I'd Kill You First: when bad meets bad

Chap. 53

KEENON:

My family had so many questions and worries and concerns, and I honestly didn't know what to say. I was speechless.

Soda was gone.

And I was safe.

That was what I wanted.

So why did it hurt?

I told her I wanted her dead, and to die knowing I hated her. I could never unsay those words. Ever.

But I wouldn't take them back anyway. I loved her at one point in my life, but that's all it was. A stage.

Twenty years from now, when I have a big family and kids, I will look back on this year of my life and marvel at the craziness of what happened to me. I will reminisce my badass days. And I will remember the girl I fell in love with. The girl that got people killed. The girl that radiated trouble. The girl that left me because she loved me.

I would remember, but I would not regret. I would not regret loving her. I would only wonder 'what if'? What if no bad guys had come along? What if no one had died?

I would never know. 

So two hours later, with a numb heart and heavy footsteps, I escaped my mother and climbed the steps to my room. My beaten body ached and my bashed head throbbed. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought about what I would do now.

I had no idea. I had a fresh start. I could literally do anything.

Then I saw it. A white envelop resting neatly on my bedside table, and at the sight of it, my heart began to hammer. A gun lay next to the paper, and I automatically knew who it was from.

On shaky legs, I stood and went to the table, retrieving the left items and stumbling back to my bed where I sat for the next twenty minutes in troubled silence.

Should I open it? Leave it alone? Was I better off not knowing what was in this envelop?

Before I could make up my mind, my fingers decided for me as they slid the flap open and pulled out three sheets of paper with neat and beautiful handwriting. I had never seen Soda's handwriting before.

I took the biggest breath of my life.

And I began to read...

{To Keenon, The One I fell for.

    Words cannot describe how I feel about what has happened to you and your loved ones. I take full responsibility for everything that happened, so you have no reason to ever blame yourself.

    This letter is not to get you to chase after me. It is not to profess my undying love for you. It is not to win you back. It is not to make excuses for myself, by any means. This letter is meant to tell you everything you always wanted to know.

    I owe you that.

So I will start from the beginning...

    My father was amazing. For the first six years of my life, he came home from work and I would run to his open arms. I loved him, and he loved me. But something went wrong close to my seventh birthday. To this day I don't know what happened, but my father went insane.

We tried to help him, of course, but nothing seemed to work. Soon, he began to be abusive. My older brothers left the house regularly, never coming home, and leaving me trapped in a house with a mad man and a mother that was afraid of him.

I loved my momma so much. She was my everything, and I was hers. But my father beat her every single day, and he broke her inside and out. He wouldn't let us leave, wouldn't stop. He violated me and beat me and locked me in closets and strangled me and even hung me from a ceiling fan. He truly went crazy. But with the mind of a child, all I could see was the father I always loved, so I stayed with him. I took care of momma and tried to clean up after dad smashed the house up. I loved Brody when he came home sometimes, but I never saw Trace much. They contributed to the verbal beatings often, and I don't know why they hated me. I never got to ask them.