Page 12 of Framed

A necessary evil ally, if you will.

One I planned to use again in order to get close to Jonathan. Just five minutes was all I needed with him.

Just five.

But now that Jonathan Sinclair had been arrested for my sister’s murder, something would need to happen with Scarlett. I’d expected a retrial, or some kind of court hearing.

However, I didn’t expect them to release her this quickly. Especially since they’d spent years claiming to the public that the “evidence” they had against her was damning.

I knew it was bullshit and more than likely doctored, but it wasn’t like I could just walk into a courtroom and say so. That was how crooked Tuscaloosa was—the number of zeros in your bank account dictated your fate.

Unfortunately for Scarlett, she didn’t stand a chance. The town needed a scapegoat, when my sister died. They needed to pin the blame on someone so they could give the residents a sense of solace, and peace.

They needed to stop people from digging any deeper into her death. And, of course, they needed to keep collecting all of their precious donations from said scared and grateful residents.

I’d always known Scarlett was no murderer. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Immediately, I saw red and my body vibrated with a rage I normally reserved for my fights. I wanted to act. I wanted to go straight to that motherfucker and make him pay for what he did to her.

But control wasn’t something I lacked. The side hustles, if you could call them that, that I occupied myself with didn’t allow anyone to get very far unless they had a certain level of control.

Fighting, for example, took patience.

It didn’t take me long to realize Briggs put me on this assignment to keep me busy. To keep me out of prison. Like many of the other people he employed, Briggs knew what my triggers were, and how to rein me back in when I was nearing the limit of bullshit I could stand by and take.

When he first hired me, I’d popped off on an assignment. Let things get out of hand. He’d given me the ground rules up front, but I hadn’t really listened, expecting him to be like my coaches. A few fuckups were fine, so long as you got the job done in the end. Nobody, in my experience, cared much how things got done, so long as they did.

But after that little fiasco, I quickly found out he was being serious when he told me what to do, when to do it, and who not to lose control around. I never messed around on another gig for him again.

Which must be why he’d assigned me this one. Otherwise, he knew I’d be a liability. But answering to him, I wouldn’t be able to go off the way I wanted to. Not yet, anyway.

He told me Scarlett was being released right away. Far sooner than I’d dared to hope. He also claimed that he wanted to help her.

I couldn’t quite figure out his true motive, but I figured it had something to do with her mother, the late famous figure skater. He’s mentioned her in passing a few times before, whenever he spoke about growing up in Tuscaloosa.

Whatever their history, I didn’t know, and it was none of my business. But if it meant he’d helped keep Scarlett safe, then for now, we were on the same side.

chapter four

Scarlett

TheveryfirstthingI saw when I crossed the border into Stapleton, GA was my mom. She was dressed in a black classic high-neck dress with long lace sleeves and a traditional skirt lined with a deep iris blue. Her black hair was pulled back into a sleek bun. Her makeup was minimal and enhanced her elegant facial features. She was naturally stunning.

I’d seen the picture before. It was one of her more popular skating photos, taken right before she won the ‘98 World Figure Skating Championship.

The truck trudged on and the floor vibrated under my feet. I glanced down at the pair of chucks on my feet. It was the same pair I’d been wearing the night I got arrested. The memory of that night haunted me and it took all the willpower I had left not to relive those horrible memories.

I desperately needed to find a store so I could buy some new shoes. I hadn’t thought about it in a while but back when I first got arrested, too often I found myself lost in thought about my old life. Contemplating where it all went wrong.

What were the odds that Athena brought a pair of shoes with her?Probably slim to none.

“Them one of your cousins or somethin’?” Ramona asked as she pointed to the billboard, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Y’all look just alike.” She was a trucker who had offered me a ride after I spent about two hours walking alongside the highway, thumb out fruitlessly.

She said she was headed in the same direction as me and agreed to drop me off at the hotel Briggs had told me to go to.

Admittedly, hitchhiking was a lot harder than I’d anticipated it to be. I thought I would have passed a gas station or a truck stop—or really anything within those two hours. Instead I was plagued with endless amounts of grassland and an empty highway. Not a single soul or animal to be found.

I hadn’t realized just how remote the prison was, until I tried to leave it.

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