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the triggers pulled. There was no safety inside four walls. There would be no safety for him anywhere—ever. And anyone with him would be at risk. Anyone he loved would be taken from him. Better not to ever take the chance, so never feel.
    He repeated the mantra softly aloud. His steps whispered on the carpet before he even knew his own intention. He crossed to the dresser and picked up the photograph of Judith Henderson again, drawn by some force greater than he could resist. A woman who spoke seven languages. Intelligent. Beautiful. An artist. He didn’t even know what that would be like, to have the freedom to paint, to pour your heart and soul onto a canvas.
    He knew languages. He was intelligent. And he knew paintings. Everything about them. It was all necessary to his business of shedding one skin and acquiring another. His temples throbbed and he sank back into his chair, the photograph in his hand. What was it about her? That lost, lonely look? The wind in her hair? The sun shining on the water? His imagination, so long repressed, leapt forward in spite of his desire to suppress it. She was waiting for someone to come and unlock that passion and fire. She was waiting for the right man to give it to.
    What the hell was he thinking?

2
     
    DARK purples swirling with black lines moved across the high cobalt ceiling, weeping crystalline tears. With so much sorrow filling the room, floor to ceiling, simple stone and wood could barely contain the intensity of emotion. Sorrow lived and breathed.
    Rage moved in the walls, breathing in and out, so that the slashes of red and orange undulated, bulging outward and then pressing back, great gulps of air to control the force of anger, the need for retribution, for vengeance. Rage lived and breathed alongside sorrow there in the spacious confines of the large, dark studio.
    A breeze drifted in from the open French doors leading to the patio and backyard where great grasses obscured all view of the studio from outside, teasing at the flames flickering at the tip of each of the dark candles illuminating the paintings. The dancing light caught glints of jagged glass embedded in the dark, angry paintings. Bold, red Japanese characters wept out a single name—Paul Henderson.
    Judith Henderson leaned forward in the high-backed chair and swept a great bold stroke of black to draw in all light and consume it. There could be no forgiveness. Never. She could not forgive the torture of her brother, his senseless death. Tears ran down her face and she brushed them away with her forearm, added another weeping stroke to intersect with a fierce, bold promise of vengeance.
    “Someday, my brother,” she promised aloud to the seething room. “I’ll find the right instrument to strike back and I won’t hesitate—not this time. I’ll wield it with deadly force and I will avenge your torture and murder.” Her soul was already black with her own guilt. What was one more deadly sin among so many?
    She touched the edge of the canvas almost reverently. Paul had stretched this one, as he had so many of her earliest paintings and she reworked it, over and over in oil, trying desperately to rid herself of the dark rage permeating her soul. Sometimes she could leave this studio as it should be, dark and locked away from the world, but other times, like now, she was driven to come here, obsessed with her need to let out the dark, obscene rage, the guilt and tremendous sorrow that was stamped into her very bones.
    This studio, and the art hidden away inside it, held all her darker emotions—feelings she didn’t dare allow out into the universe. Anger. Fury. Defiance and guilt. She poured those things into her paintings and the individual cells for the kaleidoscope. Sometimes she shook when she painted, strokes bold and angry, sweeping across the canvas as she allowed herself the freedom of true expression. In this room she used only big, broad brushes, nothing like the finer brushes used in her