Page 195 of Offside Devil

I press my phone to my ear. “Miss me already?”

“For years now,” a deep voice rumbles.

I instantly recognize it.

It’s the voice that has haunted my nightmares for years. The one echoing down every dark alley and calling from every shadowy corner. I haven’t walked out of my front door in years without the ghost of this voice whispering in my ear, slithering down my spine.

The day I stumbled out of my father’s house, clutching my bleeding stomach, it was this voice that raged after me. “I’ll find you, you little bitch!”

An icy calm steels my spine. “Dante.”

“Family means something to you, after all,” he sneers. “I thought maybe you’d forgotten about me. As far as I can tell, Mira McNeil doesn’t have a brother.”

I don’t ask how he knows my fake name or how he found me. It doesn’t matter.

“It doesn’t have to be like this, Dante. We can be better than this. Dad doesn’t deserve our lives.”

That’s what we’ve given him: our lives. Mine has been spent running. Dante’s has been spent chasing after me.

“Dad didn’t deserve to have his fucking throat sliced open, either!” he roars.

I stand up slowly, adrenaline jittering through my limbs. I’m shaking as I pace across my bare living room. “Dad did this to us. He hurt me and manipulated you. He turned us on each other—but we can be better than him, Dante. I know we don’t know what family looks like, but we can try.”

I’ve seen a glimpse of it these last few weeks—family. I’ve seen what my father stole from us, but we could scrape it together if Dante would stop trying to kill me long enough to listen.

“He was going to kill me,” I breathe. “If I didn’t do what I did, Dad would have… I wouldn’t have survived it, Dante.”

I hear him breathing heavily. “Maybe not. But I know for a fact you won’t survive this.”

Something smashes against my front door so hard I hear the wood crack.

My heart leaps into my throat, but I try not to react. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m here. Maybe if I stay quiet, her will?—

“I know you’re in there. I saw you walk inside.” Dante plows into my door again and the hinges scream. “There’s nowhere to run now, Kitty.”

He’s really found me.

In an instant, all of my training kicks in.

I chuck my phone on the floor and grab my barely-packed suitcase. The knife block is still on the corner of the countertop closest to the door, so I slide the butcher knife free.

Dante charges into my door again and again, but I try to block it out as I sprint to the bedroom. If I don’t block it out, I’ll be frozen with fear.

I try to focus on the next step—on what’s ahead of me.

Mom’s photograph is already in the duffel, along with a few days’ changes of clothes and my last check from Zane. There isn’t time to grab anything else. As I slide open my bedroom window and step onto the fire escape, I hear the front door explode open.

I take the stairs two at a time. The metal rattles against the side of the building, but I don’t slow down. Don’t look back.

At the last step, I’m ten feet from the ground, but there isn’t time to lower the ladder. I jump.

I hiss as my ankle twists the wrong way. Something in my foot cracks and I fall to my knees.

“Keep going,” I pant, pushing myself off the ground and limping as fast as I can down the alley.

Pain rips through my leg with every step, so I mumble the refrain I’ve been saying for the last six years to drown it out. “Run or he’ll catch you. Run or you’ll die.”

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