The Reaper's Runaway Princess novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Not in My Clinic
Mara puts a loud customer in her place after a priceless vase breaks, takes her brother's call about a husband still hunting her, and sees a man at her glass door mouth the name her father's club gave her: Princess.
"Tell her you don't come here to stare at her," the woman in the six-inch heels shouted.
Her husband stood by the front desk holding a cat carrier and looking at the ceiling.
"Honey, the cat has a brushing appointment."
"The cat is your excuse!"
Mara Sizemore put down the roll of gauze and stepped around the exam table.
The waiting room was full.
A teenager held a rabbit, a man held an old beagle, and the widower with the golden retriever puppy had just set down a cup of peach juice for her.
All of them were watching.
"Ma'am, you're scaring the animals," Mara said. "Please lower your voice."
"The animals?"
The woman swung around, and her handbag swept the blue vase off the counter.
It hit the tile and broke into six pieces.
Water ran across the floor and under the puppy's paws.
Nobody spoke.
The vase had a lopsided handle and a thumbprint pressed into the glaze.
The widower's wife had made it before she died, and he had given it to Mara the day she opened the clinic.
"Oh," the woman said. "It was in the way."
Mara felt her hands go cold, and then very steady.
"You'll replace that."
"Excuse me?"
"Every month you come in here and accuse your husband of looking at me."
"Maybe if you dressed like a professional..."
"Today you broke something that can't be bought," Mara said. "If he wanted someone else, he wouldn't be standing next to you looking at the floor."
The beagle's owner coughed into his sleeve.
The teenager's mouth fell open.
The husband set the carrier down. "I'll pay for the vase," he said quickly. "I'm sorry. We'll go as soon as he's brushed."
His wife stared at him. "You're taking her side?"
"I'm taking the cat's side. He likes her."
Mara knelt and began picking up the pieces.
The widower knelt beside her and held out his cupped hands for them.
"I can glue it," he said quietly.
"It was your wife's," Mara said. "I'm so sorry."
"She'd have liked what you said." He almost smiled. "Now go wash your hands, sweetheart. You're bleeding."
She looked down at the heel of her thumb, where a shard had cut her.
By sundown she had brushed the gray cat, treated a bulldog who peed on her shoes, and checked the orange tabby recovering in the back.
She flipped the sign to CLOSED and locked the door.
The clinic was glass on the street side, with plants along every sill.
Anyone walking past could see straight in, and she had built it that way on purpose.
No closed doors, no dark corners, nothing a person could hide behind.
Her phone buzzed on the counter.
Only one person had this number.
"Rodney?"
"Hey, baby sister."
She sat down hard on the stool. "It's been a month."
"I know. I had to stay quiet."
"You said two weeks."
"I know." He breathed out. "How's the orange one?"
Mara frowned. "What orange one?"
"The cat you pulled out of the drain. You always have a cat."
She laughed, and it came out wet. "I never told you about a cat."
"You didn't have to. Is anyone looking at you wrong in town?"
"No."
"Good. Because he's still looking."
Her stomach dropped.
Four years of motels, then two years in this town, and those words still made her hands shake.
He meant her husband, the vice president her father had handed her to at nineteen to settle a favor.
"Did he find me?" she asked.
"Not yet."
It came too fast, and she shut her eyes.
"Rodney."
"Not yet. I'm being careful. And I need you to do something." His voice went bright. "Classes at the community college start in three weeks. I sent in your records and filled out the enrollment papers."
"My records?"
"I handled the paperwork."
"No."
"Mara."
"I'm not going to college. I'm not leaving this town, I'm not leaving the clinic, and I'm not leaving my cats."
"You can't hide forever."
"Watch me."
"You sleep on a cot in the back of a vet clinic."
"I'm safe there."
"You're hiding."
"You didn't live in his house!" Her voice cracked. "You don't know what he did when I..."
She stopped.
She remembered a needle in her arm, and then a ceiling, the ceiling of her husband's bedroom.
Everything in between she knew only because Rodney had told her.
"Nobody is taking you back," Rodney said, low and fierce.
"Did the Garrisons look for me? Is that who..."
"Don't say that name." He had never been so sharp with her. "They stopped being your family the day they gave you back to him. Don't say it. Not ever."
Her thumb was still bleeding, and she pressed it against her jeans.
"All right," she whispered.
"Say you're staying where I put you."
"I'm staying."
"Good girl. I'll call in a month."
The line went dead.
Mara sat in the lamplight with her heart pounding.
She was not going to college, and she was not going to run again.
She had built this place out of nothing, and she said it aloud to the empty room.
"I'm staying."
Something moved beyond the glass.
A man stood on the wet sidewalk under the streetlight, with rain running down his jacket.
He was tall, with a dark beard and a bandage across his knuckles.
He looked straight through the bright, open window at her.
He lifted one hand and laid it flat on the glass door.
She couldn't hear him, and she didn't need to.
She read the word on his mouth, the name her father's club had called her since she was nine years old.
Princess.
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