Escaping The Cheater For My Hitman Stepbrother

The hand released my wrist as fast as it had grabbed it.

A bottle shattered somewhere deeper in the alley, and the streetlamp sputtered back to life. Whoever had been behind me was gone — nothing left but the copper smell and the bruise already forming around my wrist bones.

I didn't stay to investigate. I shoved the crumpled VIP card into my back pocket and ran.

---

The repair shop office smelled like cold coffee and transmission fluid. I'd been staring at the collection notice — for ten minutes, reading the same line over and over.

Dante stood in the corner by the parts shelf, wiping his hands on a shop rag that was already black. There was a smear of something dark along his jaw. Not oil. Darker. Thicker.

"Why do you always smell like blood?"

He didn't look up. His fingers worked the rag between his knuckles, slow and thorough.

"Dante."

"You're asking the wrong question."

"Then what's the right one?"

He crossed the office in three strides. His hand — still streaked with motor oil — pressed a folded sheet of paper flat against my sternum. The contact was brief, firm, impersonal. He stepped back before I could react.

I caught the paper before it fell. Unfolded it.

A collection notice. Printed on cheap stock, the kind that smudges when you touch it. Julian Mercer's name at the top. An amount owed — fourteen thousand dollars — to a lender listed only as "R.K. Holdings." Payment overdue by sixty-three days.

"Where did you get this?"

"His jacket. Left pocket. He left it on the hood of the Civic he brought in yesterday."

"You went through his pockets?"

Dante tossed the rag onto the workbench. "He left his jacket in your shop. I read what was in it."

I turned the notice over. On the back, someone had scrawled a phone number and two words in Julian's handwriting: *Kira pays.*

My stomach dropped.

"He's planning to stick me with this," I said.

Dante leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms. His expression hadn't changed — flat, watchful — but something in his posture had shifted. Tighter. Coiled.

"He's already started," he said.

Before I could answer, the bay door rattled.

---

Julian walked in carrying a six-pack of beer and a smile wide enough to split his face. He wore a clean shirt — actually clean, pressed even — and his hair was combed back with gel that caught the fluorescent light.

"Hey, babe. Thought I'd swing by, help you with that Camry out front. Looked like the alternator's shot."

"I didn't ask for help."

"I know, I know." He set the beer on the counter and raised both hands, palms out. Surrender pose. Rehearsed. "No strings. Just a guy helping out his girl."

"I'm not your girl."

"Kira." He dropped his voice. Soft. Wounded. The Julian frequency — the one tuned to make you feel guilty for being angry. "I know I screwed up. But I'm trying here. Can't you see that?"

He took a step closer. His hand drifted to his pocket, and he pulled out a key ring — two brass keys on a plain steel loop.

"Listen, I was thinking. If I'm going to help around the shop, it'd be easier if I had a set of keys. Save you the trouble of opening up every time."

I stared at the keys in his hand. Then at his face. The smile was still there, but his eyes were doing something different — scanning the office, cataloging. The filing cabinet. The safe under the desk. The ledger I'd left open on the chair.

"You want keys to my shop."

"Our shop. Eventually. Right?" He winked. "Come on, Kira. It makes sense."

A shadow moved behind him.

Dante stepped through the bay door holding a steel pipe — three feet long, thick as a forearm, the kind used to reinforce exhaust systems on trucks. He held it loose at his side, one-handed, the way someone carries an umbrella they don't plan to open.

Julian didn't see him. He was still talking.

"I figured I could come in mornings, handle the easy jobs, free you up for —"

The pipe swung.

Not at Julian. Past him. The arc was tight, controlled, and impossibly fast. It caught the key ring dead center, ripping it from Julian's fingers with a crack that echoed off the steel walls. The keys flew across the shop and struck the far wall, bouncing twice before skidding under the hydraulic lift.

Julian stumbled backward. The pipe kept moving — a smooth continuation of the same swing — and stopped. The blunt end hovered one inch from the bridge of Julian's nose.

Nobody breathed.

Julian's eyes crossed trying to focus on the steel in front of his face. His lips parted, but nothing came out.

Dante held the pipe steady. No tremor. No effort.

"She said no," Dante said.

Julian's throat bobbed. He took one step back, then another. His heel caught the edge of a toolbox, and he grabbed the workbench to keep from falling.

"You're fucking crazy," he whispered.

Dante lowered the pipe to his side. "Door's behind you."

Julian looked at me. I said nothing. His jaw clenched, unclenched, clenched again. Then he turned and walked out through the bay door, his pressed shirt dark with sweat between the shoulder blades.

The six-pack sat untouched on the counter. Dante picked it up and dropped it into the trash bin.

"You didn't have to do that," I said.

"Yeah," he said. "I did."

---

Rackley's Billiards closed at two a.m. I got there at two-thirty.

The back entrance was a steel fire door propped open with a cinder block — the kind of security that said nobody expected trouble, or nobody cared. I slipped through sideways, the VIP card pressed between my fingers like a talisman.

The basement level was unfinished. Concrete floor, exposed pipes, the hum of a boiler somewhere behind the walls. Stacks of old furniture lined the corridor — broken chairs, a pool table with a cracked slate, and in the far corner, a row of wooden barrels. Old ones. The kind breweries used before this building became a billiard hall.

The smell hit me first. Mildew and something sweet — rotting wood, maybe. Fermenting dust.

I crouched beside the last barrel in the row. The lid was loose, sitting crooked on the rim. I lifted it and set it on the floor.

Inside, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag, was a stack of paper held together with a rubber band.

I pulled it out. My hands were steady. My pulse was not.

IOUs. Handwritten, each one on the same lined paper, each one stamped with a red thumbprint at the bottom. The amounts varied — two thousand, five thousand, eight hundred — but the format was identical. Borrower's name. Amount. Date. Interest rate. And at the bottom of each page, a line labeled *Guarantor.*

I read the first guarantor's name. Then the second. Then the third.

All the same.

*Kira Thorne.*

My signature — or something close enough to pass — scrawled in blue ink across every single page. The loops on the K were wrong, too round, and the T leaned left where mine leaned right. But to anyone who wasn't me, it would look real.

Seven IOUs. Total amount: forty-one thousand dollars.

Julian hadn't just been spending my money. He'd been borrowing against my name, forging my hand, stacking debts I'd never agreed to onto a foundation I couldn't afford to lose.

The shop. The building. Everything my father built.

I sat on the cold concrete floor with forty-one thousand dollars of lies in my lap, and the boiler hummed its low, indifferent song.

Somewhere above me, a door creaked open. Footsteps crossed the ceiling — slow, heavy, heading toward the stairs.

Someone else knew about the barrels.

And I was still holding the evidence.