Chapter Text
You only meant to shoot him once.
But once turned into twice, then three times, until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and your mother stopped screaming. The silence after was worse than the noise— thick, heavy, like the air had been soaked in blood.
The gun slipped from your hand. You stared at it, not shaking, not crying— just waiting. For sirens, maybe. Or for the floor to split open and swallow you whole.
When the cops came, they found you sitting at the kitchen table, wrists raw from old bruises, blood drying on your collar. You didn't run. You didn't lie.
What was there to lie about?
The judge called it a tragedy. The papers called you a monster. The state called it second-degree murder and shipped you off to a place with concrete beds and fluorescent lights that never turned off.
Juvenile detention in the middle of New Mexico was a box full of broken girls, all teeth and claws. You learned fast not to cry, not to flinch, and never—never—to look afraid.
The first night, someone tried to jump you in the showers. You left the girl with a split lip and a chipped tooth. The guards dragged you to solitary, and you smiled the whole time.
Three years after that. Three years of counting days by tally marks carved into the metal frame of your bunk, of learning how to take a punch and throw one harder. Three years of hearing the warden's mutt bark outside your cell like it could smell the violence in your bones.
When you finally killed the dog, it wasn't out of spite. It was instinct.
Escape came after, like it always does— on the heels of something unforgivable.
You didn't have a plan. Just blood under your nails, a stolen switchblade in your boot, and enough adrenaline to outrun God.
The desert night swallowed you whole. No guards. No dogs. No fences tall enough to hold you anymore.
You caught your first ever freight train two towns over— hitching a ride in an open boxcar with nothing but dust, rust, and a runaway boy who offered you half a sandwich and never asked your name.
That became the rhythm: hop a train, stay ahead of the questions.
In Amarillo, you hustled pool in a smoky bar with a fake ID and dead eyes. In Tulsa, you picked pockets at bus stops and pawned wedding rings you never asked about. Chicago was cold, cruel, and full of fences to climb and alleys to disappear into.
Every city had a new alias. Every night was a coin flip between a place to sleep and a reason to keep moving.
But you were free.
And freedom, even the kind soaked in stolen whiskey and sleepless nights, was better than a cage.