Page 15 of Karma

“Why do you think I killed anyone?” I ask.

He shrugs. “The bloody woman tattooed on your arms… that’s you, isn’t it?”

I glance at my right arm, where the eyes of my likeness would be looking back at me, if her face wasn’t covered by long blood-soaked hair. Themeon my left arm is staring at the world defiantly, wearing a bikini top and a skimpy skirt, a knife and a gun in my hands, blood dripping everywhere.

“You’re very observant,” I say. “When did you have time to look at my tats so closely?”

He smiles. “All the time since I met you. But mostly this morning when I couldn’t sleep. They’re all very well done.”

“They are, aren’t they?” I say, running my hands down my arms, over the women and the wolf howling at the moon whichis for Grim. And the bear, keeping watch over it all, which is for Reaper. And all the trees and chains and bikes and empty roads which is for my life as a fugitive. “My girl Isabella is mad talented.”

“That tattoo artist from Brooklyn?” he asks and I nod.

“I found her about ten years ago,” I tell him. “Most of my ink is her work. I don’t trust anyone else anymore.”

“Good decision,” he says. “Because they’re all gorgeous. Just like you are.”

“You don’t have to say stuff like that anymore,” I say. “You already got me naked.”

He frowns as though I’d offended him and I’m instantly sorry for my harshness.

“I said it because I mean it,” he says. “Just like all the other times I’ve said it.”

He straightens in his seat and his legs are no longer touching mine. And it feels like a cold and lonely chasm has opened around me. That same chasm that’s been around me ever since Reaper died. Or maybe even from before. He’s managed to build a bridge over it, and I didn’t even realize it until just now when he took it away.

I’m sick of running and hiding, sick of the knots in my stomach that make me say mean things and won’t let me enjoy the burger which I’m sure will be delicious. I’m sick of not trusting anyone. And being unable to just be happy.

I lay my hand on his arm as the waitress sets down our food and wait for her to leave again. The feel of his warm skin under my fingers instantly makes the chasm less threatening.

“About fifteen years ago, I killed the mayor’s son and two of his buddies, also scions of wealthy and influential families in Charlotte,” I tell him. “They were gonna put me in a cage and keep me as a pet. This was after they’d bought me off some otherguy who got me from my stepdad, neither of which was very good to me.”

He doesn’t say anything, so I glance at his face. But there’s something so genuinely sympathetic in his eyes, I have to look away again. I don’t want his pity. I’ve told him too much.

“Fifteen years ago?” he says, his voice distant and somehow muffled. “You must’ve been just a teenager.”

“I was seventeen,” I say. “And I didn’t know much but I knew I wasn’t going in that cage. They had knives hanging on the wall in the room where they had me. Ornate, heavy things. And the next thing I remember is walking down one of the pretty colonial mansion-lined streets wearing a blood-soaked dress and no shoes. That’s how Reaper and Grim found me. They picked me up and I’ve been free ever since. And running from the law ever since.”

I figured I might as well just tell him the whole story, since I made the mistake of opening up about it in the first place.

He’s just looking at me, silently, impossible to know what he’s thinking. I rub my arms. The street and the house where it happened are also on my arm, hidden and obscure, but there all the same, as a reminder of the day my life ended. And how much worse it might’ve been.

“But if they bought you and were gonna cage you, then you were just defending yourself,” he says in that same muffled, distant voice.

“You’d think, right? But the cops and the press called me a hooker who went mad,” I say. “They even gave me a nickname. Jackie the Ripper.”

“That’s a cool nickname,” he says.

“Karma’s better.”

He nods. “It is. But seriously, you should’ve just burned the house down with their dead bodies in it. That’s what I did. The house didn’t burn, but their bodies did.”

He looks shocked, his eyes growing wide and kinda spooked for a second. But then they cloud over.

“What?” I ask after going over all the other questions that start with wh- and settling on this one.

His attention is already on his steak though, and the blood spilling out as he cuts into it.

“I had a run in with a couple of psychos similar to the ones you described. Also about fifteen years ago,” he says and sticks his fork into the piece of steak he cut off, doing it so hard that some of the blood lands on the table. “They don’t haunt me the same way yours do though. At least no one ever came looking at me over their deaths.”

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