with anguish. “It’s impossible.”

I don’t point out that it’s no more impossible than last time. Her odds are one in six every time. But that’s far too low, when my brother is already at rock bottom.

Another cold feeling takes hold of me, this one calm where the last was panicked. She is mine. If she’s going to die, it will be at my hand. She does not get to destroy my property. To take my kill.

She already tried, when she jumped off that bridge. She tried to take my kill, and it’s not hers to take. It’smine.

I calculate the distance between us, then shift my weight sideways.

“Please,” Duke sobs, dropping his head toward the floor. “Mabel, please.”

In the second when her gaze moves to him, I leap.

Everything happens so fast that I can’t tell the sequence of events.

I crash into her.

A shot echoes around the freezer, deafening in the small metal room.

She flies backwards, her arms shooting out to either side as she smashes into the shelves.

I pin her wrist to the metal edge of one and wrench the gun from her hand.

Her body crumples to the floor.

Behind me, Duke makes the sound of a dying animal.

My brain sequences the events in order, though some happened simultaneously, and then it’s over, and all that remains are echoes—the gunshot, the metal shelving, my brother.

I turn, my whole body gripped in a cold dread, sure I don’t want to see what waits. If she shot him…

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