Inked in Lies: The Fallen Men #5 Read online

  He went down in a way I knew meant he would stay down.

  “Gotta say, I’m thinkin’ we’re cut from the same rebel cloth,” Zeus said as he wiped blood off his rings with the edge of his tee. “You wanna hang ’round with us, see how it goes, I’m thinkin’ we’d be happy to welcome you into the fold.”

  Bat finished up with the last assailant, leavin’ him on the ground and steppin’ over him on heavily booted feet so he could slap me on the back. “Welcome to the club, Casanova.”

  And just like that, a kid who had never been lost in his whole fuckin’ life felt like he’d finally been found.

  LILA

  “The father killed the mother.”

  It was that time between sunset and twilight, when the sky bleeds from pinks and purples to a soft-edged blue. The crickets were chirping in the long grass in the field behind the old house, and fireflies were starting to sputter with light.

  I sat on the concrete front stoop, legs bare against the rough stone, pebbled with goose flesh as the air cooled and the sun dropped past the horizon.

  I was trying to focus on the night, on the earth as it inhaled and exhaled all around me. I tried to remember I was just a speck in the belly of the beast, nothing more or less significant than a mote of dust or a grain of sand.

  But it was hard not to focus on my foster mother’s conversation as she spoke on the phone in the kitchen. Her thin voice wound like a ribbon through the cracked open window over the sink and fell in my lap like an unwanted gift.

  “Poor thing was there,” she continued over the clang of pots as she prepared dinner. “She doesn’t speak much now. I wonder if she might be a bit…dim. Or if it’s just the trauma, you know?”

  I peeled apart the blade of grass in my hand, pulling out the seeds and adding them to the pile beside me before I moved on to the next.

  I knew the germination cycle of the grass in her back field. How long it would take to plant from seed to growth. What kind of conditions were needed for certain plants to grow. That it was stupid of her to plant hyacinth in the full shade at the side of the house when they needed sun.

  I wasn’t dim.

  But I understood why she might think so, given I’d avoided speaking to her and her wife, Rhonda, whenever I could get away with it. It wasn’t that they were bad people. It was that I found I had nothing to say, not even when someone asked me a direct question.

  I thought, maybe, I had left my voice back in Entrance. That it had torn out of my throat while I was screaming for my parents to stop fighting. For my mother not to die.

  “Just plays outside all day long. Obviously, her parents let her run wild! She comes home with dirty hands and skinned knees and then won’t even tell me where she’s been.”

  I didn’t get why she cared. I didn’t cause any trouble, didn’t bother any of the other farmers in the small valley of Summerland, B.C., so why did it matter what I did?

  “I’m telling you, Lisa, we’ve had all kinds of kids stay with us, but Lila? She…well, it’s like she doesn’t care about anything. She just exists. It’s not as if she’s a problem child, but it’s concerning, and honestly, a little creepy. She does exactly as she’s told with this blank face, and she never talks unless we ask her a direct question. I’m worried we won’t be able to reach her. She’s been here six weeks and no change.”

  No change.

  I pulled the old flip phone from the back pocket of my jean shorts and opened it to read the last text message.

  Jonathon: We’re working on it, Flower Child. Be patient and safe, yeah?

  Dane: Nine weeks and eleven days, Li. I’ll be there no matter what in nine weeks and eleven days. Even if we don’t have the legal shit sorted out, I’ll be there, and you’ll come with me. I promise.

  I moved my thumb over the little screen, wishing I could actually see the Booths, actually touch Dane.

  I felt slightly breathless without them. The crushing weight of missing them too heavy on my chest, cutting off my air flow at every inhale.

  “The only time she ever gets cross is when I try to throw out her flowers,” Marge continued as she ran the tap. “So I don’t touch them anymore, even when they wilt and rot in the glass. Rhonda used to collect bugs, so they have something in common, but I barely know how to talk to the girl.”

  Done with eavesdropping, I pushed off the step and began my twilight walk of the property.

  Rhonda and Marge Croft owned a blueberry farm on the edge of Summerland, and their sweeping property was my happy place. Every evening before dinner, I walked under the ponderosa pine trees, trailing my fingers through the long wheatgrass, dragging deep, clean droughts of hot, arid summer air through my open mouth so I could taste the mineral breeze off Lake Okanogan. I took pictures with my phone. The tight bunch of a blue hydrangea, the fading edge of Giant’s Head Mountain against the darkening sky, the silky black back of a raven lurking in the gloomy pines.

  It was our ritual.

  Dane and Jonathon and me.

  We took pictures of pretty things to send to each other.

  Dane sent photos of Vancouver, the hard angles of blue-tinted glass buildings and the sweep of the Pacific Ocean spread out from rocky beaches.

  Jonathon sent pictures of people from home, of Molly in her kitchen and Diogo coming home from work still done up in his wet canvas overalls. He sent videos of Milo and Oliver playing basketball at the hoop in their driveway and shots of Hudson making a mess everywhere he went. He walked along Main Street every week to snap shots of Mac’s Grocer and Honey Bear Café and Stella’s Diner.

  He knew Dane and I lived for those photos.

  I’d scroll through them before I fell asleep, the glare of the phone harsh beneath the covers of my bed.

  My favourite were the images Jonathon sent of his graffiti.

  He graffitied everything. Every inch of skin he could reach with a pen on his arms and legs, chest and feet. The entire interior of the Booth’s modest farmhouse had been transformed by his art, painted onto the floors and up the walls where the designs bloomed on ceilings and around doorframes.

  And now he had taken to graffitiing the town.

  Dane and I both knew it was for us.

  A sunflower on the black brick of Evergreen Gas Station.

  A pair of blue eyes, Dane’s eyes, looking out from the seawall in the bay.

  He was leaving pieces of us all over the town we’d been forced to abandon.

  I cried whenever he sent a freshly spray-painted design, and I laughed when he took to wearing a black skeleton bandana over his face as he crept around in the dark to do his work.

  Even kilometres apart, Jonathon Booth knew how to bring joy to the Davalos kids.

  But nothing could reach me that night.

  It was Ignacio’s birthday.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have felt so sad about it, that I wasn’t with my father and never again would be to celebrate his birth. He’d killed my mother, after all.

  But he was still my papá.

  The man who let us shove his face into the tres leches cake while we chanted mordida! Who taught me how tie my shoes and patiently braided my hair in the morning before school.

  The man who provided the only adult guidance I’d ever known.

  There was an ache in my chest like the two sides were divided by a crater I would never be able to bridge between loving him and hating him.

  It throbbed acutely as I lay down in the dirt between the rows of low blueberry bushes and stared up at the blackening bowl of the sky.

  The night was so quiet in the farming valley that I heard the crunch of tires on gravel long before I would have in Entrance.

  It didn’t interest me at first.

  Marge and Rhonda were good people, often having friends and family drop by to visit, but I wasn’t in the mood to pretend I was okay around company, so I stayed in the dirt.

  When my phone buzzed with an alert, I raced to flip it open to find the latest update from Dane or Jonathon.
It had been two days since they’d texted.

  It was a picture from Dane, the plastic black curve of a glove compartment.

  Not his best effort.

  I was about to flip it closed when it vibrated again.

  A photo from Jonathon, this one of his knee. There was a tear in his worn jeans and on the skin showing through the gap he had drawn a sunflower he’d labeled ”Suntastic Yellow.”

  My chest warmed as I drew my thumb over the screen, pretending I could touch the petals.

  Before I could reply, another image came through.

  I tapped it and immediately choked on my inhalation of shocked breath.

  A selfie of Dane and Jonathon pressed cheek to cheek. My brother was beaming widely, his face so dazzling to me that tears pricked the backs of my eyes and started to roll down my cheeks into the dirt. To see his face expressing genuine happiness again felt like a punch to the solar lexis. And then, Jonathon beside him. More subdued, his grin a curling of lips and the slight cocking of a single eyebrow that made him look rakish and mischievous.

  Like he was keeping a secret.

  Before I could even begin to wonder what it could mean that Dane and Jonathan were together again, there was a clamor of voices coming from the front of the house.

  “Lila,” I imagined someone called.

  But then again, louder, someone did. “Lila!”

  My heart stopped for one long moment, and then as if prompted by a starter gun, I took off at a sprint. I jumped from the dirt and ran through the rows of bushes, scattered blueberries bursting under my toes, arms pumping, legs churning so hard they burned after only a few steps.

  I’d never run faster, propelled by the force of hope at my back.

  “Lila!” Another voice called from the front as I reached the backyard. “Li, where are you?”

  “Here,” I panted quietly as I started to round the house. Then louder, “Here!”

  I broke through the side gate and exploded into the front drive, the asphalt under my tender feet still warm from hours in the sun.

  And there they were.

  All of them.

  Diogo and Molly.

  Milo, Oliver, and Hudson.

  Jonathon.

  And Dane.

  I couldn’t breathe. There was no space for air in my lungs, they were wrung so tight with impossible joy. My mouth was open, panting, but I couldn’t find my voice. My blood was pumping hard through in my body, but I found I couldn’t move.

  Only my eyes stirred, hot as fresh coals and wet, so wet they leaked down my cheeks, over my neck, down the slope of my chest to dampen the fabric of my t-shirt.

  I stared at them so hard it hurt, and then I stared at Dane.

  He looked good, healthy and happier than I’d ever seen him. His face was spilt open in a wide, white grin, his eyes sparkling the way the noon day sun did over the lake. He’d grown even taller, definitely becoming broader through the shoulders and chest in the time we’d been apart.

  He looked like a man.

  A whimper worked its way free of my throat like the whine of some broken engine. It seemed to breach the tension between us, and before I could blink, Dane was moving.

  Then I was running too.

  He dropped to his knees on the pavement the moment before I hurtled myself into his arms. The second I wrapped my arms around him and dug my face into his neck, the crisp curls behind his ear tickling me familiarly, I burst into ruckus sobs.

  I couldn’t control myself. I clutched at his back, gripped his shirt so tightly it warped the material, crawled up his torso so that I wound around him like a baby koala.

  This was my brother.

  The only person who had loved me my entire life and had always tried to put me first, even before himself.

  And he was there.

  Holding me.

  It felt too good to be true, and my anxiety drove me to claw at him and squeeze him as tightly as my small body would allow.

  Dane’s husky chuckle ruffled my hair. “You still smell earthy and sweet as spring.”

  And that was it, the end of my composure. Sobs barrelled up my throat and tore across my tongue, a tempest of disconsolate sound.

  “Shh, Li, you’re going to make yourself sick,” he murmured to me as he stroked a big hand down my hair and back, letting me maul him. “Quiet, now, my Li girl.”

  “I-I-I can’t,” I wailed helplessly, tossing my head back so I could look at his face, snot trailing across my cheek with the momentum of my turn. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you,” he answered calmly, always so composed, always so ready to tether my wild soul. “I’m here now, and I love you.”

  I placed my chubby hands on his cheeks to feel the planes of his face, the way a beard pushed up through the skin of his jaw and abraded my palms, how his cheekbones angled so high and so steep. I delighted in recognizing the familiar shade of his dark skin and the way his left eye twitched when he was tired. I ran my thumbs over his brows and finished by tipping my forehead back against his neck, more settled by my physical examination than by his soothing words.

  I had always been tactile, touch the only affirmation my mind would believe.

  “There we go,” Dane murmured as he picked me up and planted me on his hip like I was a baby.

  I was too elated and too exhausted by my emotional waterworks to protest. Instead, I fisted a hand in his tee and rolled my head so I could look at the Booths as we walked back across the driveway to them.

  Molly was the only one openly crying, but Hudson had red eyes and a serious sniffle as he clung to his mother’s hand. Milo and Oliver were pressed shoulder to shoulder, taking solace from each other, and Jonathon stood beside Diogo, both men with their arms crossed and feet braced like they were ready to slay anyone who got in the way of our reunion.

  My heart ached so badly it dropped a beat.

  “Hi,” I said, suddenly shy.

  I hadn’t seen them in weeks. Maybe things were different. Maybe, like my parents, they’d forgotten how to love me.

  But then Molly was surging forward with Hudson, enveloping both of us in a hug. She smelled of home, of leavened bread and sun-soaked linen.

  “Hey, sweet girl,” she said through her tears and her smile. “Hey, sweetie.”

  Then Diogo was over her shoulder, his huge hand descending on my head. I was proud to wear it there like a coronet.

  “Hey, girl,” he said in his rumbly, lightly accented voice. “You ready to come home?”

  “Are you serious?” I breathed, tears flooding my eyes again.

  Dane laughed and pressed his cheek against mine. “It took a while, but they got it sorted out with the province. Molly and Diogo are going to foster us until I’m eighteen and I can take guardianship of you in nine weeks.”

  “And eleven days,” I added, making everyone laugh in an expression that was more relief than humour.

  “Or longer,” Molly said as she pulled back in order to let Milo and Oliver pat my back, touch my hand, kiss my cheek.

  The Booths were tactile, too, and I took every ounce of their bright affection like the sun starved hyacinth at the side of the farm house.

  “You two don’t have to move out until you’re ready,” she continued. “If you want to stay so Dane can go to school or something, we’ll be happy to have you.”

  I could feel Dane’s shift, the way his spine straightened and his shoulders locked. “We’ll see.”

  Molly looked at him with her big, sad brown eyes, lips rolled between her teeth, and then she nodded. “Okay. For now, why don’t we talk to your foster parents and get your stuff? If we hustle, we can make it back to Entrance before midnight.”

  “Unless you want to spend one more night here?” Jonathon teased.

  He was still standing a little set apart from our group, his hands in the pockets of his baggy, distressed jeans. There was a small, easy grin stamped on his rosy mouth, but he didn’t look happy, not really.

  He looked
worried.

  Something twisted in my chest because the same vulnerability I had felt moments ago seemed to be echoed in him.

  I squirmed until Dane let me down, and then I walked over to Jonathon, slowly, even though I wanted to run.

  He eyed me with that fake grin affixed to his face, his eyes the only true tell of his wariness.

  I didn’t stop moving until I was against him, my arms wrapped around his waist as I hugged him.

  It was the first time I’d ever embraced him, and it made me remember the last time he’d touched me, curled around me like a human shield amid the chaos of my mother’s murder.

  This time, it was me who could comfort him.

  I tipped my head up to look into his eyes and found him watching me, his grin flattened into a confused grimace.

  “Thank you,” I said softly, just for him. “For saving Papá and trying to save my mamá.”

  Something worked behind his eyes, and the corner of his mouth disappeared between his teeth. Then his hand lifted and settled on my shoulder for a brief squeeze before he leaned down to say just to me, “Wasn’t tryin’ to save them, Lila. Wasn’t about them at all, yeah?”

  I sucked a shaky breath in through my mouth and slowly nodded. “Yeah, okay. But you should know, I found a dream.”

  “Oh, yeah?” This time his smile was genuine.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to find the courage to be bold enough to tell the truth. “I thought of it the first day when you guys moved in next door, and now, it’s kind of coming true.”

  “What is it then?”

  I scuffed my bare foot against the asphalt, took a deep breath, and said the truest thing I’d ever had to say, “I dreamed I’d be a Booth.”

  LILA

  “Feliz cumpleaños!” I shouted as I flung open the door to the bedroom Dane and Jonathon shared and sprinted over to my brother’s sleeping form. “Happy birthday, Dane!”