CONVICTED Book 1-Luck Is My Frenemy

Prologue - Edited

"FREEZE!" I felt hands on my arms before I heard the voice. I couldn't quite react yet, my arms were heavy and my head was spinning. Was that really blood on the floor, or just a red tint in this light?

I noticed not the big things, the things worth remembering, but instead a can laying on the floor, the only memory I would have of tonight in the years to come. Emblazoned on it were words that would trigger me for the rest of my life: BUD LIGHT.

Who would've known two little words could hold so much power? I pondered the power of words as my head was pushed down, cuffs rattling on my wrists as I was sat in the back of the police car. I hadn't noticed the cuffs, where was I going?

Jail, I guess. The cuffs were a cold reminder, cold metal pressed against my back as the lights painted scary shadows of red and blue on the apartment complex.

He was dead.

The blood soaked my clothing, the comfortable clothing that I wore to the party.

The party with the dead guy.

He really was dead, wasn't he?

It still wasn't registering completely. I was playing with the hem of my shirt and replaying the moments leading up to this exact backseat. Dead body, sobbing girl, wrestling over the knife, dead body, blood, another dead body, police...

The street lights passed by, illuminating the cops' faces and the grate between us.

Was I such a monster? The people in this car thought I killed someone.

"I didn't..." My first words of the night were feeble and defeated.

"We know. We've heard it all before - 'I didn't do it, it wasn't me!' - you can quit while you're ahead." The man in the passenger seat didn't even look at me. My gaze fell to my lap, and I just then noticed how irritating these cuffs were.

I stayed silent as the car parked, my mind running a mile a minute but nowhere to go. Thoughts escaped me, just hazy images on the outskirts of my consciousness, as I was sat in an interrogation room.

"Do you know why you're here, Miss?"

And so it began.

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The killer jumps from the window the moment I come in, I see the girl dry heaving and sobbing over a still and bloody body. She pulls the knife out of the body's chest and starts cutting her arms, all I can think is "Just what the fuck happened here?!" I reach to stop her but my efforts are fruitless. She fights with no will to live, no fear or need. She knows, just as I do, that one way or another she is dying as we fight. Bleeding out, crying, and fighting - is this really how she wants to go out? I try taking the knife from her but she's dead by the time I wrestle it free.

I place my hand down to her neck, searching for a pulse, but there is none to be found. My ponytail is loose and messy, even my bangs are dripping with blood. And here I kneel, frozen in trepidation and confusion as blood drips... drop, drop as time passes on the wall clock, tick, tock, and I am here ...waiting, for what I don't know.