Emily woke to the smell of bacon burning and the sound of screaming from two floors below. Grabbing her robe, she put it on as she ran down the stairs.

"Didn't I tell you to get your daughter to sign the house over to us? It's all her damn fault I spent the last few weeks cooling my heels in jail! Do you know what that's like? She thinks she can keep me out of my home? She's got another think coming, the worthless bitch!"

A sound of a fist hitting flesh and her mother's moan punctuated his previous comment.

Emily entered the kitchen to see her stepfather bending over her mother who lay slumped on the floor. Reaching for the first thing she saw, she grabbed the cast iron frying pan off the stove.

She never felt the hot metal handle searing her hands, nor the grease flying out of the pan as she raised it over her head and brought it down on the back of Nick's head. As he turned, a glazed look on his red and raging face, she swung the pan again.

"You God-damned son of a bitch! Leave my mother alone!"

Years of frustration, fear and anger let loose as the skillet connected again. Yet he didn't go down until he stepped in the bacon grease splattered on the floor. When he fell, his head hit the granite counter top and he went down.

Emily brought the pan down again; fear that he might get up kept her watching him for any sign of movement until she saw the blood seeping from the back of his head spreading out over the clean white tiles of the kitchen floor. Dropping the pan, and running to her mother, she noticed the way her mother sprawled on the floor, her neck bent at an impossible angle.