Page 3 of Tempting Little Thief

“Let her go.”

You’d think snakes grew from my ears the way the man’s eyes bulged at my defiance, shock rooting him in his place.

“Don’t!” my sister pleads, her strangled words stealing her last ounce of energy. “Just stop. It’s o-okay.”

She trembles, fear of what he’ll do to me racking through her body, just like it is mine for what he might do to her.

I reposition myself, making sure I’m parallel with the front windows rather than leaving my back exposed to my mom and any stupid idea she might come up with to help her husband. I stop moving once the edge of the neighbor’s bushes cut along the backs of my legs, both my parents now in my line of sight.

Like I knew he would, my dad follows my movement, shifting his feet sideways to face me once again.

He’s antsy, head whipping around as sirens sound somewhere in the distance, and his nostrils flare, knowing we can’t stand out here much longer. In his mind, he’s thinking if he gets us back inside, he can at least try and hide us, manufacture an excuse of some sort—like when I had a “bike accident” that broke bones when, really, he’d shoved me out the upstairs window, sending me sailing into the bed of his El Camino in the driveway because he thought I’d been outside with the fresh black eye he served me the day before. I wasn’t outside, but my sister was, and I knew one of us would face his wrath for it, so I made sure it was me.

His hold must loosen because, in the next second, my sister’s piercing scream fills the air, and she tears herself from his brutal grip, ripping the hair straight from her scalp as she crawls to me.

I dart forward, grabbing her torso with my arms as gently as I can, and yank her back to me. She goes limp the second she’s in my arms, eyes flickering as she mumbles incoherently.

We tumble to the ground, and my dad screeches into the air, charging at us.

My eyes widen when he raises the gun, pointing it at my sister, and then something cold presses into my palm.

I look down in what feels like slow motion but must be no more than a fraction of a second, frowning at the matte-black pistol, my eyes briefly flicking to the split knuckles of the hand passing it to me through the bush.

Hayze Garrett, my one and only friend, because I don’t have to hide from him. He lives in hell too.

A branch snaps, and I face forward, lift my left arm, and grin.

Dad’s eyes shoot wide, and a cold, dead laugh leaves me. I pull the trigger at the same moment he does.

My body jerks and his gives up on him.

He crashes to the ground with a loud crack that sends a satisfying shiver down my spine.

My pulse pounds heavily in my ears, my mother’s cries loud and bellowing, my sister’s whimpers of pain deafening and then … nothing.

I don’t feel the bullet he sent through my shoulder earlier or the gashes his belt left in my back afterward. I don’t feel the sting of the foxtails embedded in dead grass from the cuts he drew across the bottoms of my feet with his hunting knife to “keep me in the chair,” he had said. I don’t feel worry or anxiety or dread.

I don’t feel helpless or stuck.

I don’t feel shit.

I walk over to my father’s lifeless body and stare down at the pathetic excuse for a human, the complete waste of flesh and blood.

I blink, my vision clearing, coming back to the present.

My eyes are still on the ground, tracing the path of red backward, from the grass to the cracks to the cement slab … up to his ear and temple, to the dead center of his beaded brows, where the blood gushes from.

A perfect fucking shot.

My head cocks to the side as I stare into crystal-colored eyes, the same ones I see in the mirror every morning.

The man the movies say you should trust and love most in the world.

The man who showed us you can trustno man. Or woman, for that matter.

My father.

The abusive drunk.

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