Their Favoritism Resulted In A Cruel Outcome Chapter 02
Half an hour earlier, the cell door had opened.
The men who came in weren’t guards bringing water.
They were three strangers reeking of alcohol.
They wore uniforms without badge numbers.
The moment I saw the way they were looking at me, I stepped back.
The one in front waved an access card.
“So this is Connor Winthrop’s cast-off fiancée?”
“Someone wants to see how long the perfect Worthington daughter can hold out on camera.”
My mother immediately stepped in front of me.
“Get out.”
The man laughed.
“You’re suspects in a terrorist plot. Once you’re in state prison tomorrow, who’s going to care about one little video?”
“Besides,” he sneered, “we were paid to be here.”
As he spoke, he grabbed the collar of my wedding dress.
I shoved him away, but another man caught my wrist and threw me to the ground.
The clip in my veil struck the wall, and pearls scattered across the concrete floor.
That hand reached for me again.
Hannah lunged from behind and bit down hard on his flesh.
The man spun around and punched her.
Rachel grabbed a broken water cup and slashed it across another man’s face.
My mother, the children, even my seventy-something grandmother—they all rushed in.
More than a dozen women fought those three men with hairpins, shards of plastic, and their bare fists.
Lauren wrapped herself around me, taking a kick meant for me.
Her forehead slammed into the bedframe, blood running into her eyes, but she still shoved me behind her.
“Willa, get back!”
“Don’t let them touch you!”
My grandmother raised her cane and brought the metal handle down hard on the leader’s temple.
“She told you to get out.”
“Don’t you understand English?”
The three men had clearly assumed women in formal dresses wouldn’t fight back.
It wasn’t until one of them was cut by a jagged piece of plastic that they retreated into the corridor.
The leader kicked over an old kerosene heater.
Fuel spilled across the floor and caught on a cigarette butt they had dropped.
Flames climbed a blanket almost instantly.
Standing outside the door, he spat at us.
“Go on, keep pretending you’re still Charleston’s first family.”
“Your men are back home drinking with the real daughter. No one’s coming for you.”
The cell door locked again.
Their footsteps echoed away down the corridor.
We tried to beat down the fire with clothes and water from the sink, but the pressure was too weak, and the flames had already worked their way into the insulation inside the walls.
Neither the alarm nor the sprinklers ever came on.
Lauren tore off a sleeve and used it to cover the ripped collar of my dress.
My mother held me, her hands shaking so badly she could barely grip the fabric.
My grandmother sat in the ash, looking at the injured women around her, and didn’t speak for a long time.
We had still been clinging to a sliver of hope. Maybe my father and brothers hadn’t really planned an attack.
Maybe Connor would hire a lawyer and find us.
But those men had gotten into a state detention facility, and they knew about Blair.
We had no choice but to believe that everything outside was now under her control.
When the first door burned through, my grandmother looked up.
“Can that maintenance door in the back be opened?”
No one knew.
Molly didn’t understand what was happening. She hugged Hannah’s leg and said quietly that she wanted to go home.
Hannah crouched down and kissed her forehead.
“We’re getting out.”
“Stay close to me. Don’t let go.”
My mother and sisters-in-law took off hairpins, jewelry, and belts, handing my grandmother anything that could be used to pry a lock.
But the maintenance door had long been welded shut from the outside.
My grandmother told us to stand the mattresses upright to block the smoke pouring in from the corridor.
Then she pointed to the vent in the ceiling and told the lightest of us to climb up.
“We find our own way out.”
“If the people outside won’t help us, we can’t just sit here and wait to die.”
My mother nodded.
My sisters-in-law lifted the children up one by one.
But Molly threw herself into my arms.
“Aunt Willa, I’m scared.”
“I don’t want to die.”
She was only six.
Yesterday, she had threatened to block the wedding aisle unless Connor paid her a ransom of ten ten-dollar bills.
I held her tight, my throat burning from the smoke.
I wanted to say that none of us were going to die.
But when I looked up at the sealed vent cover above us, the words wouldn’t come.
I was afraid, too.
I didn’t want to die, either.
I was already wearing my wedding dress.
My mother had sewn a small piece of old lace into the lining, from the veil she wore at her own wedding.
My grandmother had pinned a sapphire brooch to the inside of the hem.
Connor had promised he would be waiting for me under the old oak tree.
He said that after the wedding, he’d take me to Maine to see the ocean in winter, and to Arizona to watch the desert sunset.
We had even talked about names for our children.
But I never made it to the aisle.
In the end, it was Hannah who lifted Molly from my arms.
She pressed her daughter’s face against her chest and softly sang the song Molly had loved most as a little girl.
I couldn’t bear to watch.
My grandmother pressed the damp towel into my hand.
She said that even if I didn’t have Worthington blood, I was still the child she had raised for twenty-six years.
And she would never let anyone drag me away.
None of them knew the detention order was a fake.
The so-called attack on the governor was a lie.
My father and brothers being arrested was a lie.
The only things that were real were the iron door locking us in, the smoke spreading through the cell, and our hearts slowing to a stop.