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Inferno (Blood for Blood #2) by Catherine Doyle (36)

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

THE ESCAPE

I was in the upstairs bathroom squishing my moisturizer into an already full rucksack when I heard a car door slam outside. I burst into my mother’s room, ignoring the stale feeling of depression that clung to the lavender-scented drapes inside. I edged towards the window, peering over the doorstep, where the top of my uncle’s head was visible. He had already left New York when he called me. I never had a head start.

I was too late.

Crap. I slid back into my room and stuffed Luca’s switchblade in my pocket. The doorbell rang, followed almost immediately by several loud thumps. My phone was buzzing in my pocket.

By the time I was halfway downstairs, there was a key turning in the lock of the front door. I almost bit off my tongue as it swung open in front of me, swallowing a curse. Jack stomped inside and I froze with one hand on the banister, the other across my heart.

We stared at each other. Every bone in my body ached to hurl myself at him, wrap my hands around his throat and watch the light drain from his eyes. I hated him, and the heat of my rage felt like it might burst through my skin and rip me apart. Would he take me by force or could I run? I had to think, to focus. I couldn’t mess this up.

Slowly I came towards him, forcing one foot in front of the other, pulling the tendrils of raw fury back into my body and stifling them. I had to compose myself, to squash the hostility long enough to get away from him. And I would do it, even if it destroyed a part of me to do so. I would not let my emotions sell me to Donata Marino. I would not let them keep me from avenging my mother.

Jack’s frame seemed to press outwards against the narrow hallway. There was no space – no place that his shadow didn’t touch. ‘Sophie.’ One word: not quite angry, but stern.

‘Jack.’ Antony, I reminded myself. But no matter what the truth was, he would always be Jack to me. A liar. A coward. The word Antony tasted too bitter in my mouth. My fingers squeezed into my palms until their tips bent back on themselves.

He shut the door behind him. ‘You didn’t answer me.’

I felt my voice vibrating with fear, so I forced it higher, louder. ‘I was upstairs. Can’t you wait, like, two minutes?’

There. That teenage indignation. Jack huffed a sigh and I watched his shoulders dip. He thought this would be easy; he thought I would come around. Idiot. He stepped closer, and it took everything in my power not to attack him. ‘Are you ready to come with me?’

We both knew it wasn’t a request; he was just allowing me the illusion of free will, for old times’ sake.

‘Do I have a choice?’ Surly, but not unbendable. It was a delicate line.

‘No. Either you come or she’ll kill you.’ A sigh, a flicker of the man I used to know. ‘And we’ve lost enough already.’

We’ve. I contemplated lunging at him and clawing his eyes out. I might get one before he wrenched me off him.

‘You’ll have to come now,’ he said.

Focus. I stamped my foot. ‘This is so unfair.’

‘Hurry up and pack a bag. I’ll wait down here.’

I jutted out my chin. ‘Can’t we just stay here?’ The idea of having him anywhere near the last place my mother had laughed and lived made me want to scream, but he would expect some opposition to the move, and if I didn’t dig my heels in, he’d get suspicious and trail me while I packed.

‘We’re going somewhere nicer,’ he said impatiently. ‘Somewhere closer to the trade.’

‘Where?’ I whined.

‘Will you just pack? I’ll tell you later. Libero and Marco are waiting in the car.’

I couldn’t escape. Double crap. At least he hadn’t brought that murderous skeleton near my mother’s house. I didn’t know how much more my wavering restraint could take, and the idea of coming at Donata Marino with a kitchen knife was just too tempting.

‘Fine.’ I trudged back upstairs, blinking back the tears of rage that spilled freely down my face once I was turned away from him.

I hovered in my bedroom, staring out the window as hopelessness wrapped itself around me. My eyes fell on the wooden trellis crawling up the back wall – the last of my mother’s garden projects. Slowly, carefully, the threads of a plan unfolded in my head. I’d have to go out back. It was my only chance – my last chance.

I opened the window in my room and swung my already-packed bag out, angling my arm so that it landed in a bush to the right of the kitchen, away from the window. Then I stuffed an old rucksack with towels and sweatshirts to make it appear full. I stomped around for a while, slamming my feet against the floor above Jack so he’d think I was having a tantrum.

After ten minutes, I came downstairs. He hadn’t moved from the hallway. He stopped scrolling through his phone and registered the bag as I dropped it by his feet, taking care not to be any nearer to him than I had to be. I scooted backwards, arms folded across my chest. ‘There.’

‘Good,’ he said, stowing his phone in his pocket. ‘You’re cooperating. I knew you’d come around. It was all just a horrible accident, Soph. The wrong person died, but don’t worry, we’re going to take another run at those bastards, and this time they won’t get out alive.’

I sneered internally. He obviously didn’t know I was the one who had rescued them. Man, he was such a moron.

I forced a shrug. ‘Whatever. I can’t make rent by myself, and we both know I have nowhere else to go.’

The ghost of a smile flickered across his face, and I caught myself wondering what it would be like to cut it out of him and watch the colour drain from his lips. I smiled too as the image danced in my brain. One day I would find out.

Jack unclasped the front door and lugged my bag over his shoulder. ‘Ready?’ he asked, his tone already lifting.

I stalled. ‘I need to pee.’

His brows lifted. ‘What? Why didn’t you go upstairs?’

‘I was too busy rushing for you!’

‘Fine. Hurry up.’

I locked myself into the bathroom under the stairs and assessed the window. It was too small to fit through; I had overestimated my tininess. Dammit. I ran the tap and cursed loudly enough so he could hear me. Then I shouted through the door, ‘Can you please get me a toilet roll from the cupboard in the upstairs hallway?’

My heart thudded in my chest.

Please please please.

There was a loud, pointed sigh and then the heavy plodding of his feet on the stairs. I eased open the bathroom door, shut it quietly behind me and darted into the kitchen and out the back door. I had seconds at best.

I grabbed my rucksack from where it had landed, and catapulted towards the end of the garden. I threw the bag over the wall and started climbing, my feet scaling the trellis, my hands clawed tight against the concrete. I was halfway over the wall, my feet scrabbling against wood on one side and my fingers clutching stone on the other, when Jack’s voice rang out behind me.

He was running and I was struggling, heaving my body over the wall until it scraped along the top as I slithered over it. And then he was below me, lunging for my foot and wrapping his fingers around my ankle. With a primal shriek, I kicked out, anchoring myself with my hands as I bucked against him. He held firm. With my free hand over the wall I grabbed Luca’s switchblade from my back pocket and flicked it open. Jack yanked me by the ankle. I slipped towards him with the blade outstretched, and slashed it as hard as I could across his face.

He fell backwards, shrieking as blood pumped from his eye and coated his fingers as he held them tight to his face. He lunged blindly for me, but I had re-straddled the wall and was rolling over it, falling away from him.

I landed with a thud on the other side. The drop was high and the fall jolted the wind from my lungs. I re-stashed the blade, ducked and rolled, grabbing my rucksack and stumbling into a small line of trees that hid me as I pressed against the wall that bled into another, larger street of houses. Jack’s screams of agony hung heavy in the air behind me, and I seized the surge of adrenalin they gave me.

I sprinted along an endless row of boxy homes, hopped into a nearby garden and weaved my way behind a squat wooden house with a dilapidated porch. At the back of it I lost myself in an expanse of shrubbery and threw my rucksack over wall after wall, chasing the sun as it sank away from me, until I was too tired to do anything but wedge myself behind a garden shed somewhere along the endless row of houses. I tucked my limbs inside my body, shrank into a ball and waited for the darkness to hide me from Jack and his Marino assassins.

I took out my phone and called Millie.

‘Soph?’ She cleared her throat, waking her voice up. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘Yeah,’ I said quietly, conscious of the fact that I was trespassing on someone else’s property. ‘I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving town for a little bit.’

‘What? Why? What’s happened?’

‘Calm down,’ I said quickly, cutting off the freak-out. ‘I’m just living, Mil. I’m living like you told me to.’

Panic vibrated in her voice. ‘Soph, you’re freaking me out. What are you talking about? I didn’t mean “leave town” when I said that, I meant “get up and go for lunch with me” or something. This is definitely not what I meant.’

‘I know.’ I smiled against my phone. ‘I’m not going off on some big soul-searching adventure.’

‘Oh,’ she said, relief colouring her tone. ‘I thought you were about to ditch me for the pyramids or the Grand Canyon or something.’

‘Jack’s back in Cedar Hill.’

She sucked in a sharp inhale. ‘Shit.’

‘Yeah,’ I concurred. ‘I’m going somewhere he can’t get to me … until I want him to.’

‘What exactly does that mean?’

I tempered my response. There were some things she would understand, and some things she definitely wouldn’t, and the truth of what I was planning was in the latter category. ‘It means I’m going to lie low, just until the danger dies down.’

‘Then lie low here, Soph. You know you’re always welcome at mine …’

I had to smile, because we both knew it wouldn’t work, and still she had offered because that was the kind of person she was. Unafraid. Loyal. ‘You really are an amazing friend, Mil.’

‘So are you,’ she shot back.

‘I think you’re definitely winning in the friendship stakes right now.’

Her laugh tinkled down the line. ‘You’ve had your moments too, Gracewell.’

Gracewell. I bristled. That word. That lie.

It stood for nothing.

‘We’ll deal with this together,’ she said, filling up the silence and pulling me from the impending spiral of rage and disappointment I was becoming all too used to.

I ignored her unfailing optimism, a part of me wishing I could believe it. ‘I think the whole point of being a good friend is not putting your friend or her family in danger when you don’t have to.’

‘I’ll be fine.’ She didn’t sound sure, but I didn’t need her to be, because I was sure about two things now: Jack was incredibly angry, and he was also incredibly dangerous. That made him unpredictable. And if Millie sheltered me, she’d be in his firing line too, and I would never let that happen.

‘I’m not taking that chance,’ I said firmly. ‘And you know that.’

‘Where are you going to go? What are you going to do? Where are you now? Did Jack—?’

‘Mil,’ I interrupted. ‘I have a plan, don’t worry. I promise I’ll fill you in as soon as I can, OK?’

‘OK,’ she relented after a short silence, her voice turning sceptical. ‘But whatever happens, just don’t leave me behind.’

Even the thought of it made my chest seize up. ‘Never.’

‘Because I cannot do senior year without you. It’ll break my spirit, Soph. It’ll suck the soul out of me.’

‘I know,’ I said, soothing her through a bubbling laugh. Her drama was the only kind I would freely welcome into my life. ‘Don’t worry,’ I teased. ‘I’ll go into the darkness with you.’

‘Good,’ she said, matching my tone. ‘Because you’re my light.’

‘You’re so sappy.’

‘You love it.’

‘I know.’