Cold-Blooded Beautiful by Christine Zolendz

the crimson spray of his suffering.  I wanted to burn her name across his forehead and watch it bubble and hiss with the blistering flames.  I wanted justice.  Revenge.
    When my eyes became focused, and my breathing slowed, there was broken glass and furniture littered all over the room.  The curtains were torn off the windows and my extremely large couch had been thrown right through it. Giant shards of glass were sticking out of the leather, and a cold wind drifted in from the other side.  My desk chair was dangling by a wire in my flat screen television that had a brilliant desk-chair-sized-hole in the middle of it.  The chair twirled and swayed in the breeze.  I don’t think I’ll be stopping my therapy anytime soon .
    Opening the door, I stumbled out into the hallway, and fell into the kitchen.  My hands were a bloody mess and my throat was scorched dry.  It was three o’clock in the morning and Jen was in the kitchen, holding one of my steak knives, shaking and crying.  The blade of the knife glimmered and trembled harshly with the vibrations of her fear.  “If you touched her, hurt her in any way, I will gut you,” she warned.
    “With a fucking steak knife?” I laughed, dryly.
    Violently trembling hands held the knife out threateningly.  “Where is Samantha?”
    Before I could answer, Dylan rushed through the door with a crowbar and a baseball bat. “I got the crowbar, come on!”  When he saw me standing there, he froze, and held the bat out towards me, another person, threatening me, this time with a blunt object.  They’re acting like this from what they heard, imagine what they’ll do when they see the fucking den.  I don’t care; it’s my damn house .
    “Sam is taking a bath.  I got a bit self-destructive, but I’m sorted out now and did a bit of redecorating in the den, and… ” I looked directly at Jen and tried to give her some sort of reassuring smile while climbing to my feet,  “I would never lay a hand on her in violence, not in the way that David did.  So put your weapons down, and really, Dylan?  A baseball bat?  I have five different licensed firearms in this house and you went for the bat?  Seriously, if you thought I was hurting her, you bloody call 911!”
    Jen dropped the steak knife into the sink and slumped down onto the floor, Dylan was next to her instantly, pulling her into his arms.  Oh, get a freaking room .
    “You were screaming and there was glass breaking and I thought…” Jen stammered, tears falling down her face.
    I raked my hands through my hair. They came back drenched with my own sweat, and I shivered.  “Look…Sam told me about…about…losing the baby, about David putting a gun to her head, knocking her out and the branding.  I just ran her a bath, closed the door behind me, and lost it.  That man does not deserve to breathe,” I said, with an eerie calmness as I began pulling paper towels off the roll and patting at my mangled hands.
    Dylan rubbed his hands over his face, “Wait, what?  She had a miscarriage and her husband got angry with her ?” 
    Wiping the tears away with the sleeves of her shirt, Jen stood up slowly and leaned against the counter for support, “No, Dylan.  Samantha didn’t have a miscarriage.  That bastard gave her an injection of a combination of Digoxin and Potassium Chloride.  When you inject it into the heart of a fetus, it assures no chance of a live birth, and the death of the fetus is immediate.  It’s how they administer late term abortions due to fetal anomaly.”  Streams of tears poured down her face, and she gave up on wiping them away.  “Kade, that was just the beginning.  He had her tied down to their bed.  He gained control of everything after her mock miscarriage .  She wasn’t dealing with a normal man.  He was a psychopath, precise, and vicious.  He put on a brilliant show for everyone and she was the starring puppet.”
    “Bloody hell,” Dylan whispered.
    Me.  I said