Midnight found her on a hill overlooking the bridge. The city lights blurred to her gaze like an artist’s wet canvas. The bottle hung in one loose grip as she leaned against her motorcycle and surveyed the view.
“Not quite the same,” she said out loud, thinking of the suspension bridge in Wabun where she and Kidd just about died trying to out run the Steel Panthers. “Not as pretty.”
She took a swig of whiskey and let the fire burn away the regret.
“Should have listened to you when you asked me to run,” she wiped the back of her mouth with her sleeve. “Maybe you’d still be here and I wouldn’t be . . .” Her voice caught painfully.
Shrugging she set the bottle down on the saddle and looked at the schematics she had drawn onto her wrist with a pen earlier. Like she didn’t know they had a tracking device embedded in her body. What? Did they think she was stupid as well as a slut? Tears spilled over her cheeks as she traced the outline with her finger. Yeah well. Maybe she was both after all.
Digging into her boot for the knife she had kept all these years, she pulled out Jayce’s old knife into the moonlight. She weighed it in her hand and tested its sharpness with her thumb. Yup still sharp. Karla sucked at the welling blood.
She pulled her hair over to one side and let it hang down her shoulder. The other shoulder she stretched the neck of her dress until it was bared to the night sky. With searching fingers she traced the muscles and ligaments of her neck until she found the spot she was looking for. She poised the knife point to her neck and closed her eyes.
“If I said yes now, I know it’s too late,” she murmured to Kidd’s memory. Probably if she was sober, the thought of talking to his ghost would give her a hint how unhinged she was acting, but oddly enough, right that moment, it was comforting. “But I’m going to run anyway. For the both of us.”
Her whole body tensed in anticipation of what she was about to do. Her grip tightened on the hilt of the knife and in the split second before she stabbed herself, she though she heard someone call her name.
White hot pain flared through her shoulder. A spasm shot down to her hand and almost made her drop the knife but her other hand tightened determinedly. The sensation of the cold hard blade digging into her flesh was wrong. Karla’s stomach rolled and she closed her lips tightly around the urge to throw up.
In her inner mind she saw the schematic and pushed down harder with a whimper. She felt the blade scrape bone. The cold sweat of shock broke out on her forehead and upper lip. Her breath exited in quick harsh bursts as she traced the spot with steel.
When she was sure she had successfully obliterated the tracking tattoo on her clavicle she let go of the knife. Her fingers spasmed open as she hunched over and dropped to her knees in the grass.
She stared wide-eyed and in shock as blood dripped onto the grass in front of her.
That was a lot of blood.
She must have nicked one of the arteries when she let go of the knife. Damn it.
Placing her hands over the wound was rather wishful thinking; she could feel her heart beat in the woosh of spray against her fingers. Her vision was graying out and she couldn’t find it in her to care.
“I guess we’ll be running together after all,” she mumbled. She felt the curve of a wistful smile on her lips. “Sorry it took me so long.”
She fell forward onto the grass, using the last of her strength to roll over onto her back. She wanted her last sight to be the night sky.
So she couldn’t understand why Grant’s worried upside down face was the last thing she saw.
