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"Goodnight, love."
Her eyes closed and that was it.
Her screams were always going to haunt him, echoing in the back of his mind, taking him back to that dark corner of the prison with the blood. His baby sister didn't start crying until they left.
For the tortuous minutes after the screaming stopped, he was surrounded in silence. It felt more like static though, an impenetrable wall of white through which he couldn't feel a thing.
So he didn't feel anything when he shot her.
Or maybe that was a lie. He was feeling so much, too much, that it felt like nothing at all.
There isn't much to prepare one for killing a parent.
"Goodnight, love."
The last words that left her mouth, her last coherent breath of air.
It was what she always said to him before the lights turned off and sleep received him in it's warm embrace. That was before the world fell.
She stopped saying it somewhere between the roaring fire of the farm, and the long nights of eating squirrels on the road.
There was a part of him that hated her for it.
But a bigger part hated himself.
He had been the one to pull away, to distance himself from her for a past mistake that she most obviously regretted. He was angry not for himself, but for his dad.
And she died thinking he hated her.
That would always be his biggest regret, lingering in the back of his mind with the dark of the prison and the coldness of her hand.