Ruin Me: Krampus

HANNAH

The scent of burnt gunpowder was my favorite perfume, despite my youtube channel blowing up. This smelled like focus, and it was grounding.

I hummed along to the muffled beat of the pop song vibrating through my noise-canceling headphones, the ones I’d customized with holographic star stickers and a tiny glittery cat. To anyone looking through the glass of the range, I probably looked like I was daydreaming about anime and rainbows.

My shoulders were loose, my stance was casual, and my pink-glittered nails were steady as a surgeon’s.

Pop. Pop-pop. Pop.

I squeezed the trigger with a rhythmic ease, the recoil a familiar pulse against my palm. I wasn’t even thinking about the mechanics anymore; it was just muscle memory, a lethal dance I’d practiced all too young, until it was as natural as breathing.

I hit the switch to bring the target back. As the paper whizzed toward me through the dim light of the twenty-five-yard lane, I felt that little spark of bubbly satisfaction. I hadn’t just hit the center. I’d used a dozen rounds to carve a perfect, jagged smiley face right where the target’s heart should be.

“Nice work, Han,” a voice cut through the music.

I slid my headphones down around my neck, the sudden roar of the other shooters in the range filling the air.

My brother, Rohan, was leaning against the booth divider, his arms crossed over his chest and he wasn’t smiling. He never smiled when he watched me shoot.

Once, he’d muttered something about “Instagram influencers shouldn’t be able to do that to a target,” but the joke hadn’t landed. His jaw had stayed tight.

“It’s lopsided,” I chirped, pointing at the smiley face’s left eye. “I think the sight is drifting,” and I wrinkled my nose as I unclipped the paper.

“The sight is fine. You’re just showing off,” Rohan said, his eyes dropping to the target as I waved a hand to clear the haze.

Honestly, I’d much rather be three mimosas deep into a boozy brunch right now, arguing over whether avocado toast was still ‘in’ or if we’d moved on to shakshuka.

To most people, hitting a target at twenty-five yards was an achievement.

To me, it was just another checkbox on the list my brothers had drilled into me since I was eight. Shoot straight, fold the laundry, survive. I’d carved smiley faces into paper hearts before I was allowed to wear lip gloss.

Rohan stepped closer, his voice dropping an octave, losing the playful edge. “You’re still taking it with you this weekend, right? To Oakfalls?”

I felt the sudden urge to fidget.

Turning back to the counter, I busied myself with the slide of my handgun, the cold metal a grounding weight against my mounting defensiveness.

“No, I’m not taking it and yeah, Liam wants me to meet him in Oakfall.”

“Why do you have to go to him? He should come to you.” I could even hear the rest of my brothers; Make him come to you. If he wants you back, he does the work.

“Don’t start.”

“Why there?”

I shrugged. “He’s out there with some friends.”

“Exactly. Secluded and he’s got a gambling problem.”

I blinked. “Since when?”

“I know people who go to the casino.”

“Look, Rohan, I’ve known Liam since I was fourteen.”

Rohan arched an eyebrow, his expression dripping with skepticism. “You can do better than Liam Elliot. A lot better.”

“I know,” I said, my voice softening as I looked down at my pink-glittered nails. “But Mom stayed with Dad after his affair. Things can get better if you work at them.”

Rohan’s stance shifted, becoming predatory and sharp. “You are too much like mom, it hurts to watch. Do you remember what Kavi did to Dad?”

I went still. Rohan’s words pulled the memory up like a bad bruise.

How could I forget? Amar had started it—overheard mom on the phone with her “friend,” and then he confronted dad first. But when Kavi found out… that was the end of any pretense. Kavi didn’t shout. He just moved. Beat Dad until the man stumbled out the door in terror, blood on his shirt.

Amar wasn’t done. He grabbed a bat, followed him to the driveway, and smashed the windshield of Dad’s Rolls-Royce. Glass everywhere. Dad peeled out, tires screeching, but the damage was done—thousands in repairs and a family that didn’t speak to him for weeks.

Mom had begged them to calm down, eventually coaxed Dad back home so they could “work on things.” We still argued about it: Did he return for love, or because he knew crossing any of his sons again would mean disappearing for good?

Rohan met my eyes now, steady and unblinking. “If Liam hurts you like that, Han… he won’t just get bruises.”

I swallowed, which is why I haven’t told him, or any of my brothers what happened. “I know.”

My brothers never bluffed.

I clicked the latches on my gun case, tucked the weapon into its case and clicked the locks shut.

“I don’t condone violence...” Rohan started, his voice trailing off into that dark, suggestive silence he saved for the really bad ideas.

“But you wouldn’t judge me if I put a bullet between his eyes?” I finished for him, half-joking, half-testing.

“No one would ever know,” he said casually, as if we were discussing the weather. “Lure him into the woods, shoot him, and I’ll rent a cabin. I’ll hang him upside down, drain his blood, and cut him into pieces small enough to disappear.”

The words landed like they always did—clean, clinical, almost soothing in their precision.

I stared at my brother, blinking slowly, and the familiar numbness settled in my chest like an old blanket. That was just how his mind worked: calculating, efficient, cold. He was describing how you’d process an animal carcass after a hunt, and to him, a man who betrayed his sister was exactly that: meat.

My stomach didn’t twist. My pulse didn’t spike.

And that was the part that scared me more than the image of Liam strung up and bleeding out.

I swallowed, the metallic tang of gun oil still clinging to my tongue from the range. “You make it sound so easy.”

“It is,” he said, shrugging one shoulder. “We’re animals, Han.”

Animals.

I wanted to laugh it off, to roll my eyes and call him dramatic like I usually did. But the laugh stuck in my throat because for one cold, clear second, I pictured myself holding the knife instead of the gun—steady hands, glitter nails and all—and I didn’t flinch.

I should have flinched.

I didn’t because I thought of Liam. I thought of his chiseled jaw and the way he looked at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.

To Rohan, it was predation; to me, it felt like passion.

It felt normal, strangely where I belonged considering that Liam was an asshole but he was my asshole for as long as I can remember.

“After I visit Liam in Oakfalls I’ll be heading back home,” I insisted, trying to drown out the image of the cabin Rohan just built in my mind. “I won’t say the night.”

“Don’t linger in Oakfalls too long,” Rohan warned. “Those are our old hunting grounds and it’s dangerous out there. They have lots of Grizzly bears, black bears and cougars.”

I raised a suspicious eyebrow, “Cougars?”

“Yeah, they have rocky mountains up there, and don’t get me started on the wolves and the moose. It’s like a whole fucking ecosystem of scary-ass shit,” Rohan said, his voice dropping an octave. “If you see a goat walking on two legs, Han, you don’t stop to ask questions. You just run.”

“I’ll have a priest on speed dial,” I joked, rolling my eyes.

“Call me when you get there. And when you leave.”

I slid the locked case across the counter toward him. Rohan looked at the case, then at me, his expression so grim it felt like a physical weight. I countered it with my brightest, most stubborn influencer smile—the one that usually got me out of trouble and into VIP lounges.

“It’s just a talk, Ro. Stop looking at me like I’m signing my own death warrant.”

“If you don’t answer your phone, I swear to God, Hannah, I’ll come and get you. And it won’t just be me.”

It was the image of all four of my brothers descending on Oakfalls. Poor Liam wouldn’t just have a heart attack; he’d probably shit himself and or evaporate on the spot.

“I’ll answer,” I promised.

Just then, my phone buzzed on the bench and when I checked it, the screen lit up with a string of memes from Kira. She was sending me meme’s of random videos.

As we packed up, the range’s silence pressed in heavier than the gunfire ever had. I glanced back at the target one last time—the jagged smiley face I’d carved straight through the paper heart, all glittery precision and buried rage. Something cold and unfamiliar coiled tighter in my chest, sharper than the recoil I’d just felt.

Rohan was right about the woods. Bears, cougars, wolves, whatever nightmare ecosystem lurked up there—it was dangerous. But that wasn’t the fear gnawing at me now.

I gripped my keys so hard the metal bit into my palm, the pink glitter catching the dim light like tiny, mocking stars. A darker thought flickered: maybe I wasn’t running toward Liam at all. Maybe I was running toward something that would finally force me to stop pretending I was okay with forgiving and staying.

I told myself I was strong enough. Strong enough to handle another round of his excuses, his half-apologies, the way he’d pull me close like nothing had changed. Strong enough to walk away if I had to.

But the shredded target stared back at me, and the truth slipped through the cracks: I didn’t feel strong. I felt brittle. Like a girl who’d learned to kill clean and quiet before she ever learned how to leave a man who kept breaking her in small, familiar ways.

Rohan walked me to the car in that heavy, wordless way of his.

His hand rested on the roof for a second—long enough to feel like both protection and warning—before I buckled in. He tapped the glass twice: stay alert. I nodded, forced a smile that didn’t reach my eyes, and watched his silhouette shrink in the rearview until the distance swallowed him.

I cranked the music loud, some bubbly pop track that felt suddenly hollow and called Kira, my best friend from elementary school. As I pulled onto the highway, she yelled at me when she found out where I was going.

The city lights faded behind me, giving way to the dark stretch toward the mountains. Snowflakes started drifting across the windshield, soft at first, then thicker, like the world was trying to bury the road before I could reach it.

My hands stayed steady on the wheel, glitter nails glinting under the dashboard glow, but inside I felt small. Exposed. Like the further I drove, the more the armor I’d built—gun skills, bright smiles, family threats—peeled away, leaving just me: a girl who could end a life in six shots but couldn’t end a relationship that had already ended her a hundred times over.

The mountains rose ahead, black and jagged against the storm-heavy sky. And for the first time, I wondered if what waited there wasn’t worse than Liam.

Or if maybe it was exactly what I needed to finally learn how to leave.

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🩸 This is an early draft, so if you spot anything or feel something, I’d love to hear it. Doesn’t have to be long, a few words. Your comments and feedback help shape the final version.