Page 108 of Walking Red Flag

“Yeah, being gone sometimes is good,” he said. “Hey, you hear the news that her ex-boyfriend was arrested for child porn?”

“I did,” I confirmed. “I’m glad he was caught. Fuckin’ sicko.”

“Indeed,” Shasha said. “Accidents happen all the time in lock up.”

I hoped it did.

But I was going to try not to make it a habit to take out all the men that had once done Milena harm.

Someone might catch on eventually.

“I’ll get on the horn and get your flight scheduled. Make sure you pack hiking shit. She fuckin’ loves hiking. As long as she can go slow and enjoy it,” he said.

I thought about her depth perception, then thought about her hiking alone, missing a tree root or a rock, then flying down the side of the mountain.

A shiver of terror rocketed through me as I shuddered. “I’ll pack my boots.”

I didn’t have hiking boots, but I had motorcycle boots, and those were the same damn thing, right?

My age is very inappropriate for my behavior.

—Milena to Cutter

MILENA

After kicking Hazel and her crew out of the cabin, I ordered Artur to sit on the couch—which I freakin’ had to clean first—then went on to clean the rest of the place up.

Not only had Hazel and her boyfriend trashed downstairs, but they’d trashed the upstairs, too.

Not only had they taken the master bedroom—one would think that they would’ve left the master bedroom for the person whose brother had paid for the whole house—they’d tested out all of the rooms. Each of the upstairs bedrooms looked like they’d been slept in.

Or other things that I wasn’t really willing to think about.

After seeing the master and all of the others dirty, I’d taken all the sheets downstairs to wash. Luckily, the rental was freakin’ awesome and had detergent for me to use to do that with.

While the sheets were washing, I tackled the kitchen while listening to an audiobook that I’d intended to listen to tomorrow during my run.

About halfway through that audiobook was when I’d finished cleaning the entire house.

Artur took two bags of trash out for me, and he looked angry.

As in, angry enough that I was worried he’d go searching for Hazel’s boyfriend and break his ankles for having to sit there and watch me clean for the last couple of hours.

The last task of the night was putting sheets on the beds and trying to get enough sleep.

When I went toward my room, I gave Cutter a call, and didn’t lead on that anything was wrong.

I didn’t want him to feel bad, and sadly, he couldn’t always bail me out of terrible situations. He was a man with a business, and it’d been my decision to fly twenty-nine hours away to Glacier National Park where it was way harder for him to get to me.

After hanging up with Cutter, I fell into a fitful sleep.

The entire night I’d woken up with a feeling of impending doom.

I didn’t know if that feeling was because I’d kicked who I’d once considered my best friend out of a house we were supposed to be sharing, or the fact that I was about to run twenty-six miles on a trail that I knew would be excruciatingly hard on me—and not just because of the mileage.

By the end of tomorrow, I fully expected my entire self—body and soul—to be exhausted.

“You were made to do hard things,” I said to myself as I slipped into my trail shoes.

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