Sixes & Sevens (Seven Hearts Book 1) Read Free Page B

She had even gone so far as to take campus tours of other schools, just to get far enough away from the Smythes to enact her plan. She had needed them to drop their guard temporarily, and let her out of their sight for extended periods of time. They tended to watch her too closely, whenever they were so inclined.
    “Overmorrow…,” she repeated the word under her breath as she unknowingly clenched her jaw. “It finally begins.” Jaycee had been off school for Christmas break, but the new semester was set to start in about a week. She needed to be gone before then. Maggie had been told she was going to scout out another campus, over an hour away. It was just far enough, she had convinced them she would need to get a room for the night, so she wouldn’t be driving home alone in the dark. She had been forced to prey on their protectiveness as her guardians. Ted especially, treated her like an incompetent child. When in fact she was a straight-A student who had survived multiple bad living situations, without being drugged, raped, or beaten. “Whatever it takes,” she sighed. Having packed her large wheeled suitcase the night before, she couldn’t do any other packing until last minute without raising suspicion.
    Roger was also home on break…to Jaycee’s utter dismay. She had already caught him in her room several times in the couple of weeks they had been home. Somewhere along the way she suspected he had learned to pick a lock. His appearance in her room only confirmed her fears. Not to be outsmarted, Jaycee had planned her escape—uh, campus tour—during the time Roger and his parents would be visiting his grandparents. Seeing as Ted’s parents weren’t too keen on Jaycee, not being born with their Smythe blood, she was asked not to come. It didn’t distress her at all, in fact it worked into her plan perfectly.
    “Maybe too perfectly…” Jaycee thought, maybe she should have been more worried? Not even a foot out the door, and she had already started trembling like a leaf at the thought of what she was about to do. She had been over her plans in her mind thousands of times. Fear of discovery, was the only reason she hadn’t written out all the details in her journal, to further ferret out any and all loose ends. Her journal was precious to her. She couldn’t, no wouldn’t, risk losing it. That journal had been with her through every move, every day, every struggle. Writing down the moments she’d had with her mother and father was the only way she could keep her memories alive. Not wanting time to ravage the details, or skew her memory, Jaycee wrote down every detail she could remember.
    Jaycee’s journal didn’t just hold her precious moments, it also held her heart and soul. She poured out her feelings into poems and short stories. She loved the written word, reading had always been a great escape from reality. Traveling to worlds that didn’t exist, getting to pretend she wasn’t always labeled as the daughter of a convicted murderer. Just a bad seed. That she wasn’t practically an orphan. Her eyes teared up at the thought. She hadn’t felt any true kindness since the day social services had come to collect her. The nice old couple and their grandson had spent the day with her. Annie and Ed Wallner had even asked the police if they could watch Jaycee, while the police conducted their investigation. They had taken her to their home, where she had met their grandson Marc. She couldn’t remember very much about that day, detail-wise. Her emotions had been so overwhelmed she wound up feeling numb and dazed, the only emotion registering had been pain. Jaycee just had a vague feeling of being loved and cared for, she knew the Wallners were on her father’s side. When she’d began thinking of how to help her father, they were the only supporters she could remember meeting.
    The first step of her plan was to remove the Smythes’ heavy thumb from her person by running away. Unlike most runaways,