Page 81 of Creeping Beautiful

Then she looks across the hall at my room. It’s not as small as hers is, but smaller than both Donovan’s and Adam’s and the four-poster bed and armoire make it feel crowded.

Indie loses interest quickly and heads down the hallway to her own room. She doesn’t pause at the entrance like she did for the others, but goes right in and by the time I catch up with her she’s sitting on her double bed with the painted iron frame. Her eyes are downcast and her fingertips gently caress the quilt that kept her warm for all the years when she slept up here.

She absently kicks off one boot, then the other. Wiggles her bare toes. Which are painted, I notice. Dark pink.

And for some reason that bothers me. Indie with painted toes. It makes her four-year absence so… real. Like… did she have a pedicure? Did she paint them herself? Where would she do something like that?

I tried to track her that first year. I felt obligated. I mean, I did turn her into this… bloodthirsty sociopath, right? The least I could do was keep an eye on her and make sure she didn’t lose her mind and start offing people. But she literally disappeared. No trace. By this time Adam, Donovan, and I had been running ex-Company teams for several years. We had connections. Not anything as intricate as what we had before the Company fell, but it was enough to get intel and keep teams alive.

Even with all that, Indie was gone. I found some security cam footage of her truck right after she left. Had a decent, if spotty, track record of her as she made her way east towards Mobile. But after that… nothing. That was under two hours.

Two hours.

That’s all it took for her to wipe herself off the map.

It was a weird time for me. I was so fucking confused. I kept playing what happened back in my head over and over again. Donovan left right after Indie, claiming he couldn’t be a part of this. So it was just me that night.

Just me. All alone in this house.

I’ve been alone here before. Every time Adam and Indie went on a job I stayed behind.

But this wasn’t that kind of alone.

This was… loneliness.

Adam wasn’t picking up his phone. I called him constantly through that night, but he never picked up once. Finally, I had left so many messages his voicemail was full and I gave up. I went up to my bedroom and fell asleep, confident Adam would call me with some kind of update.

He sent a text.

A fuckin’ text that said, “It’s over.”

Just thinking about that fills me with hot anger right now.

How do you send a text like that?

I called him back that same day. He didn’t answer. I texted. He didn’t answer. So I busied myself tracking Indie on the various security cams.

I figured, OK. Everybody needs a moment. We just need to get our heads on straight and figure this out. And then they’d all be back.

No one came back.

Well, I guess that’s not true. Obviously, someone covered the furniture in white sheets and shut the house up.

But everyone moved on so I moved on too. Went to my machine shop. Turned the upstairs into a livable apartment. Started making some art pieces. Mostly outdoor sculptures. Opened up a fucking Etsy shop.

Which makes me chuckle a little, that’s how stupid it sounds. I was a thirty-two-year-old retired child-assassin trainer selling metal art on Etsy.

But I like my fucking Etsy shop. It calms me. Gives me purpose. And I sell a shit ton of art on there.

Once Indie left there was nothing. I had nothing. She was my everything. I probably could’ve been happy if Adam had come home. Probably could’ve stayed in the business if he was there.

But he disappeared too.

He’d moved on. The things that happened that day could not be fixed.

We were all… broken.

Indie gets up from the bed and walks over to her closet. She has a real closet, unlike the other rooms. I expect it to be empty, or maybe hold all her old clothes, smelly and moth-eaten. But inside her closet are dozens of pieces neatly hanging from the rail in clear plastic garment bags.