I Knelt For Three Years For A Lie. Now I’m Back For Blood Chapter 10
The badges were the end of it. The last of their nerve just… snapped.
The ballroom was nothing but the vicious machine-gun fire of camera shutters.
Two officers approached Owen.
The “visionary entrepreneur” was gone. He looked like a pile of expensive rags on the floor.
He scrambled across the carpet, clutching my cast-heavy leg like a drowning man.
“Mia! Mia, don’t let them do this! Prison… I can’t go to prison!”
His snot and tears smeared against the plaster of my cast. It was the most pathetic thing I’d ever seen.
“It was Marcus! He planned it all! The insurance, the identities—I was just scared! I only went along with it because of him!”
“Five years, Mia! We had five years! Tell them you’re confused! Tell them you’re sick!”
I looked down at the man I’d once thought was my entire world. My stomach turned.
Not with grief, but with pure, physical revulsion.
How did I ever let this coward touch me?
I kicked his hands away. The movement sent a spike of pain through my ribs, but it felt good.
“Five years, Owen? Was that before or after you started selling my blood for followers?”
“When you locked me in that ward, was I ‘sick’ then, or was I just inconvenient?”
An officer hauled him up. The handcuffs clicked—a sharp, metallic finality.
Across the room, Marcus was still fighting. His eyes were two pits of black venom.
“You think this is a win, Mia?”
He spat the words at me, his face twisted.
“You bury us, and Mom and Dad go down too! The scandal will kill them! Is that what you want? To be the one who finishes them off?”
I met his gaze.
His words were just noise now. Empty threats from a small, hollow man.
“I’m not the one who destroyed them, Marcus. You did. The second you put a price tag on your sister.”
“I’ve already hired a lawyer. Every cent you stole in my name is coming back. It’ll take care of them. And you?”
“You can spend the next decade thinking about ‘family loyalty.'”
The color drained from his face. He went limp, the air leaving him like a punctured tire.
Jenna was the loudest. She went into full hysterics.
“Don’t touch me! It wasn’t fraud! That’s my child! You can’t take him!”
She clutched the screaming boy, her makeup running in black streaks. She looked more like a ghost than I ever did.
“Owen! Marcus! Do something! You promised!”
But Owen and Marcus both stared at the floor.
The ‘true love’ they’d built on my bones didn’t even last the walk to the police car.
The “perfect family” shattered into three separate pieces, each one trying to save its own skin.
I watched them being shoved into the back of the cruisers.
The tension that had held my skeleton together for three years finally snapped.
My hand slipped from the branch. The floor rushed up to meet me.
But the impact never came. Two strong, steady hands caught me.
I looked up into Dr. Reyes’s face. No white coat. No professional mask. Just a slight, knowing tilt of her head.
“Show’s over?”
I managed a tiny, jagged smile.
“The credits are rolling.”
“Good. Then let’s get you out of here. You’re a mess.”
She lifted me up and carried me toward the ambulance.
The storm had passed. The air tasted like wet pavement and cold sky.
I lay back on the stretcher and took the first breath that didn’t feel like a debt.