Page 111 of Dirty Hit
My breath fogs in front of me as I cross the lot. My neck aches. My shoulder twinges where a Blackthorne lineman drove me into the turf. None of it matters. The soreness feels deserved.
What I’m not prepared for is the sight waiting for me at my Charger.
Kyra’s sitting on the hood, ankles crossed, sneakers knocking lightly against the metal. Up close, she looks smaller than the last time I saw her—swallowed in that hoodie, braid over one shoulder. Her expression is twisted tight with the kind of nerves that make her look much younger than seventeen.
The second she spots me, her whole face changes, brightening and pinching all at once. So this is why she’s been trying to get a hold of me.
I’ve been ignoring her calls for the last week and pretending the rest of my life is held together by resolve stronger than spit. I thought maybe she wanted gossip, or money. I didn’t think she was trying to warn me that Lucifer herself had a ticket to my game.
My mother stands beside the passenger door, one hand resting on the roof. It wasn’t enough to take up space in my stands; she had to come claim ground in my lot, too.
I stop a few feet away, and let the silence stretch.
My mother smiles first. Her mouth curves in that exact calculated way—warm enough to fool strangers, sharp enough to make my skin crawl.
“Domenyk,” she says, like she didn’t orchestrate half my nightmares. “What a performance.”
“We lost,” I say flatly.
“Mm,” she says, tilting her head. “Unfortunate. You seemed… distracted.”
Her voice is the same—warm honey over broken glass. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Kyra slides off the hood and lands with a small thump. “Dom,” she breathes. “Finally. I thought you’d sneak out the back.”
“I considered it,” I say, then look at her. “You shouldn’t be sitting on my car,solnyshko. You know that.”
She cracks a little smile, shoulders hunching. “You always yell at me for that,” she says. “I wiped my shoes. Relax.”
“I wasn’t aware you were coming,” I say.
“I texted,” Kyra says quickly. “I called, too. I tried to tell you, but you never answered.”
“I’ve been busy,” I say, eyes still on the woman beside her.
She flinches, the same way she always does when I pull the distance card. I hate myself a little for it, but it’s better this way. She’s already too close to the blast radius just by existing in that house. If I pull her further in, if I give that woman more leverage by demonstrating I love my little sister, she’ll get put in the ground with my other siblings. I’d rather she hate me a little and live.
My mother smiles, stepping closer. She’s aged well; people like her always do. Money helps, so does the kind of vanity that treats skin as another weapon. There are faint lines at the corners of her eyes now, but they only make her look more refined.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I tell my mother.
“I wanted to see my son play,” she says, and there’s a sliver of something like sincerity in it that pisses me off more than if she’d stayed cold. “Is that so terrible?”
“You didn’t come to watch me play,” I say. “You came to see if I’d broken your leash yet.”
Her eyes flash at that, a spark of pride and annoyance tangled together. “If I wanted you on a leash, you would be on one,malen’kiy volk. I taught you better than to project your guilt onto me.”
The old pet name lands like a slap. Little wolf. It used to soften me—now it makes my skin crawl.
“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t call me that. Don’t pretend you didn’t build this. You’re the reason I know how to clean a body out of a house in under an hour. You’re the reason there are six—”
I stop myself, and her gaze drops flicks to the front of my jeans, like she can see the ghost of those six bars. The bars I had put there to stop her. Revulsion rolls through me so hard I have to bite back bile.
Her pleasant little game-face slips off just a fraction, enough that I see the real thing underneath. Not a mother, a handler checking whether her weapon still cuts the right way.
Then she glances at Kyra and smooths it back on. “Still so dramatic,” she chides. “You make it sound like my presence is a curse.”
“It usually is,” I say. “I told you to stay away from my games.”
