It Ends With Her

by Brianna Labuskes

  Her toes dug into the faded worn-down carpeting as she paced the length of the room, keeping the box in her sight line at all times. Like she would a rabid dog.

  The Swiss Army knife was in her hand before she could second-guess herself. She flipped open the deceptively sharp blade before tossing it once in the air, then catching it by its handle.

  There was playing fast and loose with procedure, and then there was consigning it to hell. Most of the time she toed the side of the line that kept her in a job. She solved cases, and that was undeniable. If a few rules were broken while she was doing it, well, mostly the higher-ups looked the other way. The ends justifying the means.

  Still, there were certain lines that couldn’t be crossed, ones that would let a bad guy walk because of her stubborn disregard for rules. Processing evidence on her own should earn her more than a slap on the wrist or one more note in her file to add to the long list of notes in her file.

  She’d also run out of fucks to give, though, around the same time they’d found Charlotte. Or maybe before that. Probably before that.

  Maybe she had a blind spot when it came to the bastard. Maybe everyone knew it but let her work the case anyway. They were the ones who set her loose on him in the first place; they could be the ones who cleaned up her mess.

  So she slipped on a fresh pair of gloves and sliced through the packaging tape so she could pull back the flaps. The photograph came unstuck from the bottom of the box with ease.

  It was actually a pretty scene—a cabin, on the edge of a lake, that looked like a lovely little hideaway. There was a dock that jutted out in the water, with a boat moored at the end of it. No Worries was painted on the stern in purple letters. She flipped the picture over.

  Three days.

  “Goddamn it.” Clarke threw the knife into the thin wall closest to her. It sank to the hilt of the small blade. Her legs gave out and she dropped onto the carpet, her back leaning against the bed. “Goddamn it,” she said again, quietly this time.

  Almost unconsciously, her fingers found the dark ink of her tattoo, a constellation captured on skin, just below the crook of her left elbow. It was her little piece of the sky that she could always keep with her, and the emotional permanence of it and the stars had become her anchor. If ever there was a time she needed a reminder that the world was bigger than anything that seemed unbearable to her, she would just let her fingers trace over the geometric pattern. The sheer weightiness of it, of the universe it represented, made her feel light and floaty in the kind of way a razor blade used to.

  By the time she held up the photo to the light to see if there were any watermarks lurking beneath what her eyes could see, she realized she was just delaying the inevitable. Putting it off wouldn’t make it any easier, though, so she crawled to her bag, the rough carpet leaving raw burns against her kneecaps. She ignored the sting as her fumbling fingers brushed past food wrappers and crumpled receipts, sliding along the deepest recesses of her purse, as if they knew she didn’t actually want to find what she was looking for.

  When she finally snagged her phone, she collapsed back against the foot of the bed.

  There were fifteen missed calls and twenty-five unread texts. Sam was pissed. And worried.

  She thumbed to his number in the log and hit the “Call” button.

  “Jesus, Clarke.” The layers of emotions Sam could convey with just two words never failed to impress. She squeezed her eyes against it. “You can’t go AWOL on me like that again. Not in the middle of this shit.”

  It had been reckless, taking off like that in the middle of a case without telling her partner. It was behavior she didn’t want to recognize but did. The phone. The late nights without sleep. Winding up on a plane without even realizing how she’d gotten there. When it had happened before, this dangerous slide into self-destruction, she’d been able to run away to Florida. Now, though, escape wasn’t an option.

  And so it played out, a pattern established long ago, an echo of a childhood she wanted so desperately to forget. She fought it, she tried, but this case was triggering every bad habit she’d thought she’d broken.

  “I had a lead.” It wasn’t quite the apology she knew he wanted, the one she should give him.

  Before, the defensiveness in her voice would have been a gauntlet thrown. An invitation to emotionally slice at each other. Sam was subtler in his technique, but he knew how to cut just right to make her bleed.

  They had been getting better, though. Gentler with each other. He’d made an effort to stop treating her like a teenager, and she’d been trying not to take everything he said as a personal judgment on her life.

  They hadn’t had a real fight in years. Not since she’d asked for a transfer to Florida and hadn’t told him.

  “You don’t even tell me you want to move to Florida?” Sam asked, his voice tight with anger even though he kept it pitched low. That’s how they fought. Not with wild gestures and unleashed voices, but with tiny slashes and cruel jabs that hit already-bruised places so that full punches weren’t necessary.

  They sat in the back booth of the dive bar that was about a ten-minute walk from the FBI headquarters. It was known for its rude waitstaff and its patrons who wouldn’t eavesdrop on a private conversation. Agents loved it. But it was only two in the afternoon, and the others wouldn’t start filtering in until at least five. They had appearances to keep up, after all. Whereas she and Sam just didn’t care.

  So apart from Lola, their waitress, whom they liked because she left them alone and had a heavy hand with the pours, there was only one other person in the bar—an old woman perched on a stool, nursing a beer and flipping through a battered novel.

  “You didn’t tell me you were sleeping with Roger again,” she countered. Even just the name of their boss sat sour on her tongue.

  “And you care because . . . ?”

  “Because you’re stupid around him,” she said.

  “That’s not why.” Sam watched her, his eyes seeing too much. “You just don’t like that I have something in my life that doesn’t involve you. So selfish sometimes, I swear to God.”

  Saliva caught in the back of Clarke’s throat. “Oh, I’m the selfish one? Real rich, Sam.” There wasn’t anything more to say to that. They were both selfish, both self-centered to the point of thoughtlessness at their worst times. And those times seemed to be the norm lately.

  Finally Sam shifted, relented. Always the bigger person than she was. “You’re angry because you think I took Roger’s side over yours.”

  Clarke ran a hand through her hair and brought her glass to rest against her lips. She savored the burn of liquor in her nostrils before tipping it back. The smooth whiskey warmed in the heat of her mouth, and she let it sit there for a moment before swallowing it. “You did, Sam.”

  “He’s just worried about you.” He didn’t argue her point, though.

  “Why should I care what he’s worried about?”

  “Because he’s your boss. And he wants what’s best for you, even if you don’t believe it.”

  “Kicking me off a case isn’t what’s best for me. Barring me from any other cases until I see a therapist isn’t what’s best for me,” she said. What she’d done hadn’t even warranted the extreme punishment. Did it really matter if some low-life rat had his finger broken during an interrogation? The results spoke for themselves.

  He was quiet as he swirled the liquid in his glass. “You do hear yourself, right?”

  Sam sighed when she didn’t say anything more, and emptied his glass in one swallow. “Look, Roger was always wary about hiring you in the first place.” He held up a hand. “Not because he didn’t think you’d be a good agent. He just didn’t want . . .”

  “The liability?” she finished for him.

  He shook his head. “He’s not that bad, you know.”

  “Yeah, well, I can see past his pretty face, and you can’t, so I think I’ll go ahead and stick with my judgment of him.”

  Sam di
dn’t defend himself, signaling for Lola instead. Clarke quickly finished her drink so when the waitress came over with the bottle, she’d be able to fill her up, too.

  “You don’t see clearly.” Clarke continued to push.

  Sam shrugged, not denying it. “But I’d never take his side over your best interest, kid.”

  “Like you know what my best interest is.” She stared into the glass as she said it, not wanting to meet his eyes. Not wanting him to see that her own were wet for reasons she couldn’t explain. That’s how everything felt these days—inexplicably raw.

  “I do,” he said after a quick thank-you tossed at Lola, who moved off to clean tables behind them.

  “No.” There was an anger she needed to hold on to that the alcohol was already starting to numb. It beckoned her, that oblivion. But they’d been living in this codependent friendship for so long it had become normal, and that scared her almost more than the wildness in her eyes when she looked in the mirror in the mornings. “It’s your savior complex. That’s what you care about. And the fact that you’ve convinced yourself that you want what’s in my best interest just proves how much you actually don’t.”

  “My savior complex?” Sam asked as if they hadn’t had this conversation before. They had.

  “I don’t really blame you.” Clarke leaned forward, the wood sticky against her forearms. “As far as people in need of saving go, you hit the jackpot. That’s why we’re like this.”

  “Like what?”

  Clarke looked away, her eyes flicking to the black-and-white photos hanging on every inch of the wall. Former agents, their smiles loose with alcohol or celebration or both. “Why did you talk Roger into hiring me?”

  There was a pause, but Sam didn’t push the question she’d dodged. “You’re a great agent, kid.”

  “I know,” she said. She was. That didn’t make her a great human or a great friend. But he’d never asked that of her. Maybe he didn’t think she was capable of it. Maybe she didn’t think she was. “Friends tell each other things, Sam. The important things.”

  “Are we back to that? I would have told you about Roger and me if I thought you’d been able to handle it.”

  And there was the anger again. It was comforting, familiar, and it nudged through the haze of liquor. “Screw you. This is what I’m talking about. You don’t trust me.”

  “It’s not about trust, kid.”

  “Then what is it?”

  He didn’t answer. Couldn’t. They’d fallen into these patterns too long ago, and now they couldn’t escape. All they were doing was talking in circles, avoiding questions they didn’t want to answer so that the words they did say were hollow and stripped of meaning.

  “You can’t save me, Sam.” She rubbed her thumb over the knuckles of one hand, back and forth over the knobs of bone.

  “I’ll never stop trying to save you, kid,” Sam said, watching her hands. “I’ll never stop thinking you’re worth trying to save.”

  It wouldn’t help to argue. It wouldn’t help to remind him of the thin white scars on her legs, or the early mornings he found her curled over her desk after not having gone home for the night, or the way her tongue turned too sharp at the merest provocation.

  “You’re not mad that I’m moving to Florida because you care about me.” It was a realization she would have figured out sooner if she hadn’t been caught up in her own shit. “You just don’t know what you’ll do with yourself if I’m not the center of your life.”

  He shook his head, then threw back his drink a second time, but still didn’t say anything.

  Clarke didn’t pull the punch. “You might have to actually get your own life. No more Clarke and her messy problems for a distraction. Maybe you’ll be forced to look inside your head for a change and realize you don’t really like what you see there.”

  The words tumbled into the space between them with an abandon she recognized all too well. This was why she had to leave. Otherwise, not only would she burn in the flames, but she would take everyone with her.

  He huffed out a breath. “You know what? I’m tired of stopping you from hitting the self-destruct button. You want to hide out and waste your life in a swamp, go for it. Don’t expect me to clean this one up, though. I’m serious. I’m done.”

  “I’ve heard that before.” Clarke smirked to break the tension.

  Sam didn’t smile. “I’m serious.”

  Something sad and desperate shifted in her. She immediately wanted to take it all back.

  This is what she wanted, though. This is what she needed.

  “You promised,” she whispered anyway. Because this is how they were.

  “Promised what?”

  The words hurt her throat, catching like broken glass against the vulnerable tissue. “That you’d always be there for me.”

  He closed his eyes, and she knew he didn’t want to remember.

  There was a long pause where her heartbeats stuttered together with an anxiety the moment didn’t really warrant.

  Then he breathed in deep through his wide nostrils. “You’re right, kid. I will be. Always.”

  It was that vow that somehow managed to pull her back whenever she teetered on the edge of some emotional cliff. It came back to her, just exactly where she was. Huddled on a dirty floor of a motel room in a rinky-dink town in Texas, with Sam on the other end of the line.

  “You’re right,” she finally said. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”

  There was a pause on the other side, and she knew it was because that hadn’t been the response he’d been expecting.

  “I was worried about you, kid.”

  “I know, I . . .” She rubbed the heel of her hand against her eyes. “I couldn’t sleep. Was checking the tip email, and we got one that seemed legit.” They’d long ago decided to release the photos to the public in the hopes that if Clarke and Sam failed to figure it out, maybe someone out there would help. “The person recognized Gary’s. It’s their local convenience store. Next thing I knew I was at National, going through security.”

  “A note. A text. Is that too hard?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” she admitted.

  He must have sensed something in her tone that bespoke her frayed emotional state, because he let it drop. “All right, it’s done, you’re safe. Where are you?”

  She glanced around. “Middle of Nowhere, Texas.” She paused. “I found it, Sam.”

  “Burying the lede, kid,” Sam’s voice chastised through the phone.

  “We have three days.”

  “Goddamn it,” Sam said, and Clarke finally smiled.

  “My reaction, precisely.”

  “All right, all right. Three days. How . . .” He trailed off.

  He didn’t need to explain further, though, because she knew what he was thinking.

  “How does he always know when to start the clock?” She voiced his unspoken question.

  “How does he know?” Sam repeated.

  Because she didn’t have an answer that wasn’t terrifying, she let the silence hang. Any way they looked at it, Cross was monitoring their movements, tracking them. He would need to know if they got to a clue early or late. And then he would have to adjust whatever timelines he kept in his own mind. The weight of his eyes, watching her from somewhere unknown, turned her skin clammy.

  “So, is it any easier with this one?” Sam finally asked.

  She reached for an evidence bag to slip the photo into, then peeled off the latex that always made her skin itch. The pretty little scene looked as innocuous through the ripples in the plastic as it had five minutes ago. “Maybe. I don’t know. A cabin in the woods. Looks Northeastern to my untrained eye. I’ll send you and Della a picture of it, so you guys can start working. Then I’ll get my ass on a plane back to HQ.”

  “Took the words out of my mouth,” Sam said. “Any chance he’s there?”

  Clarke shook her head before remembering she was on the phone. “No,” she said.

  �
�So the hunt continues.”

  “A twisted scavenger hunt that we keep losing.”

  “Keep your head on straight, kid. Don’t let him get in there.” Sam’s calm voice served only to grate on her nerves.

  “Yeah. I gotta go,” she said, pulling the phone away from her ear.

  “Stay safe, Clarke.” Sam’s last words were tinny through the speaker. She pushed the “End Call” button.

  She looked at the photo again and wished she’d bought that six-pack.

  CHAPTER SIX

  BESS

  July 7, 2018

  Sweat pooled beneath Bess’s breasts and at the base of her spine as she pushed up another one of the steep, winding hills away from the mansion on the lake. Away from Jeremy and drunken gaiety she had no interest in. Her knee ached and her sports bra chafed, but she ruthlessly tamped down on the dull pain. Instead, she focused on breathing. The air was heavy with water, and her body bucked against the intrusion of it, scraping away at the particles, desperately seeking oxygen to power her bunched and straining thighs.

  The steady beat of the song matched her footfalls until the pavement curved, reaching its highest point, before becoming flat again. She stumbled to a stop, and gravity pulled at her, settling like a hand on her lower back, pushing her toward the welcoming ground. But it would be a mistake to give in to it, as tired as she was, so she simply bent at the waist instead. Darkness crept in from the sides of her eyes, and she squeezed them tight.

  Don’t faint, don’t faint, don’t faint.

  A rude mechanical honk brought her upright, and she stepped off the road in time to feel the air rush by her elbow as the car sailed past.

  She stumbled a bit, the edge of her shoe catching on the lip where pavement met gravel. At one point in her life, she could have imagined herself screaming at the asshole, chasing after him without a care, waving her middle fingers in the air on the off chance of him glancing in the rearview mirror.

  That’s who she used to be.

  Instead, she just stretched her arms above her head and waited for the buzzing in her ears to fade. Then she took off again. A downhill and a long stretch of flat stood between her and the small town. She’d run the route twice now, and it was beginning to feel familiar.