Page 109 of Walking Red Flag

I sent a photo of myself to Cutter with the caption ‘fit check’ on it.

He probably wouldn’t care what I was wearing, but I wanted to calm myself down, and I knew Cutter would be able to do that for me.

His immediate response made me giggle.

Cutter:

That bra does wonderful things for your boobs.

Smiling, I put my contacts in, washed and brushed, then applied deodorant to every single inch of my body that had a crease to it.

I then checked out my boobs and realized that it did appear that I had some cleavage in the shirt that I was wearing with my Nike bra.

Turning around, I gave him a photo of the back, then hit send before heading downstairs.

I found Artur already up and eating a muffin.

“Where’d those come from?” I asked.

“Uber,” he answered. “Want one?”

I was already shaking my head.

“Normally, I’m all about muffins. But I’m not taking the chance to mess up my stomach before I’m about to run a trail marathon,” I admitted.

He shrugged but didn’t argue.

That was the thing about Artur.

He was a great bodyguard. Professional.

When he was with my brother and not on duty, he was a hoot. But when he was working it was like he slipped into this personality that was impenetrable.

Though, today, he was a very unhappy bodyguard.

Before we’d left, we had a discussion with Shasha, Dima, and Cutter about Artur’s ability to guard me during the race. In the end, we decided that though he’d be there, he wouldn’t be participating in the race and wouldn’t always have active eyes on me.

It was a risk, according to them, but it was one I was willing to make.

I wanted to finish this race.

I wanted to run it without having to worry about Artur, who’d assured me that he would be able to keep up.

And maybe he might have.

But I didn’t care.

This was something that I wanted to do by myself, and he was still slightly salty about it.

The drive took ten minutes, which was the whole point in renting the cabin that we did.

Thankfully, all we had to do was drive out of the cabin’s road, then onto the main road, cutting off hundreds and hundreds of cars because we had right of way.

We parked, I drank some more water, and we waited patiently for the race to start.

Sadly, where they had us walk to was the side of the road. It was cold, there was nowhere to sit, and even worse, they only had eight porta-potties.

It was awful.

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