Guilty Pleasure

04. In Violation

       I was standing face to face with the devil himself, staring him dead in those mesmerizing but intimidating eyes of his. He kept my gaze for a brief second, lingering for a moment longer than what was necessary. Spencer Scott, the business mogul from hell, was staring at me. Yet, at the same time, he wasn't. Well, he wasn't looking at the me he was used to seeing. My natural caresses of mousy brown hair were expertly hidden behind curls of flamboyant red locks.

       My lips worked in tandem with the wig on my head, blanketed in a vibrant cherry red lipstick that pulled the whole look together. The entire scarlet colorscheme was shocking, like the bloodstains left behind from a violent crime scene. I looked like a beautiful rose, and believe me, I had the thorns I needed to protect myself. My thorns were in the form of a recently sharpened stiletto knife the clung to my left thigh beneath the leather straps of a garter belt. I only bright it for back up in case things got even uglier between Spencer and I.

       In my normal life, when I was Ivy Abernathy, and not masquerading as a totally different human being, I'd never dare to look let alone act as bold as I was pretending to be. I preferred to do my biding quietly from the sidelines, working in the shadows in total silence, until I was ready to bring things to the light. That's why I'd been able to find out all the dirty little secrets of the man standing in front of me. If I'd been so brazen and blatant about investigating him from the start, there would've been no investigation. It would've been shut down before I even got the chance to outline an expose. In truth, it would've been over before it even started.

       That's one thing that I quickly learned when I entered the exciting but dark world of journalism. There's a lot in common between detectives and journalists. It sounds cliche and even a little pretentious equating them to each other, but there really are several similarities between those career fields. They both start off with an investigation of sorts, journalists hunt for sources to get the big scoop, while detectives search for clues. However, there's something they both keep an eye out for.

       Evidence.

       You can't publish an expose without it nor can you close a case without evidence. It's the missing link that we all search for instinctively, even when we don't know what we're looking for, and when we find it, it lets one decipher fact from fiction and the guilty from the innocent.

       Evidence was more important to me now than it ever was. If I had proof that Spencer Scott was trying to penalize and punish me for my crimes himself, on his own terms, and in his own way, away from the prying eyes of the police, then the claims I made against him wouldn't be so easily brushed off or covered up like they had been. I needed proof, and I hellbent on getting it, even if that meant falling victim to his demands.

       Maybe that wretched godforsaken excuse of a lawyer, Mendoza, was right when he said that Spencer's offer was one that I couldn't refuse. It just took me a long time to come to terms with it, too busy waging a war inside my head, in an attempt to convince myself that spending some time in prison was better than spending any amount of time with him. I still thought that was probably true, but I could only do so much from behind bars. I'd only waste time by sitting idly in a cramped jail cell and the story I'd been working on would continue to be buried until I'd never be able to unearth it again.

       That was a hard pill to swallow, but it was the cold truth. The only thing I'd accomplish if I went to prison was finally being christened as the failure my mother always thought I was. I loved doing the opposite of what my mom wanted, but that was the last thing I wanted to do. It was hard knowing that my mom thought I was a failure, but it would've been so much worse if I thought I was, too.