Dirty Fighter: A Bad Boy MMA Romance Read Online Free PDF Page A

there was a corpse in the same home as me. A corpse that was, at no small amount, my fault.
    Somehow in my heart I had begun to mourn him. That made me feel even worse. It made me feel dirty and disgusting. There was a huge chance that he would have killed me if he had gotten to that gun case and an even bigger chance that my mother would have also been killed also. He had abused us, he was a horrible man, and yet he had still been my father. Somehow I still loved this man that had made my life a living hell, and messed with my head until I hadn’t even known who I was anymore. Yet, I still loved him.
    Catching my breath, I let my gaze settle on my mom’s purple paisley luggage that was sitting by her dresser. It looked full.
    “Mom, you packed already?” I asked, my brain fuzzy with panic and the swirling emotions from everything that had happened. Was she planning on us running off right now? Was she going with me? My mom sat on the bed and shook her head.
    “That was packed this morning when your dad left for work, we were supposed to go around 7:45, but we wanted just one last time here,” she explained. It was spite, of course it was. Who wouldn’t be spiteful? I stared over at the luggage, tracing the familiar pattern with my eyes before I realized the problem with them. The two suitcases would hardly hold enough for just her, much less anything of mine. My hate and fear of my father bled into my feelings for her a bit.
    “Were you going to tell me before you left me here with him?” I asked, looking over at her. Sitting there on the bed, she looked pitiful, closing in on herself as she stared at a patch of carpet a few feet ahead of where her feet hovered above the ground. Her bottom lip was trembling, her fingers closing around and releasing each other thoughtfully.
    “I had to go, you know that—he’s never laid hands on you as much as he did me,” she started to say, to explain away how she could leave her freshly turned seventeen-year-old daughter in the home with an abusive psychopath. He’d only beaten me a handful of times, and each time had been because my mom either wasn’t home or was locked up in her room. He was the one who physically assaulted me, but I still shoved some of the blame off on her. Something in my face made the words catch in her throat.
    “You weren’t even going to say bye,” I observed. The bitch. She sobbed out loud, and I could feel my drying tears cool against my cheeks.
    “I love you,” she excused, softly. I shook my head, not wanting to hear her bullshit. I deserved better than her lies.
    “You were going to leave me with him,” I repeated, my blood now felt like ice. She was going to vanish into the night and leave me to deal with the aftermath, to deal with this train of a man that had been bulldozing through my life for the last seventeen years.
    She looked up at me, her eyes tracing my face.
    “I think you should go stay with Jo for a while,” she said, turning her eyes back to the floor in front of her. My Aunt Jo lived miles away in New York. “I’ll buy you a plane ticket, I just need another moment,” she was staring in a way that made me feel like she could see through the floor.
    “I don’t think the cops will let me,” I said, not sure what she was doing. I couldn’t figure out how the hell she’d benefit from me skipping town when the cops were after me. She shook her head.
    “I’m going to tell them I did this,” she explained. I would have heaved again if there were anything left in my stomach.
    “You can’t do that,” I said, uneasily. I hated her, and I was angry with her, but she wasn’t even actually protecting me. She didn’t even realize Adam had been here.
    “I can,” she replied immediately. “I’m going to tell them I planned on running off, that I fell in love and I needed to get out,” her voice was unsteady. “I’ll say that he beat me, the truth, and when he went to turn his gun on me I hit him in