CHAPTER 5: DAMIEN
375 Words
It started with the news bulletin.
A short clip buried in the middle of a crime podcast recap—something about "early release due to good behavior" and “prison overcrowding.” They said her name like she was a ghost the system accidentally let out.
Scarlett Jones.
I paused the clip. Rewound. Played it again.
Scarlett Jones—convicted at seventeen for the murder of her mother and sister. The supposed black sheep. The family stain. The one I was never allowed to speak about.
“Stay away from that name,” Harold used to growl. “She was sick. Unhinged.”
But if she was unhinged, what did that make him?
I stared at the paused frame of her mugshot. Eleven years ago, and she still looked like she could bite through steel. Not dead inside—just buried alive.
I needed to see her. Not because I wanted closure.
Because I wanted the truth.
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It wasn’t hard to start tracking her.
Parole system updates were public, if you knew how to look. I used a backdoor in a law enforcement database, the kind of favor you collect when you’ve fixed enough firewalls for the right people. A few keystrokes. A few database pings.
Temporary housing: Westbridge Halfway Center.
But she hadn’t stayed long.
Typical.
I cross-checked withdrawal logs from prepaid phones stolen nearby. Found one activated two days after her release—pinging from the same block as Shelley’s Bar, a hole-in-the-wall joint with no cameras and a known history of laundering money for biker gangs.
Harold would’ve scoffed.
I smiled.
That’s where I’d go too.
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Nightfall.
I sat across the street from the bar in a rusted sedan I paid cash for. No plates. No questions. She hadn’t come out yet, but I knew she was there.
Inside.
Watching.
Coiled.
I thought I’d feel nervous. I didn’t. I felt… aligned.
Like I’d been orbiting this meeting my whole life, and gravity finally gave in.
She was the storm they told me to fear.
But I wasn’t afraid of storms anymore.
I just wanted to know if she'd let me stand in the eye of it—
—or if she'd tear me apart the second we made eye contact.
- Writer
