NOTE: This story is unfinished and unedited, and will not be updated anytime soon. This is from like four years ago I apologize.
16 year old CJ Lancaster is your average girl. She's lazy, she spends most of her time on the Internet, and hangs with her friends at school. She's not popular, but she's not a 'loser' either. When she's at home, CJ likes to sit around doing nothing, except when 6-year-old TJ is around. Then CJ likes to bug her younger sister. But it's all with love. She loves her parents, she loves her sister (though she'd never admit it), and she loves her dog.
But then something happens. CJ comes home to find her mother throwing clothes and valuables into suitcases, and her father guarding the door with a gun.
A gunshot sounds. CJ sees her mother's fear, feels her mother's hand pushing her under the bed, hears her mother whisper in her ear: "Whatever you do, do not do what the government says. Social services is not your friend. Trust no one. Run."
Now CJ is on the run, never in the same place. She's not experienced, but she knows some things, and the rest she'll gain with practice, and each passing moment living in fear.
CJ's sister is nowhere to be found, an neither is her father, not even a body.
She doesn't know what her mother meant by "social services is not your friend," because they're supposed to be the good guys, right? But CJ does understand one thing her mother said, and she follows that last order.
Trust no one.
CJ can still hear her mother's scream as the second gunshot rang out. She remembers crawling from her hiding spot under the bed after what seemed like eons. She remembers seeing her mother's body, lying on the kitchen floor, bleeding from a gunshot wound to her head, eyes open, unseeing. She remembers collapsing on the floor next to her ever-loving and -gentle mother, and being filled with anger, determination, and a need to have revenge.
It's never enough to just hope.
Raven Collins has an enemy: her best friend's twin brother. The only problem? That very same twin brother blames Raven for his twin's death, as well as the rest of her town.
While she struggles to uncover the truth surrounding Adam's mysterious drowning, she also has to fend off budding feelings for her high school tormentor, but when he decides to join her in the hunt for answers, their connection becomes all the more real.
While the romantic lines become blurred and they are faced with more questions than answers, can Raven control her heart long enough to find out the truth of what really happened to her best friend, or will she be consumed with the undercurrent that threatens to drag her, and everyone else, down right along with her drowned best friend?
Trigger Warning: mild language, mild sexual content.