“I’m sorry, Abel. Maybe it’s just that I’m the new shiny toy at the moment,” I said and knew it wasn’t true, but I was hoping to reach him before this got a lot worse. “You know what it’s like when you get a new plaything, something that interests you and holds your attention for a while.”

“You know…” He tapped the side of his head with the sharp point of the knife. “I thought about that. I’ve spent days in my house thinking those exact words, but here is the thing….” Abel took another step, and I grabbed the statue off the table and took a step away from him. “My brother has never kept anyone longer than seventy-two hours, and he’s had them strapped to the table the whole time. With you, he never put you on the table. Instead, he feeds you and fucks you, and now here you are, wandering his home free as a bird. Naw gurrl, you’re the fox in the hen house.”

I wasn’t sure I’d ever classify Cain as a hen, but I got the analogy. “Why don’t you come back for dinner? I’m making ribs, homemade fries, and corn, and we can discuss this. Abel, you must know if you hurt me, Cain will not just be angry. He won’t forgive you.”

Those red-rimmed eyes held so much anger and hate as he stared at me.

“No, I don’t want dinner. I want him to find you unbreathing and for him to realize who he still is. You’ve fucked with his head. You’ve warped him into this….” He waved the knife around. “Domesticated thing, this lap dog that you control.”

Abel spat on the floor, and my eyes went wide. Cain would kill him for spitting on the floor, let alone insinuating he was being controlled. Add in killing me, and Abel was digging his own grave, but Abel was so angry and hurt that he wasn’t seeing straight. Then again, with a personality like his, did he ever really see straight?

I managed to move to the blank space between the living room and the dining room and waited. My self-defense training was coming back to me, but it was always a harder fight when someone was drunk.

“I’m going to kill you like I killed our mother. It will be a reunion for us, a good old go-back-to-the-beginning reset. He forgave me for killing her, and he’ll do the same now.”

“You’re fooling yourself, Abel. Cain planned on killing your mother, but you took that from him and made a mess he had to clean up, but at least he already wanted her dead. He doesn’t want me dead.”