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She’s eleven feet away. Ten.

The whip is already coming up.

I raise the knife.

I take aim.

The kitchen is very small and very still and the orange halves are sitting on the counter with the juice running down their cut sides, and the rooster mug is sitting there too, and the morning light is coming through the window and it lands on June’s face and she looks young and she looks furious and she looks like the most alive thing I’ve ever seen. Alive and afraid.

Alive. Afraid. Beautiful.

June.

I throw.

The sound it makes when it leaves my hand is a clean, whooshing sound.

And then there is just her scream.

Chapter Ten

June

The knife whistles past my head, and I feel the air move with it.

The blade hits the wall with a solid thunk and stays there, quivering.

He missed.

He missed by at least three feet, maybe four, which is either the best news I’ve gotten in the last twelve hours or the worst, because a miss that wide means either he’s a terrible shot or he wasn’t aiming for me at all, and I don’t have time to figure out which because I’m still moving, still charging, the whip in my hand and my heart hammering so hard it feels like it’s trying to break through my ribs and make a run for it.

But I will not stop. Will not give in. Will not go back to the way things used to be.

New life, new June… even if that means the New June doesn’t get to live very long, at least she dies free.

My bare feet slap against the cheap linoleum and my head is pounding from the wine and the screaming and the adrenaline that’s moving through my blood like liquid fire, and Wraith is just standing there in my tiny kitchen with his hands empty now and that same fucking smile on his face, and I am going to wipe that smile off with this whip if it’s the last thing I do.

Which it might be.

I’m ten feet away. Nine. Eight.

I raise the whip higher, my arm cocking back for the strike, and I’m aiming for his face this time because I am done, I am so completely fucking done with men and knives and smiles and…

Something wet and cold hits me square in the forehead.

Splat.

I stop.

The wet thing slides down my face, over my nose, and drips off my chin in thick, viscous, snotty globs that smell like… egg. Raw egg. The yolk breaks somewhere near my eyebrow and runs into my eye and I have to blink it away, which gives me a blurry, stinging view of Wraith still standing in the kitchen, and he’s holding another egg in his hand, his thumb pressed against the shell like he’s ready to throw it.

“What the fuck?” I say.

He throws it.

This one catches me in the chest, right over my heart, and the shell cracks and the egg explodes against my t-shirt with a sound like a water balloon hitting pavement, and now I’m not just confused, I’m wet and confused, with egg white soaking through the fabric and sticking it to my skin and the yolk sliding down toward my stomach in a slow, disgusting trail that makes my hangover actively worse and gives me the urge to projectile vomit like I’m starring in The Exorcist.

I look down at myself.