Page 31 of Dirty Tricks

And not one boy in the room moves to help me. Not one moves to leave. My screams don’t puncture their conscience.

It’s like I don’t exist as a person at all.

“Since you’re no longer my girlfriend, you can be part of the entertainment,” Finn says, eyes narrowing, not a jot of empathy in their dark depths.

He turns to his friend, passing over a key as he nods at the exit. “Bolt the door.”

CHAPTERNINE

XANDER

My pulse racesas I slam the boot closed, running around the vehicle for the driver’s seat, desperate to get going, to get rid of the evidence, to get back to my girl. I wipe blood from my eyes, the cut on my forehead immediately providing a new stream into my vision.

This time, my stepfather wasn’t fucking around. Tonight, he came with a knife.

I’d arrived home to find it held against my mother’s throat, the short window of time she’d bought to phone me by barricading herself in the wardrobe, long gone. My stomach had curled, the edges charred by my burning rage.

There are long white spots in my memory, interspersed with freeze frame images of him coming for me, slicing my scalp when I ducked my head to stop him stabbing out my eyes. The knife moves from his hand to mine in one still frame; buried in his chest the next. Me twisting the blade to do more damage.

In the final one, his lifeless eyes stare blankly at the ceiling.

Time jumpstarted back to its usual sequence as I pulled the vehicle close to the front door, as my mother and I hauled the body into the boot.

She’s just left, fleeing to establish an alibi far from here. There’s no need to run to the safety of a shelter. Not any longer.

I open the garage and stare at the assortment of tools and machinery left there by the landlord. We have strict instructions not to use this part of the property, but I guess my days of rule-following are behind me. I walk along the benches, hefting a hammer, a manual saw, a large chisel, imagining the damage each of them would cause.

Then I see the grand prize. A chainsaw sits on the lower bench, plugged into a charging station. As I pick it up, I smile to see the hundred percent mark on the battery gauge.

I grab a hammer just in case I need to ensure the fuckwit’s dead before I carve him into pieces. Once stored in the backseat of my stepfather’s car, I pass around the rear of the vehicle, his keys already safely in my pocket.

A text comes through to my phone. My mother.

“I’m in Amberly. I’ll grab a cheap room at the pub for the night.”

Despite the horrific events of the past half hour, I smile at her message. When I told her to get in the car and go, she didn’t hesitate. All going well, I can join her there tomorrow while the police are none the wiser.

If everything goes according to plan, I’ll have a special girl on my arm when I do.

There’s a pin from Lexa and I click into it, frowning when I see the location high above the city, then smiling.

The road she’s on goes higher, joining with the main routes along the hilltop range. There are a million spots up there where I could dispose of my stepfather’s body. Every couple of years, someone goes missing and even with dedicated searchers, it can be months before they’re found.Ifthey’re found.

No one’s going to find this repugnant excuse for a human being. Nobody cares enough for my stepfather to mount a search.

Two birds with one stone. The evening is lining up again, taking me back to the perfection with which it started. Now I’m thinking of her, I can’t wait to get back to Lexa’s side, to cuddle her into my embrace.

The journey doesn’t take more than twenty minutes, but it seems longer. Every time I stop at a set of lights, I scan the occupants of the surrounding vehicles, wondering if they notice anything strange, wondering if they can sense the corpse hidden in the boot.

At one point, a police car speeds across the intersection in front of me and my mind blanks in panic. It’s going the wrong way, oblivious to my presence, but it still sends a nasty jolt to my system.

A few hours and I’ll be free and clear of him. I’ll check in on Lexa, then take care of business. My mind calms, thinking of coming back to her later, the job done.

There might be questions to answer somewhere down the track, but there are people who can help me with that if need be. A criminal element was in touch a while back, asking questions, feeling me out for a role.

I didn’t lean into their overtures so they went away, but I know if I needed to, I could reach out and rekindle their interest. They’re not the kind of gang that ever goes away, even if the head of the snake occasionally changes.

But that’s a thought for the future. I snap back to the present, eyes on the road in front of me as I curve up the side of the hill. There’s a half-empty carpark waiting right where Lexa dropped her pin.

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