Page 4 of Beautiful Exile

A shadow slid over her body again, and then a man moved into the frame. He looked like he belonged. Like someone who lived at one of the properties a few acres away. Someone we’d see at the club or church. He wore khakis and a button-down shirt, his light brown hair just a little shaggy and unkempt.

But his hands showed he was different: the black gloves he wore, the gun in the hand closest to me.

My whole body trembled, and I felt liquid sliding down my legs, soaking my jeans.

“Check her,” the other voice said—the one that had taunted my mother. The one who’d ordered the spilling of her blood. The one with the Latin lion shoe.

The man in front of me crouched, careful not to step in the blood—Mom’s blood. He pressed two gloved fingers to her neck and then turned, looking at the man I couldn’t see. “She’s gone.”

My knees nearly gave way.Gone.My mom. The black dots were back, almost taking me under.

“Good riddance,” the other man spat. “Search every room in this house. I want to make sure that brat really is at a sleepover. If not, she’s dead.” His voice began to fade as he stomped down the hall, but his words reverberated in my ears.

Sleepover… My mom’s story was saving me, telling the beautiful lie that I was gone.

Only it wasn’t thegonemy mom was. Or my dad. My chest burned as I slid to the floor, my body contorting to fit the space. But I couldn’t stay upright anymore.

All I wanted was to slip into thatgoneright along with my parents.

1

ARDEN

PRESENT DAY

I stared at the painting,frustration swelling, swirling in inky tendrils as I assessed the image and brushstrokes, the angry beat of heavy metal blaring from the speakers. It wasn’t working. Something was missing. Perhaps it was too similar to pieces I’d done in the past. Or maybe it felt just the slightest bit false.

I worked in various mediums: metal for sculpting, oils for canvases, even the occasional pastel or charcoal piece. It was my way of processing and dealing with the darkness. Letting it come and then expelling it onto some surface.

Some would think it was healthy. The foster family I’d ended up with on the opposite side of the country certainly did. But the truth was, the darkness and I had never really come to an understanding. We constantly battled, but I never won the war—even now, at age twenty-five.

Which was why my workshop, nestled in the mountains of Central Oregon, was currently ablaze with light. It was my way of casting out those shadows, the same as I did with my art. Ironically, while my fear of the dark had remained, my creativity came alive at night.

Maybe it was the darkness’s way of keeping its hooks in me, tempting me to see if I was brave enough to face it. I stared harder at the canvas. The image was haunting; I’d give it that. Dark, tunneling trees beckoned you to come closer. But something was definitely missing.

I let out a growl of frustration that had Brutus lifting his head from where he lay in the dog bed in the corner, his gray ears twitching. The massive cane corso was always checking up on me. He was another weapon in my arsenal against the darkness.

“I’m fine,” I grumbled, heading to the sink on the far wall. Pouring some solvent into a dish, I began the process of cleaning my brushes.

The routine was a meditation of sorts—one of the few I could muster. Because sitting on a pillow while soft music played wasn’t really my thing. I needed something active, punctuated by the raw anger of hard rock and various kinds of metal. I found it in art and jujitsu.

Both were gifts in their own way. Ones given to me by the family I’d found in a place I’d least expected. After months of foster care and then witness protection in Boston, they’d finally placed me far from that world and with a family who knew nothing about Boston society or judges who’d taken bribes to throw cases a certain way, ultimately costing their family everything.

As that familiar mix of anger and guilt swirled in a noxious stew inside me, I took a steadying breath and remembered where I’d landed.

With the Colsons.

A family that was a mix of blood, adoption, and foster bonds but closer than any I’d ever known. But maybe it was the element of choice that made it that way.

Nora Colson’s choice to continue to bring children into her home after losing her husband and one of her sons in a car accident. But not just any children. She took the toughest cases, the most broken ones. So, it hadn’t been a surprise that I’d landed on her doorstep, barely verbal and scared of my own shadow.

But she and her mom, whom we called Lolli, had brought me out of my shell and helped me heal the best they could. Just like theyhad for everyone who came across their threshold. They had Cope and Fallon, Nora’s birth children; her adopted son, Shep; and Rhodes, Trace, and Kyler, her fosters.

We were a patchwork family full of different threads and fabrics, but it created something that never would’ve been otherwise. Something more beautiful.

But that didn’t change the fact that I sometimes felt like I didn’t fit. I was just a little too odd. Not especially good with people. I was better with my paints, metals, animals, and sparring—all the things that didn’t need words.

I dropped my brushes onto the towel, spreading them out to dry. My fingers were still twitchy since I hadn’t gotten the outlet that painting provided tonight. My gaze flicked to the massive windows along my workshop’s back wall. I could just see the beginnings of the sun peeking over the ridge of the Monarch Mountains to the east and knew it would cast its rays across the golden faces of Castle Rock before long.

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