Escaping The Cheater For My Hitman Stepbrother

The floor was wet. That was the first thing I registered — cold, sticky wetness soaking through the back of my shirt, smelling like cheap whiskey and something metallic.

The second thing was the voice.

Not from the bar. From somewhere deeper. A memory that didn't belong to this moment — fists against my ribs, a boot on my throat, a man screaming about money I didn't owe. The crack of bone. Then nothing.

I opened my eyes.

Dim yellow light. A ceiling stained brown from years of cigarette smoke. The underground bar on Millford, the one without a sign. I was on the floor between two overturned stools, and my skull throbbed where it had kissed the concrete.

Three feet away, Julian Mercer sat slumped against the bar counter, pressing his palm to a gash above his left eyebrow. Blood ran between his fingers in a thin red line. A broken bottle neck lay near his knee, its jagged edge still wet.

He looked at me with those soft, wounded eyes — the ones that used to make me stupid.

"Kira... babe, what happened? I think I blacked out. Did someone hit me?"

I stared at him.

The gash on his forehead was from the bottle I'd smashed across it. I remembered now. All of it. The way he'd laughed into his phone in the bathroom, not knowing I was outside the door. The woman's voice purring back. The pet name he used — *angel* — the one he told me was only mine.

And behind that, layered underneath like a bruise beneath a bruise, the echo of another life. Debt collectors. A stairwell. My own blood on linoleum.

I wasn't doing this again.

"Kira?" Julian's voice cracked. He blinked hard, selling the confusion. "I don't — I don't remember anything. Why am I bleeding?"

"Because I hit you with a bottle," I said.

His act faltered. Just a flicker — his jaw tightened, his eyes sharpened — then the mask slid back into place.

"You're not serious. Why would you —"

"Stop."

I pushed myself up off the floor. My knees ached. My palms were cut from the glass. I didn't care.

Julian reached for me. "Baby, sit down. You're confused. Let me —"

"There's a towel on the bar," I said, stepping over his outstretched legs. "Get it yourself."

"Kira!"

I didn't turn around. My fingers found the ring on my left hand — that pathetic little band with its cloudy stone that he'd sworn was a real diamond. I'd believed him for eleven months. Eleven months of covering his rent, his tabs, his parking tickets. Eleven months of *angel, you're the only one.*

The drain grate was set into the floor near the bar's back exit. Rusted iron bars over a black hole that smelled like sewage.

I pulled the ring off and held it over the grate.

"What are you doing?" Julian scrambled to his feet, swaying. Blood dripped off his chin. "Kira, that cost me —"

"Nothing," I said. "It cost you nothing."

I opened my fingers. The ring dropped through the bars without a sound.

Julian stared at the grate, then at me. The softness drained from his face.

"You're going to regret that," he said quietly.

"No," I told him. "I'm eleven months late for this."

I walked out the back door and didn't look behind me.

---

The Thorne family repair shop sat at the dead end of Gravel Lane — a corrugated steel box my father had built with his own hands before the cancer ate through him. The sign above the bay door still read THORNE & SONS, even though there were no sons. Just me, a girl with grease under her nails and a ledger full of debts.

The fluorescent tube in the office buzzed and flickered when I flipped the switch. Midnight. The shop smelled like motor oil and rust, and the space heater in the corner had been broken since February.

Eddie Salazar was already inside, sitting on the cracked vinyl chair with a manila folder on his knee. He was sixty-something, bald, built like a fire hydrant. He'd worked with my father for twenty years before Dad died.

"You look like hell," he said.

"Matched the evening."

He didn't push it. Eddie never pushed. He just tapped the folder.

"Got those files from St. Agatha's. Kids aging out of the system — sixteen, seventeen. Strong enough to lift an engine block, hopefully smart enough not to drop one on their foot."

I sat on the edge of the workbench. "How many?"

"Four candidates." He spread the pages across the desk. Photocopied intake forms, each clipped to a small black-and-white photo. "Any of them could work as shop help. Live in the back room, earn their keep. Paperwork says adopted brother — adopted brother, basically. Keeps it legal."

I looked at the first photo. A boy with round cheeks and nervous eyes. The second, a tall kid staring past the camera. The third, a girl with close-cropped hair and a gap-toothed smile.

The fourth photo stopped me.

The boy in it wasn't smiling. He wasn't posing. He was glaring directly into the lens like he wanted to break the camera and the hand holding it. Dark hair fell across a sharp face. A scar cut through his left eyebrow. His jaw was set, his mouth a flat line.

Everything about him said *don't.*

I put my finger on his picture.

"This one."

Eddie leaned over. His expression shifted. "Kira. That kid's got a record thicker than my thumb. Three foster homes, all ended badly. Last family returned him after two weeks."

"This one," I repeated.

"You sure? The Nguyen boy is —"

"I'm sure, Eddie."

He studied me for a long moment, then gathered the other files and left the fourth on the desk.

"Your old man would've picked the same one," he muttered. "Stubborn runs in the blood."

He'd barely finished the sentence when the sound hit — metal shrieking against metal, the bay door's rusted track screaming as someone hauled it open from outside.

I was on my feet before the door cleared the halfway mark.

A figure stepped through the gap. Tall. Broad across the shoulders. The overhead light caught the sheen of motor oil smeared across his forearms, his neck, the front of his shirt. He smelled like a garage fire — grease, sweat, and something sharper underneath.

In his right hand, he carried a heavy steel wrench. The kind used for lug nuts on semi-trucks.

Fresh blood streaked the wrench's head. Not oil. Blood.

He walked to the wooden worktable in the center of the shop and dropped the wrench onto it. The impact cracked through the silence like a gunshot.

Then he looked up.

His eyes moved from Eddie to me, then back to me. They stayed.

Dark. Steady. The kind of gaze that didn't ask permission and didn't offer explanation.

"Who the hell are you?" Eddie's hand drifted toward the tire iron leaning against the wall.

The stranger didn't answer Eddie. He was still watching me.

"Dante Russo," he said. His voice was low, rough at the edges. "St. Agatha's sent me early."

I looked down at the photo on the desk. The same scar through the eyebrow. The same jaw. The same eyes that dared you to flinch first.

The blood on the wrench was still wet.

"You want to explain that?" I nodded toward the table.

Dante's gaze didn't waver.

"No," he said.

The fluorescent light buzzed overhead, and nobody moved.