"You gonna shoot me?" Reeve Magnusson threw back the remainder of his whisky, swallowing and making a bitter face which found its origins more in the pain of a life lived hard of his own volition than could ever be made by swallowing liquor. "Name a point of my life I don't deserve to be shot for the least I've done."
"You insulted my sister..." Aja spoke for the first time since she'd entered the property. Her grip firmed on the large pistol, and she knew that despite intending to show her determination she'd just revealed her indeterminate mind. She was becoming less convinced by the second, but by the second she knew that she could not kill this arrogant man, her mirror image.
Reeve nodded, facing her, ready to die. He'd consumed enough whisky that he was ready, or so Aja felt. "Kill me. I wouldn't blame you. I've lived a thousand times more than you'd care to even know." He didn't step forward, but he was poised as though he were about to. "C'mon. I'm literally at the kinda range that if I wanted, I could swat the gun outta your hand." He didn't. His hand remained on the glass. When finally he nodded, he turned away. "Just put me outta my misery and go. I've had enough."
"Argh!" Aja raised the weapon near her temple, using that hand, still clutching the weapon, to clear her thoughts as though it were empty. "Stop!"
"What?"
"You're screwing with the minds of people I care about!" Aja pressed the Colt to Magnusson's temple. Magnusson, who had initially drawn away, stiffened his determined jaw. "You just let your lip flap like you're some freaking kid!"
"Yeah. I do that." Magnusson said nothing. Suddenly his eye met the eastern horizon, and his eye wet as though he were begging some Saint for some gift he knew he could not receive. "I do it for me, though, Aja. I do it because I don't have anything else." He gestured at the kitchen, at the house, at the estate he'd built. "You know what this is? All this? It's the work of a soul that's worse than anything you could imagine. Yeah, maybe it's hard work. Sure, maybe it's talent. But it's the work of someone who's so much more worse than you could understand, and that soul that's so broken, it's just got a pistol pointed at my head. And I wouldn't lift a finger to stop her at this point."
Roaring in frustration, Aja lifted the .44 ACP, the relic of the Second World War, and fired directly past his ear. He staggered at first, raising his hand to the now-bleeding eardrum, but she swept the smoking muzzle past him, despite his secondhand attempt to grasp it. Staring at the smouldering gun, Aja felt her eye widen. She was going to that length to defend her sisters. She trembled as though from some demented, Poe-inspired palsy, not at first realising that she had become the first of several madmen in a madmen-run madhouse.