PART 2
The boy’s terrified words hung in the cold air.
“They’re not who you think they are.”
The stern man yanked the boy back much harder this time, tearing the fabric of the boy’s shirt.
His face was red with defensive rage.
“Get this filthy street rat out of here!” he barked at the palace guards rushing through the doors.
The music abruptly stopped.
The ballroom fell into a suffocating, dead silence.
But the blonde girl wasn’t looking at the furious man standing above her.
She was staring at the boy’s freckled, dirt-streaked face as he was dragged away.
And suddenly, the thick, heavy fog in her mind shattered.
For three years, she had been told the carriage crash was a tragic accident.
She had been told her parents died instantly in the rain.
She had been told this stern man—her ‘uncle’—was her loving guardian.
Her protector.
Her only family left.
But looking at the red-haired boy fighting the guards, a buried memory violently tore itself open.
She remembered the smell of smoke.
She remembered the sound of shattering wood and screaming metal.
She remembered this exact boy—the stable hand’s son—pulling her from the burning wreckage in the dark.
And she remembered what he had pointed to in the mud.
The carriage brakes.
They hadn’t failed. They had been cleanly cut.
It wasn’t an accident.
The people raising her.
The people managing her family’s massive estate.
The people who heavily medicated her and told her she would never walk again.
They were the ones who ordered the crash.
They were the ones who put her in this chair to keep her quiet and controlled.
The stern man stepped directly in front of her, trying to block her view of the doors.
He forced a tight, artificial smile.
“Don’t listen to him, darling. The boy is clearly insane. He just wants money.”
But the man’s hands were shaking violently.
A bead of sweat rolled down his temple.
He looked completely terrified.
The girl looked down at her paralyzed legs.
The legs the expensive palace doctors swore were broken beyond repair.
The legs she had been too drugged, too depressed, and too afraid to even try to move.
If they lied about her parents…
If they lied about the crash…
If they paid off the stable hand to disappear…
What else were they lying about?
Rage, hot and pure, flooded her chest, burning away three years of induced weakness.
Not sorrow.
Not fear.
Just pure, blinding anger.
She slowly reached her hands down to her sides.
Her small fingers clamped aggressively around the metal armrests of the wheelchair.
A woman in the front row gasped.
The stern man spun around, his eyes widening in absolute horror as he saw her grip the chair.
“No,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Don’t—”
He reached out to push her shoulders back down.
But she slapped his hand away with a vicious strike.
The wealthy crowd let out a collective gasp.
She pushed down heavily with her hands, her arms shaking from years of disuse.
Her knuckles turned bone-white.
She slid forward on the leather seat.
Her black shoes planted flat and firm against the polished marble floor.
Every muscle in her body screamed in protest.
But she didn’t stop.
And for the first time since the night her entire life was stolen…
The blonde girl rose from the chair.
She stood up tall, her school blazer straightening out.
She was trembling.
She was unsteady.
But she was towering over the man who had kept her captive.
The guards at the door froze, dropping the red-haired boy in sheer disbelief.
The man in the tuxedo backed away, tripping over his own feet, his face entirely drained of blood.
The girl took one slow, deliberate step forward.
Then another.
She looked at the terrified man, her voice ringing out clearly across the dead-silent ballroom.
“Call the police,” she commanded the crowd, never breaking eye contact with him.
“My uncle has a confession to make.”