Prologue: Fifty Miles North
It was a fairly cool night out, and the air was laced with moisture, which settled against the skin and caused hairs to rise. Kate Beckett, however, was not cold, as she sat with her back against the rough bark of the only leafless oak around, its branches coiling high up into the black sky, as if reaching for the peppered stars. Though her sleeves were short, and her draping shirt, no doubt designed to follow some style to which she was not privy, hung off her right shoulder, her skin did not prickle, except for when her curling hair tickled the back of her neck. Black skinny jeans were damp and smudged with soil, and knee-high lace-up leather boots had lost their shine long ago. But she was not cold. She supposed that she probably should have been, but her sensitivity had crept inside of her somewhat, and was lurking somewhere beneath the surface, unable to breach her skin.
The crickets crooned and birds chirped as Becket sat against that tree, surrounded by green and brown and moist, hugging one leg to her chest, the other outstretched and resting on a root protruding from the Earth. Her face bore no expression; it was cold and disconnected. She stared absently into the shadows ahead of her. Her Crown Victoria was not far away, she knew, but she couldn't remember from which direction she had come as she sat there in the dirt, fifty miles north of Manhattan in a State Park somewhere along the Hudson.
At last Kate Beckett's gaze shifted to stare at the cold metal wrapped around her left ring finger, holding a diamond safely in its grasp. It was one so glitteringly clear and so ostentatious she could hardly remember the moment she allowed it to be placed upon her finger. It was an icy reminder, and it felt too tight, like it was cutting off her circulation, imprisoning her blood vessels. Imprisoning her. The hand wrapped around her bent leg so tightly it was digging the metal bar into her calf.
Her right hand was more relaxed, resting palm up on her long thigh. In it she cradled her gun.
And for the first time in her career, it was not a suspect's barrel she faced, but her own. This was perhaps the hardest test she'd ever faced, from the most difficult position she had ever found herself in. Everything was coming at her at once, like demons crawling out form the gaps between the trees surrounding her, trapping her there. She felt the same crushing pain as had come with PTSD; the same ache of loss as she'd felt that day, January 9th, all those years ago; the helplessness of facing the shooter in the warehouse after her own shooting - the shaking of her wrist; the conflict as she'd missed her shot, almost corrupted evidence and then put the job before her heart to protect her mother's killer. It all hit her right now, all that and everything that had happened since, everything that had passed in just three days, and everything that had been lost. All that had been said. All that had been seen. Everything shared between her and her squad, her and Lanie, her and Ryan and Espo. Her and Rick.
The question lay only in her cowardice, and the murderous grip of her depression. But even she could not be the judge of that as she stared vacantly out through cold, dead eyes.
She clicked off the safety and raised her arm.