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Naomi and Mom were the only two left sitting. I didn’t know how to protect everyone.

“Okay,” Nate said, trying to break free of the hold Xavi had on him. “I’ll go with you. Now. Let’s go.”

“Nate!” Maddox, Xavi, and I all shouted at the same time.

A gun fired.

50

-Devon-

Iwasdeafinone ear.Whywas I deaf in one ear?

Everything happened in slow motion. The gun went off, my hearing went away, and my body crouched, trying to cover both my mom and Maddox. When I blinked, Maddox had his hand around the back of my neck over the top of my mom’s seated body, but my eyes swept the length of Nate. Maddox was fine, but was Nate?

Nate looked shocked, and Xavi’s hands were all over him, feeling for wounds, trying to figure out what the fuck just happened. And then my dad crumpled to his knees, the gun still in his hand and a bloom of red spreading over the material of his grey shirt.

“You always were a bitch,” Dad coughed.

What?

I looked behind me. My mom, who’d had her hand in that damn purse all evening, had a gun in her grip, and her purse was opened to reveal candy wrappers and old lipsticks. My brain tried to tie it all together, butwhat the actual fuck just happened?

“Devon,” Maddox shouted, stealing my dazed attention. “Are you okay?” He spun me, palming my cheeks and checking me over. “Just tell me you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” I whispered, my eyes asking him the same question.

Maddox nodded, and relief brought back a bit of my clarity.

Seth took the gun from my dad as he fell to the deck in a puddle of his own blood. I looked between my dying dad and my murdering mom, but when I met her eyes, she wasn’t a murderer. She was blank. Confused. Still holding a smoking gun.

“Mom?” Nate asked, taking the gun from her hand. “Mom?”

No light of recognition or spark of understanding. No smile on her face or tears in her eyes. She was gone. Her lucid state fled because of a stressful situation, just like Heidi had said. A traumatic event ruptured our moment because, once again, my dad had his timing down to an art.

I stood, not wanting to look at her so empty. Rounding the table with Maddox hot on my heels, I walked over to my dad. Then the anger came.

“How fucking dare you!” I snarled at my dad. “You took her from me. Again!” I gripped the bloody fabric of his shirt and shook the bastard, demanding that he acknowledge me as an adult, a man. But just like my mom’s face, there was nothing on my dad’s either.

I stared at him long and hard, not believing what I was seeing. Nate knelt beside me, smacking my hands out of the way so he could look closer.

Dead. Dead. Dead.

“He’s gone, boys,” Seth said. “I’m… sorry?”

A terrifying huff of crazed laughter came from somewhere. Me. It came from me. Another one bubbled up my throat and joined the first, surprising me and scaring me and making me insane. Dead? After all this? After everything he put us through, all it took was one lucid day on our mom’s part, a purse with candy, lipsticks, and a gun, and she finished a job we couldn’t do ourselves?

Another crazed laugh filled the air, but it came from Nate. He leaned back on his heels, looking as diabolical as I probably did. Then he laughed harder. I didn’t know what we were laughing at, but I had no control over my body. I laughed with him. We laughed so hard it became impossible to stop—not even when the sirens sounded in the distance.

“She did it,” Nate said, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. “She really fucking did it.”

“She shot the bastard,” I laughed with my brother, trying to calm down and feel something for real. Relief and hysteria were a weird combination, but they were all I had at the moment. Maybe it was shock.

“She saved our asses again. In the only way she knew how,” Nate huffed another laugh. Turning to face our blank-eyed mom, he said, “Thank you.”

She didn’t react.

Looking at my dad on the deck, knowing he was actually dead, I stopped laughing.

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