CHAPTER ONE

It’s raining, and the tattered roof of the bus stop does nothing to prevent my hoodie and backpack from getting soaked.

I glare in the direction of where I just walked from. A twenty-minute walk in the rain that would have been easier if she had just driven me in her faded Honda. She didn’t even bother to come say goodbye.

Clutching the straps of my backpack tighter, I refuse to cry.

Why would I want to spend my life in that dirty trailer? No. I don’t want to end up like that flabby woman my dad married as a last resort. I’m not going to be trailer trash like her and just spend my life drinking and gambling.

That woman is fifty shades of crazy as it is. I’m still reeling over the fact that she framed me. My hand flexes around the strap of my backpack. I knew she hated me but framing me for attempted murder is a bit of overkill.

I know she had wanted to send me to juvie until I’m eighteen next year. I still remember the smug look on her face when she had been sitting in the courtroom, her left hand bandaged.

I don’t know what Dad was thinking when he chose to marry her. It still grates at me.

However, there is a cold satisfaction in recalling the way her smile slid off her face when the judge offered me the option of going to this stupid delinquents’ camp for a year instead.

I scoff.

As if I’ll really go.

As soon as I’m on this bus, I’ll get off at the fifth stop, which is in a city. I’ll find my way around. I’m smart. I glance at my reflection in the dirty glass where there is a peeling poster stuck on the other side of a half-naked woman, bending over.

Choppy, brown hair and green eyes, I barely have any baby fat left in my cheeks at seventeen. Boys my age always call me hot. Men, older than me, call me alluring. I make sure never to be alone with either. My chest needs a little more growing, but I’m curvy enough. I can easily pass as nineteen, twenty, or—maybe with a little makeup—twenty-two.

I look back at the empty stretch of road.

I hate Texas with a vengeance. If I have it my way, I’ll never come back here. And if things work out the way I’m planning, I’ll never have to.

I have the bus schedule memorized. It’s a long trip with multiple stops, but it’s a bus that will take me straight to the new hell Dolores wants to send me to.

Mistfall Wilderness Camp.

Does she really think she can throw me in some delinquent, government sponsored school and she’ll get rid of me? So that she can bring her greasy lover to that trailer my Dad raised me in?

Fury burns through me, along with morbid disgust, and a grief that hasn’t yet softened even though a year has passed.

Dad would never have let this happen.

I bite my tongue to push back the tears that are burning my eyes right now.

Don’t think about him.

Don’t think about him because you can’t do anything yet.

My hand clenches into a fist as an unbidden memory returns to me. The day of the funeral. That fat whale just sat there, staring at the urn. She didn’t even ask me before cremating him. She didn’t even let me see his face when they found his body.

Sixteen years of memories are all I have left of the only person in the world who gave two shits about me. And now I’m here, being discarded like a useless lump of flesh. I saw her research all these delinquent camps. I remember her taunts about how they would kill me, and that I would be no better than the living dead once they were done with me.

But living with her was also no better.

I move to the edge of the bus stop where the water isn’t seeping through. My hoodie is drenched. Under my anger is misery.

I want Dad back.

I want our old life back, the one before he married this woman.

But Dad is gone, and nobody knows why.

With the crime rate being what it is, they made my father into another statistic, blaming drugs and what not. But I know better.

We may have been poor, but Dad was a scholar. He loved books. He never touched alcohol, not even at his own wedding. And he abhorred drugs. To the point that even I don’t mess with them either.

I draw the line at anything that messes with my senses.

I see a vehicle getting closer, and I frown. It’s a familiar car. A little too familiar.

Shoot.

Did Dolores figure out my plan? Is she here to personally drive me all the way to the Pacific Northwest?

I doubt she has the gas for it.

I see the car pull up and then Dolores’s figure emerges from it.

“You forgot this, you stupid idiot!”

She throws a package at my feet, and I scowl, “If I didn’t take it, then I don’t want it. Keep it and get lost.”

“Pick it up, or I’ll pound some sense into that thick head of yours.”

Her threat has me glancing at her meaty fists. I’ve been at the end of them enough to know what awaits me. I lean down and pick up the package.

“Give it to those people there,” Dolores spits at me. “And never come back. I don’t want to see your face again, useless no good—”

My blood boils. “Useless? Me? When was the last time you took a shower, Dolores? Any idea why your last lover threw up when you brought him to the trailer? When did you last have a job?”

I see her eyes turn into angry, little slits, and I know she’s going to come at me, but I don’t care. I won’t hold back anymore. If she kills me, at least the bus driver will be a witness. I can see the bus coming in the distance.

“You ungrateful little brat!” Dolores snarls. “After everything I’ve done for you—”

“Done?” I echo, laughing like a crazed loon. “You’ve done nothing aside from taking my wages to feed your alcohol habit! I don’t even know why Dad married you! What exactly did you bring to the table? Nothing, that’s what! Aside from beating me and stealing my savings, you’ve done nothing.”

“I gave you a roof!” Dolores roars, stepping toward me, furiously.

“That was my father’s trailer!” I shout back, equally pissed off. “That was my right! The moment you walked into our lives two years ago, everything went to hell. You can deny it all you want to the police but I know you had something to do with Dad’s death. You can’t convince me otherwise!”

Dolores goes still and then she lets out a bark of laughter. “James’s death? You think that was my fault? Is that why you’ve been so crazy since he died? What, you think I stabbed him or something?!”

“You had something to do with it,” I sneer with strong conviction. “Why else wouldn’t you let them do an autopsy? Why else would you risk a public fine and get him cremated? I know you’re hiding something, and when I’m back, you can bet your ugly face that I’ll find out. You’ll be rotting behind bars by the time I’m done! I’m never forgiving you!”

Dolores gives me an incredulous look. “You think I killed your father and then pulled off some major stunt to hide it from the cops? Newsflash, sweetheart. The cops don’t give a shit. The only reason the judge fined me was because you threw a freaking fit in the station.”

“Don’t try to—”

“You think you’re so smart and that your father was such an angel, don’t you?!” She suddenly spits out. “You don’t know a damn thing about the kind of man your father is, the kind of things he’s into. He’s a damn coward. You say I didn’t raise you?! If I hadn’t been there this past year, you wouldn’t have survived a day. I’m the only reason you are still breathing, you ungrateful little brat! James is a coward. He would rather leave you than face reality. He would rather you cry than take you with him. I stuck around, Taylor! I did! Not him! And I kept you safe! His little stunt—I covered it all to keep you safe! And what do you do?”

I stare at her as the bus pulls up and the doors part. “What do you mean take me with him?”

It suddenly occurs to me that I never once saw his face. Where there had once been anger at not being able to say goodbye to my father’s dead body, now the whole thing suddenly takes on a new meaning.

“What do you mean?!” I repeat, angrily, a little desperately.

“Get on the bus,” Dolores sneers. “And good riddance to you. Don’t come back here. I don’t want to see your face again.”

My blood is boiling at this point, frustration and agony rising to form a tight ball in my chest. I can’t breathe. “No!”

“No?” Dolores’s eyes narrow into tiny slits as she rounds the car, her fist raising in the air.

I already know what’s going to happen.

She’s in my face now, her hand balled into a fist.

My ears are ringing, and I can feel my hands tingling with a strange sensation. But I can’t think straight.

I shove her.

She should have just stumbled back.

But something else happens. Something that shocks even me.

She goes flying through the air, as if shot out of a canon. A horrific cry leaves her lips as she is thrown against the side of the bus with a force that could not have come from me.

I look down at my own hands, perplexed at what they just did.

It is the scariest thing I’ve seen in my life.

Frightened, shaking, I can’t just stand there.

I run onto the bus, and the bus driver simply closes the doors as if nothing happened. He doesn’t even bother to check and see that Dolores is safely on the sidewalk.

I stand there like a frozen statue.

Did I do that?

It couldn’t be.

I stare at my hands and swallow.

No.

She just tripped. That’s all.

That’s all.