The Reaper's Runaway Princess novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: No More Running
At three in the morning, Mara was packing a duffel bag in the dark.
She moved quickly and quietly. Scrubs, a toothbrush, the envelope of cash from the back of the freezer, a photo of the first dog she had ever saved.
Her phone buzzed on the cot, and she snatched it up.
"Rodney?"
"Why are you whispering?" His voice came clipped and fast. "Are you alone?"
She looked at the closed door of the exam room, where Wyatt slept on the floor beside the brindle dog.
She had not told him about any of them.
"I'm alone," she said.
It was the first lie she had ever told her brother, and it came out easily.
"Good. Listen to me. Pack tonight. Don't tell the old man, don't tell anyone. Drive to Denver and go to the address on the college papers. A room is waiting."
"Rodney, a man in a club vest searched my clinic today."
The line went silent.
"Did he see you?" Rodney asked at last.
"I don't think so."
"You don't think."
"Is he coming here? My husband?"
"No," Rodney said. "I told you, I'm being careful. But leave tonight. Please. For me."
He sounded close to tears.
She knew that voice. He had used it when she was twelve and he'd taken the blame for her broken window.
"I'll think about it," she said.
"Mara..."
"I said I'll think."
She hung up and pushed the phone into her pocket.
Then she zipped the bag, slung it over her shoulder, and walked out the back door into the cold.
The alley behind the clinic was empty.
Her car sat at the end of it, forty steps away, under the only working light.
She had gone twenty when a low engine growled behind her.
A motorcycle rolled out of the dark with its lights off and stopped across the mouth of the alley.
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