She doesn’t bite. Instead, she grips the back of my head with both hands and crashes our skulls together.

The pain is blinding as everything goes dark for a second. I think I’m screaming. I don’t know. Someone is.

She releases her grip and I roll off, scrambling as fast as my rubbery muscles allow. I look at her and Cora’s grabbing her head, the impact just as debilitating for her.

I look over and see my father standing there, watching us from across the study. His expression hasn’t changed, that perpetual squint locked in place, analyzing us as he would a financial statement. He still has his goddamned drink in his hand.

Then I realize that’s all this is.

This fight. It’s an analysis to him.

Now I understand what all this means to my father. What this point in time represents.

This is a decision being made for him.

If Cora kills me, everything can be laid to blame on awful Rose. They’ll craft a posthumous narrative in which I was the girl who did a terrible thing as a teenager and tried to tell the world about it through her books.

But if I kill Cora, the liability of the family is finally removed. The daughter who can’t control her urges, the girl whose past mistakes were always sure to be revealed will be gone, her terrible acts buried deep along with her.

Either way, my father wins. Which is why he’s standing there, holding his drink, watching his offspring try to annihilate each other.

Logan Yates always wins.

I reach and grab the fallen iron poker, then lift myself up. As I get to my feet, my back is to my father as I face Cora, who scrambles to stand.

I raise the poker over my head, now grasping it with both hands.

Cora gets onto one knee before losing her balance and falling onto her back.

Now’s the moment. She’s vulnerable. I’m not. I have only seconds to make my move, and they might be the only seconds I’ll have.

She’ll kill me if I don’t kill her.

Max. Think about Max. Both parents gone.

Attack, Rose.

Attack with all you have.

And still.

Still, I don’t know how.

Don’t know how to swing this heavy poker and smash it into my sister’s skull. Don’t know how to keep hitting her with it after the initial blow incapacitates her. Over and over, blood spraying, bone crunching, skin and face turning into lifeless goo.

I don’t know how to do that, because I’m not Cora.

I can’t.

I just can’t.

The seconds pass, my body frozen, the poker held high and immobile. Cora manages to get to her feet.

She stares at me, a purple welt rising on her forehead, that toothless grin back in place.

She knows I can’t do it. Knows I’ll never be like her.

Her right hand slides into the back pocket of her jeans, and from it, she pulls out a folded knife. Black rubber grip. Like someone who’s practiced for this very moment a hundred times, she deftly thumbs the three-inch blade from its home.