by Tarah Benner
Levi was handsome and charming, and he had a habit of flirting with Lark and the rest of the girls on the farm. Most of all, Lark remembered the way he’d smelled — an expensive cologne with notes of citrus and cedar.
Lark was shy and awkward around guys her age, but Levi was easy to talk to. He flirted and smiled, and sometimes Lark flirted back. It seemed harmless enough. Levi was way too old for her, and she figured he knew that.
It seemed harmless for two whole months, and then, in a night, everything changed.
It happened on the Fourth of July. Lark was warm and tipsy from the rum and Cokes she’d been sipping. The guys were setting off fireworks over the pond while the girls roasted hotdogs and marshmallows. The air was alive with gleeful, boozy shouts, and Lark had never felt so content.
At one point, the bonfire sputtered, and Lark staggered off to get more wood. They’d been stockpiling it for months over by the toolshed, and it felt good to get up and walk.
Halfway between the main barn and the shed, Lark heard somebody calling her name. She recognized Levi’s voice, and she waved him over to help her with the firewood. She never asked why he was out by himself near the edge of the woods or what he’d been doing while the rest of them celebrated.
He was as nice and normal as ever, but when they got to the toolshed, Levi started acting funny. He positioned himself much too close to Lark, and she could smell the booze on his breath.
He grabbed Lark by the hand and pulled her into the toolshed. All of a sudden, he leaned forward and tried to kiss her, and Lark took an automatic step back.
She felt an immediate kick of awkwardness, followed swiftly by guilt. She tried to laugh it off and refocus on the firewood, but Levi was undeterred. He pulled her in and squeezed her butt, and Lark jerked out of his grip.
Levi grabbed her arm and yanked her toward him. Lark tried to pull away and yelled at him to stop. But that just seemed to provoke Levi, and in a split second, he had her sandwiched against the wall.
Lark pushed him away and cried for help, but her voice was drowned out by the scream of fireworks.
For once, Levi’s cologne didn’t smell good. It was strong and aggressive, and it made Lark want to retch. She couldn’t see anything except the side of his face, but one of her arms was pinned against a low shelf.
Her fingers brushed something hard and cold, and in that instant, her survival instincts kicked in. Levi was busy fumbling with Lark’s pants, and she saw her opportunity.
She’d only meant to stun him with the hammer — maybe even knock him out. But she’d struck him harder than she’d thought, and her aim had been true.
Everything after that was still a blur. She vaguely remembered running back to the barn, crying hysterically. She remembered somebody draping a blanket over her shoulders and making her a cup of tea before the sheriff arrived at the scene. She remembered her friends’ sympathetic expressions — and how they changed when she told them what she’d done.
The trouble was nobody had seen Levi corner her in the toolshed. He hadn’t managed to rape her, so there was no physical evidence.
On top of that, Levi had been a volunteer firefighter — an all-American boy who’d lived in the county all his life and played high-school football.
Nobody could believe that he would try to rape a nineteen-year-old girl. And when the sheriff took the other workers’ statements, it sounded as though Lark had been flirting with him all summer.
It wasn’t until trial that Lark learned what Levi had been doing in the woods that night. He’d been fooling around with Natalie, an older, pretty girl who’d worked with them.
Apparently, Levi and Natalie had been hooking up all summer, and Natalie insisted that Levi had never forced himself on her.
When it was all over, everybody thought Lark had killed Levi in a jealous rage. The prosecution convinced the jury that Lark had lured Levi to the shed with the intention of killing him.
Before Lark knew it, her public defender was urging her to take the plea bargain. It was twenty-five years at San Judas or thirty to life in federal prison. She took the deal.
Lark was dry-heaving on the bank — her stomach a mess of angry knots. Beads of sweat had erupted all over her body. Denali was whimpering, and Lark felt herself losing control.
That night with Levi Flemming hadn’t just robbed her of her freedom. It had awoken something ugly inside of her — something she could never escape.
eight
Lark
When Lark emerged from the abyss, she was lying in the mud on the edge of the river. Denali was breathing in her face, and she was in pain.
She must have passed out, though whether it was due to hunger or a blow she’d sustained in the fight, she couldn’t be sure. The sun was still high in the sky, which meant she hadn’t been out for long.
Still, the realization startled her. She felt shaky and off-kilter from a lack of nutrients and her flashback. The memory of that night still clung to her like a bitter chill.
In the five years she’d been imprisoned, she’d desperately tried to put Levi’s murder behind her, but she couldn’t. No matter how she justified it, she was a murderer.
Still trembling, Lark forced herself into a seated position and reached over to run her hands up and down Denali’s coat. It was coarse and warm in a comforting way and made her feel a little bit more sane.
Slowly, Lark’s heart rate returned to normal, and she crawled under her favorite cottonwood tree to take inventory of her injuries. Her ribs were definitely bruised, but nothing felt broken. Her knee was stiff and sore and the bump on her head still throbbed, but Bianca hadn’t managed to break her nose.
Her hands were in the worst shape of all. She could tell several of the tiny bones were probably fractured, but there was nothing she could do about that now.
She pulled herself gingerly to her feet, and as she did, she heard a familiar tew just a few yards away. She whipped her head around to locate the source of the call and froze.
A mountain bluebird was perched on a branch just ten or twelve yards to her left. His eyes and beak were black as coal, and the top half of his body was covered in indigo feathers. His breast was a paler shade of blue, tapering down to a snow-white belly.
As Lark watched, the bird cocked his head to the side and let out another tew, as if he’d never seen anything quite like her.
A sharp kick of nostalgia hit her so suddenly that she felt as though she’d missed a step coming down a flight of stairs. Bittersweet warmth and familiarity swelled inside her, and she pinched her own arm to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.
Lark hadn’t seen a mountain bluebird in more than six years — since the spring before she’d killed Levi Flemming. During her imprisonment at San Judas, she’d made it a game to see how many species of birds she could identify. Her mother had loved birds, and she’d taught Lark to identify most of them by their call alone.
Mountain bluebirds used to be plentiful in northern New Mexico, but over the years their numbers had diminished until they nearly disappeared. Lark thought she may never see another one in her lifetime, but here he was — chirruping just for her.
He lit off from the branch, and Lark followed his path through the canopy and up over the river. His outline faded against the pale blue sky, and Denali’s sudden bark yanked her out of her trance.
He was standing as still as a statue, glaring at a spot on the bank just a few feet downstream. Lark followed his gaze through the fence and jumped.
A man was standing on her side of the river — no more than eight or nine feet away. He was tall and handsome with deep-copper skin, wearing brown cargo pants and a dull navy shirt.
The man was looking right at her, and Lark recognized him as the guy who’d been staring at her on supply day. He couldn’t have been more than a few years older than her.
Lark’s spine tingled with anxiety, but something about his earnest gaze kept her rooted to the spot. His eyes were a warm, rich brown like cherry wo
od, framed by inky-black lashes.
A surge of panic shot through her veins. Mercy had very strict rules against fraternizing with the men, and Lark was going to be in enough trouble as it was. Her back was still scabbed and bloody from her last lashing. Her body couldn’t take any more punishment.
Caught by a sudden burst of common sense, Lark stumbled backward and prepared to run. But then the watcher took a step forward, and a soft, musical voice rang out.
“Hey . . . wait!”
Lark froze, watching the watcher for any sign of trouble.
“Who are you?” asked Lark. Her voice sounded rough and scratchy.
“Soren,” he said, taking another step closer to the fence and placing his hand against the chain-link panel.
Denali’s stance was low and protective, but he didn’t bark or growl.
“What’s your name?” asked the watcher.
“Are you the one who’s been leaving me messages?”
Soren cracked a smile, and Lark caught a flash of perfect white teeth. “Yeah . . . That was me.”
“Don’t come any closer,” she said abruptly. “Denali has ripped people apart for doing less than you’re doing right now.”
It wasn’t exactly true, but Soren didn’t know that. Unfortunately, when his gaze dropped to Lark’s side, Denali was wagging his tail and panting happily.
“How did you get here?” she asked, annoyed that Denali would drop his guard so easily.
“I swam.”
He wasn’t lying. His clothes were soaking wet, and he wasn’t wearing any shoes.
“I mean, how did you . . .” Lark gestured up at the steep rocky cliff towering above them. “Never mind.” She took a deep breath. “Why did you send me those messages?”
Soren shrugged. “I just wanted to talk to you.” His grin widened. “Actually, I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen you here before,” he said, speaking in a slow voice as if he were choosing his words carefully.
“When?”
Soren’s eyes flickered to the left. “A couple of times.”
“Have you been spying on me?”
“Uh, no . . .” Soren frowned, rubbing his neck. “Spying is a harsh word. I’d call it . . . admiring from a distance.”
“So you’ve been stalking me.”
“Why are you so determined to turn this into a bad thing?” he asked, eyes twinkling.
“Why were you watching me?”
Soren let out a burst of musical laughter. “Because I’m a guy. I could watch you all day and never get bored.”
Lark frowned. She was two seconds away from bolting back up to the colony. She shouldn’t have been talking to this guy at all. She felt weird knowing that he’d been watching her without her realizing it, but she just couldn’t seem to pull herself away.
“I don’t know what it’s like over there, but over here it can get a little suffocating,” said Soren. “Eight hundred dudes living on top of each other twenty-four/seven . . . You start to miss the fairer sex.”
“You mean you miss sex.”
“I didn’t say that,” said Soren, unable to suppress a grin. “It’s kind of a given, but that’s not what I meant.”
“How come I haven’t noticed you before?”
“I’m a hunter,” he said. “It’s my job to see without being seen — ‘stalking,’ as you call it.”
There was a long pause.
“So are you going to tell me your name, or do I have to guess?”
“Lark,” she said, almost defensively. “My name’s Lark.”
“Lark,” he repeated, his eyes warming at the sound of her name. “It fits you.”
Lark didn’t know how to respond to that.
“Was that a lark you were staring at a minute ago?”
Lark shook her head. “It was a mountain bluebird. I haven’t seen one in the five years I’ve been here.”
“You’ve been here for five years?”
She nodded.
“How much time you got left on your sentence?”
Lark cleared her throat. “Twenty. I’ll be forty-five by the time I get out.”
Soren’s eyebrows shot up so far that they were in danger of disappearing into his hairline. She could see him debating with himself — deciding whether or not he should ask her what she’d done to land herself in prison for twenty-five years. He didn’t.
Instead, Soren glanced around and lowered his voice to barely above a whisper. “What if I told you there might be a way for you to get out of here before you turned forty-five?”
Lark didn’t say anything right away. She just stared at him, waiting for him to continue.
Soren glanced around, his expression deadly serious. “What if I told you there was a way for you to spend your next birthday out there.” He nodded through the trees. “On the outside.”
“How?” Lark almost didn’t want to hear what Soren had to say. She didn’t want to get her hopes up, but she was too curious to dismiss him outright.
“Can I trust you?” he asked.
“Can you trust me? You’re the stalker!” said Lark.
“Fair enough.” Soren’s mouth quirked into a grin before falling back into complete seriousness.
Lark waited.
“It’s the guards,” he said. “Three of them have gone missing.”
“What do mean missing?”
“Missing,” Soren repeated. “Gone. At first I thought maybe the prison was just shorthanded — like too many people called in sick that day or something. But I’ve been watching, and the first two haven’t come back. Now another one’s gone.”
Lark shook her head. “Maybe they just made some cuts.”
“Maybe,” said Soren. “But if I were looking to escape . . . I’d say now would be a pretty good time.”
Lark dragged in a deep breath, her heart pounding against her ribcage. Soren didn’t seem completely crazy, but his suggestion that they could escape from San Judas sounded wild. Still, Lark couldn’t seem to walk away, and now Soren had ignited a dangerous spark of hope inside her.
“What about the fence?” she asked.
“All we need are a few cloudy days,” he said, speaking quickly now that he had a captive audience. “Last time, three straight days of cloud cover was all it took to deplete the batteries. There wasn’t enough juice left to keep that fence live, and it went down.”
“Three days of cloud cover,” Lark repeated. “How often does that happen?”
“Not very often,” Soren admitted. “But come July . . .”
“And what about the twenty-foot wall on the other side?”
Soren flashed a confident smile. “Up and over.”
Lark looked skeptical. “That’s your plan? Up and over?”
He quirked an eyebrow. “It’s best not to overthink it.”
Lark shook her head in disbelief. “Even if you managed to get over that wall, this place would still be crawling with guards. And once word got out that there was a convict on the loose, they’d have roadblocks, choppers . . . not to mention your face would be plastered all over the news.”
Soren tilted his head to the side. His expression was a mixture of amusement and disbelief. “If a couple of roadblocks were all that stood between you and freedom, would you really let that stop you?”
Lark didn’t answer. What he was suggesting was insane, but she couldn’t deny that she was intrigued. There was something about Soren that inspired confidence. He was charming, persuasive, and definitely dangerous.
“What do you say?”
“What are you in for?” Lark asked suddenly.
Soren’s face went dark, and for a moment, Lark wished she hadn’t asked. It seemed intrusive, unfair even, given the fact that he hadn’t asked her.
“I was charged with kidnap and aggravated assault,” he said in a low voice.
Lark’s eyebrows shot up.
“But there were some . . . extenuat
ing circumstances.”
“What kind of circumstances?”
Lark couldn’t imagine any scenario that could justify kidnap, but who was she to judge? Most people heard “convicted murderer” and stayed far away from her.
“Did you know a baseball bat is considered a deadly weapon?” he asked.
Lark opened and closed her mouth, but no words came out.
“The kid I took was my eleven-year-old brother,” said Soren. “And the piece of shit I assaulted with a baseball bat was the man who’d been beating him under my mother’s roof.”
“Oh.”
Soren shook his head, seemingly lost in thought. “The thing is . . . if I’d been there, he never would have gotten away with it.”
Lark’s stomach lurched.
“But I was out of the house by then, and Naomi was on one of her benders . . .”
“Naomi?”
“My shitty excuse for a mother.”
Lark swallowed, feeling horrible. “How many years did you get for that?”
“Ten,” said Soren. “It would have been eighteen months for aggravated assault, but with the kidnapping charge . . . I served two years in federal, and I’ve been here for two.”
“Why did they get you for kidnapping?” Lark asked. “If he was your brother . . .”
“By the time Naomi got around to caring, we were long gone,” said Soren. “Clint was in bad shape, and Naomi reported my brother missing. When the police caught up with us, it was my word against Clint’s.”
Lark shook her head. “Your mom didn’t . . .”
“Clint had a record,” he said with a shrug. “I think she thought I’d get off easier, and she had Micah so scared . . .” He shook his head. “Anyway, he wouldn’t testify.”
Lark didn’t know what to say. The situation was too horrible.
“Why are you trying so hard to escape?” she asked. “Your brother needs you to be free and clear when you get out.”
Soren’s eyes went dark. “My brother’s only fifteen,” he said. “He still lives with that bastard. He needs me now.”
Lark stared at him for several seconds, trying to decide whether or not she believed his story. She’d been in San Judas long enough to know that everybody had an angle on their conviction — some sob story they would tell to get people to trust them. But all the things that would normally set off Lark’s bullshit detector weren’t working at the moment — probably because she wanted to believe Soren.