Crossroads by Laurel Hightower

Author:Laurel Hightower [Hightower, Laurel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Off Limits Press LLC
Published: 2021-11-14T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The cross again. The dark, and the cold. Moonlight on the blade, fear making her breath come quick, her hands shake.

This time it wasn’t silent. A bitter wind whipped her hair, moved the bare branches to rub against one another, to whisper above the creaks of the heavy limbs above her. Beneath all of it, the undercurrent of those moans.

They’d started the moment she took her first step down the steep grade, and they hadn’t let up since. She’d limped the perimeter again, gun in hand, but found no one, and the October branches stripped of leaves left little room for hiding. There was no one to make the moaning, so Chris decided not to hear it.

She had a cleaver this time, a sharp one, honed that afternoon in Dan’s workshop. It was sick that she’d even asked him, and she knew it, but he’d wanted to help, so she’d let him. He’d looked ill when he handed it to her, no doubt wanting to take back his rash words. Beau would have, she knew. Beau would have decided what was best for her and supplanted her judgment with his own. Maybe he’d have been right to do so—objectively, Chris knew that what she was doing looked insane, not to mention cruel. Asking her boyfriend to get her a knife sharp enough to amputate a finger—it wasn’t the action of a sane woman. And maybe she wasn’t one. She didn’t feel crazy, and when she ran through the scenario in her mind, this felt like the logical next step. She supposed crazy people never thought they were, wasn’t that what people always said? It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like she was going to check herself in for a psych eval. Either Trey had truly visited her because of the sacrifices she made, and now needed her to go the extra mile, or she was insane, and he was never there at all. And if she had a choice in which reality to stay in, she wanted to be here, with him.

She had a candle lighter she’d found buried in a kitchen drawer and was running it over the blade. She didn’t know how much it would help, but she’d always heard a heated blade cut better, and she wanted this to be quick. Not painless, there was no chance of that, but she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to keep going, if the first cut didn’t do it.

She’d decided on a finger instead of a toe, in spite of her first instinct. Toes were smaller and less visible. You didn’t look down hundreds of times a day and see your toes, not unless you were barefoot, so initially a toe seemed less traumatic. But as she considered, as coldly as she could, the mechanics of what she would need to do, she realized a finger was the better choice. It wouldn’t affect her balance, and it would be easier to protect. A missing toe would be agony each

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