Page 189 of Offside Devil

I hitch a thumb towards the building. “There are cameras.”

“Yes. There, there—” He points to the far corner of the building and then to the corner closest to us. “—and there. Unfortunately, the system just so happens to be malfunctioning and the camera pointed at this part of the lot is no longer storing data.”

Who would’ve guessed Owen had a P.I. straight out of a Bourne movie on speed dial? This guy is legit.

He pulls out a folder and hands it to me. “The details are in here, but the rundown is this: Mira McNeil doesn’t exist.”

I blink at him. Like the security camera he fucked with, my brain is also no longer storing data. “What?”

“It’s a fake name,” he explains. “A good one, because she’s hard to track down in the first place. She’s stayed under the radar—until the last couple months.”

Until she came to work for me.

I shake my head. “But… who is she?”

“Her real name is Katerina Costa.”

I roll the name around in my mind, trying to make sense of it. Mira. Katerina. What else was she lying about?

“Katerina went missing almost seven years ago, shortly after the murder of her father,” he continues, dropping bombs like confetti. “She was wanted for questioning.”

“Questioning for… what? Was she a witness?”

The man who called looking for her… could he have been the murderer? Maybe he wants to kill the last remaining witness. Maybe that’s why Mira… Katerina—no, fuck that. She’s Mira until I decide otherwise.

Maybe Mira is running because her father’s murderer is chasing her.

But Ian shakes his head. “Not quite. The night before her father’s murder was reported, Katerina showed up at a hospital with a nasty stab wound. It missed her major organs, but it was deep and likely not self-inflicted. Especially given her history.”

I’m about to ask what he means when I remember what Mira told me.

“Abuse,” I whisper.

Ian nods. “She was in and out of the hospital her entire life. Bruises, broken bones, ligature marks.”

“He fucking choked her?” I spit. “Why wasn’t she taken away from him?”

Peter Morris has been up my ass for weeks, but where was CPS when Mira needed them?

“There were a few reports made to CPS, but none of them were ever followed up on,” he says. “It’s a shame, because this is as open-and-shut a child abuse case as I’ve ever seen. That girl was tortured for most of her life.”

I lean against the side of my car so I don’t fall over. Nothing feels real. God turned off gravity, apparently.

“But it looks like she got the last say,” he adds.

“What does that mean?”

Ian looks at me like I’m stupid. I don’t even blame him—so many bits of information are floating around my head, I feel like I’m wading through murky waters.

“I mean,” he says flatly, “that Katerina Costa killed her father, fled, and has been living under an assumed name ever since.”

I let a murderer into my house. With my son.

If what Ian is saying is true, then there’s no disputing the facts.

But it doesn’t feel true.

The woman who shrinks against a wall when I so much as raise my voice can’t be a murderer.

---