IVY'S POV
I could not process what had just happened.
For as long as I could remember, I had hated him.
Not in the quiet, distant way children sometimes resent their parents but in something sharper, something that had grown slowly over years of bruises, punishments, and words that cut deeper than any blade.
There had been nights I lay awake imagining what it would feel like if he simply… stopped existing. If the house fell silent without his voice. If the fear that followed me everywhere finally had nowhere to come from.
I had wished him dead more times than I could count.
And yet the moment replayed in fractured pieces that refused to settle into anything I could fully understand. My hands around his throat. The resistance of his skin beneath my fingers. The way his body had gone still.
He looked so small and shocked in that moment.
That was the part that clung to me, that refused to fade.
