With startling speed, Natalie shot her right hand forward, latching her fingers around the wrist of Tina’s hand, somehow managing to avoid the knife blade. At the same time, she wrapped her foot around Tina’s ankle. Pulling her leg back, mustering a strength Natalie didn’t know she possessed, she sent Tina to the ground on her back. The matted gym floor protected Tina’s body, but the bloody knife dislodged from her grasp upon impact.
Panic drove Natalie as she scrambled to her feet. She glanced at the knife, thinking she could reach it before Tina came to her senses. Natalie made her move, but Tina recovered quicker than she expected. In a role reversal, it was Tina who got a hand on Natalie’s ankle. With a tug, Natalie went back down onto her knees, hard. Tina scrambled over her back like she was after a fumbled football.
“I have kids, too,” Tina blurted out.
Natalie rolled onto her back, taking Tina with her. She grappled with Tina on the floor, moving her face from side to side to avoid her fingers, which Tina was trying to use like talons. Even so, Tina sunk her nails into Natalie’s cheek. She pulled her fingers across the skin, digging in deep. Blood surfaced from the long marks gored into Natalie’s flesh.
With an anguished roar, Natalie bucked Tina off her, but she fell back in the direction of the knife. By the time Natalie scrambled to her feet, she found Tina standing as well, holding the knife out in front of her, stabbing at the air.
With every step Tina took forward, Natalie took one in retreat, all the way until she was butted up against the rack of dumbbells. Instinctively, Natalie picked up a ten-pound weight to use as a weapon.
“Please, Tina. Don’t. This isn’t you.”
“I killed before to save my life, my family. I can do it again.”
Natalie threw the weight at Tina’s head, but there wasn’t much thrust. Tina had no trouble sidestepping the slow-moving projectile. Natalie picked up a five-pound weight and threw it harder this time. Tina ducked to avoid the strike.
Don’t stop attacking.
Don’t give her time to breathe.
Blood continued to ooze from the scratches running down Natalie’s cheek as she picked up another ten-pound barbell. This time, instead of throwing it, she charged at Tina while giving her best warrior cry. Taken by surprise, Tina backpedaled quickly. She crossed over the running track before ramming up against the wall that overlooked the swimming pool below.
Momentum carried Natalie over the track as well. When she was within striking distance, Tina lurched forward with a lightning-fast counterattack. The blade of the knife landed on Natalie’s forearm. Tina pulled her arm back, dragging the blade with it, producing a long gash. Natalie tried landing a punch at Tina’s head with the barbell, but the shock of getting sliced open caused her to miss her target. Even worse, the barbell sprung from her grasp as if she’d thrown the weight. The window behind Tina broke in an explosion of glass that plinked as the pieces hit the tiled floor below.
A chlorine smell washed in through the shattered window. Tina came at Natalie with a fury, the knife hoisted high above her head. In response, Natalie wrapped Tina around the midsection, driving forward with her legs like she was pushing a weighted sled across the floor. Tina fell backward, stopping only when her legs hit the wall behind her. About three feet up from the floor, the wall became an open window that looked out onto the pool below. With the glass now in a million pieces, there was nothing to safeguard against a fall. Tina vanished through the opening, but Natalie didn’t see what was happening in time to let go.
She was still holding on to Tina when she realized the momentum was too much. One moment her feet were on the ground, and the next she was tumbling over Tina before she, too, fell through the opening created by the shattered window. The fall lasted only a second, but it took a lifetime. Down she went, holding her breath, eyes closed, bracing to meet the floor below.
A sudden splash reverberated in her ears. Cold water covered her body. Natalie hit the pool with force, and intense pain radiated out from her shoulder before traveling up and down her legs, her back. She surfaced, choking, coughing water out of her lungs and spitting out blood. Wet hair curtained her eyes. She examined her arm, expecting to see a protruding bone. There was the gash, nothing more. But still, the blood was everywhere, pooling about her with the crimson sheen of an oil slick.
Then she saw the source.
Tina lay on the edge of the pool, her arms splayed open in the shape of a cross, legs straight out in front of her, feet pointing toward the ceiling. Her shoulders hung over the pool’s edge with her neck flexed at a grotesque angle, her head partly submerged under water. Even with a distorted view, Natalie could see that one side of her head was crushed and through a hole in her skull, poured a steady stream of blood.
Natalie caught a flash of silver glinting from the bottom of the pool, shimmering like a mirage. It was the knife used to kill Audrey Adler.
CHAPTER 46
MICHAEL
He felt like he was drowning.
He couldn’t breathe. There was something down his throat, choking him. He thrashed about in an unfamiliar bed, noticing now that there were tubes and wires hindering his mobility, so many that he felt like a puppet on strings. Alarms rang out. He heard commotion coming from the hallway outside his room. Then there was indiscriminate shouting, strained voices, and the high-piercing whine of several more alarms.
His eyes fluttered open slowly; everything appeared blurred. He shook his head from side to side, trying to dislodge the discomfort in his throat. No use. There was no getting rid of it. Soon there were hands all over him, tugging, pulling out the tubes. He gagged. Coughed.
“Michael, can you hear me? Take a breath, you can do it on your own now. Breathe in slowly, out slowly. Relax, Michael, you’re okay.”
He thrashed in his bed.
“We need to sedate him,” he heard somebody cry out.
Michael understood what that meant. He had something important to say before they sent him back into the abyss.
“Natalie,” he managed to croak out. “I need to see my wife.”
* * *
Michael opened his eyes to find her standing at his bedside. Her arm was in a heavy-duty black sling. Bruises and scrapes covered her face but didn’t dim her smile or her beauty. His heart lifted.
“Hey, you,” Natalie said, running her hand across Michael’s stubbly cheek.
“Hey, back,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “What happened? You’re hurt.”
He lifted his arm weakly, gesturing to her sling.
“The old Michael would ask if I got the license plate of the truck that hit me,” Natalie said.
“I’m still heavily sedated,” he managed, which coaxed a little smile from Natalie. She got him some water, which he drank through a plastic straw.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “For what I’ve done. I’m so sorry.”
A few tears slipped out of her eyes.
Michael didn’t know what she was sorry for, so she told him, enduring a fresh stabbing pain in his abdomen as her story unfolded.
“You told me that you killed Audrey.”
Michael nodded, though he didn’t quite remember.
“I was dying,” he said. “You were all I cared about, you and the kids.”