German grew stiff and his hands tensed. It was enough for the spoon to slip right through his fingers and crash to the silver tray with a loud, sharp clank that made me jump. I flew to my feet to sit him up in his chair, assuming he was eating too fast and had swallowed something the wrong way. But when I tried to straighten him, his muscles were tight. I noticed the muscles in his neck were bulging. His skin was hot to the touch and growing red.
“Don German!?” I shouted, putting myself directly in front of his face to try and figure out what was wrong. His tongue was swollen and pressing out against his teeth as his eyes grew wide, glossy, and red.
I continued shouting his name for a few seconds, loud enough that other staff members had started gathering to see what was wrong.
“Someone call for help!” I shrieked. “There’s something very wrong!”
All chaos broke loose as he struggled to breathe. All the while, Greta stood leaning against the doorway looking calm as could be with her arms crossed. She didn’t seem in any hurry to help at all, leaving the rest of us to try and keep Don German alive until the ambulance arrived. I didn’t know what was happening, but I was certain she had something to do with this.
3
Leonardo
I was supervising some of the landscapers when the ambulances pulled up outside. I raced inside so fast that I beat them to the scene. Don German was seizing up in the corner of the room with Lucia standing over him in shock, ordering the others around in how they could help him until the medics arrived.
“Get out of the way!” I shouted as I stormed in to clear a path for them.
I grabbed Lucia by the arm and yanked her to the side, watching in a panic as they tried to clear his airways enough to get him on the stretcher.
“Let go of me!” she growled, trying to wriggle free.
I wouldn’t loosen my grip. Jorge and Dario had gathered and watched as they wheeled our grandfather away. Jorge immediately turned to us, seeing Lucia struggling against my hold on her.
“What did you do!?” he fumed. “What did you do to him?”
“Nothing!” she cried. “I was feeding him and...he just...I didn’t do anything! He started having some kind of reaction!”
“Bull shit! You’re his caretaker! This is your fault!”
The rest of the staff were taking in the whole scene with wide eyes. I couldn’t stand their laziness on top of everything else. They would take any excuse to get out of a few minutes of work.
“What are you all standing around for!?” I barked. “Get back to work!”
As they dispersed, I yanked Alicia into a nearby closet and threw her in, locking the door from the outside. The moment she was contained she began throwing herself against the door with her feet and fists, demanding to be let go.
Dario didn’t seem to like the way I was handling things and immediately started defending her. “Maybe we should wait and see what the doctors say before we start pointing fingers.”
“You saw him!” I argued. “He was obviously having an allergic reaction.”
Jorge nodded. “Peanuts. She probably put some in his food. She couldn’t wait to get out of here and figured if she killed him off, her contract would be terminated without her owing us any compensation.”
Dario shook his head, still unconvinced. “We don’t know that. We don’t have any proof.”
“Nonetheless, she’s staying in there until we know more,” I decided out loud before storming off into the kitchen.
The staff had busied themselves, knowing better than to be standing around idle when I came for them. I marched up to Greta who was chopping vegetables over the countertop in the middle of the room.
“What happened? What did he have for lunch?”
“Soup,” she shrugged innocently. “I prepared it myself, but...as you know, I have to turn it over to Lucia to feed it to him. She took the tray and carried it into the corner. I assumed she was getting his afternoon pills, but now...Now I fear I was wrong to trust her.”
She looked around to the others to back her up, but they just stared at their feet.
“Every one of you better start talking! If I find out anyone knew anything they didn’t tell me, you’ll be just as responsible as Lucia! You’ll all be fired or worse!”
Finally one of the younger girls made her way over to stand behind Greta. “Lucia is always saying how much she resents Don German. She hates working here. She said she’d do anything to get out of her contract.”
“That’s...that’s not true!” Another girl chimed in from the corner. “Lucia barely talks at all! She keeps to herself mostly! I’ve never heard her say anything like that!”
Greta glared at the girl, and the others soon followed suit. They didn’t like her going against their word, but I didn’t have time to sort through their stories. I spun on my heels and huffed off. Dario was quick to meet me outside the kitchen door and chase after me.
“Let’s just take a minute to calm down,” he pleaded. “At least wait until the doctors tell us more before we start throwing around accusations.”
“If he doesn’t survive this...I’ll kill her myself...with my own bare hands.”
We locked ourselves in one of the parlors to wait. The hours went by excruciatingly slow, with us mostly in silence, until finally, the phone rang. I pounced to answer it before any of the staff could. I released a huge sigh of relief as the doctor explained that Don German would be fine after some rest and more treatment. He did, in fact, have an allergic reaction to peanuts, and it was a very high concentrated dose.
“This was no accident,” I explained to my cousins after hanging up the phone. “This wasn’t some small trace amount that could have ended up in his food by sloppiness. Someone put it in his food on purpose. They were trying to kill him!”
“Mother was right,” Dario said grimly. “The workers really can’t be trusted.”
I barreled towards the door, but once again he tried to stop me. “Let's think this through. We should order to see all the recipes from the kitchen staff. Maybe a pie or cake called for nuts and there was some kind of mix up…”
“Do you hear yourself!? Of course it wasn’t a mix-up! The doctor said himself that it was too much to write off as an accident!”
“What are you going to do?” he asked instead. He knew he couldn’t stop me, so he resorted to trying to mitigate the damage I intended to inflict on Lucia.
I was done with words. I shoved him off of me and stormed back to the closet where Lucia was locked inside. I could barely stand the sight of her as I flung the door open.
“Is he okay?” she asked softly, bracing herself against the back wall.
“Why do you ask!? You want to know if you’re going down for murder or just attempted murder!?”
“I swear I didn’t do anything! Stay away from me!”
Jorge and Dario caught up to me, clamoring behind as I charged in to grab Lucia. She kicked and screamed as I threw her over my shoulder, exposing the length of her legs and her panties as I carried her off. She struggled to pull her hideous brown dress back down in between pounding her fists into my chest. My cousins asked where I was taking her, but I didn’t bother responding. I charged on, ignoring everyone and everything, right across the front courtyard.
Lucia was curvy but still felt light as a feather in my big arms as I stomped across the property. I made my way to the back stables. They were old and run down, hidden off behind the new ones we had built last year. We intended to save the structures and use the lumber for future projects, but for now, they would serve a better purpose.
I threw Lucia inside one of the stalls with force and slammed the door shut behind her, locking it again. Just as she had done in the closet, she immediately flung herself against the door hitting it and kicking it with everything she had while spouting off a flurry of expletives in Spanish.
“We can’t hold her prisoner!” Dario protested as he came running out behind me.
“We can until we k
now more,” Jorge insisted. “We have to keep her contained while we investigate. Should we call the police?”
“No,” I growled. “If the police come and do find her guilty, justice will be up to them. If she did this, she deserves much worse than just rotting away in some jail cell.”
“I have never been treated this way in my life!” Lucia shrieked from behind the door. “You’ll pay for this, Leonardo! You’re going to find out that I’m innocent and I’ll make your life a living hell for humiliating me like this!”
I kicked the door as hard as I could, sending her flailing backward. “You’re the one who is about to be in a living hell, sweetheart. I’ll make sure of that.”
She found her way to an opening in the old, warped boards and poked her head through just before rearing back to spit in my direction. I kicked the walls again, hard enough to rattle her off of them.
“You’re nothing but a rich, spoiled brat and I’ve known it from the moment I first saw you in the laundry room! I’ve seen you stalking me ever since! You’ve been waiting for your chance to frame me with something.”
I glared at her through the opening in the boards that she had just spit through. She was thrown to the ground in the corner of the stall with her chest heaving. Her dress was ripped and falling down her shoulder, but she quickly struggled to cover herself when she noticed me looking.
“You honestly think I would poison my own grandfather to prove a point about you? You think mighty highly of yourself, don’t you? Stalking you, pfft. I don’t give you enough thought to bother. You are nothing. You are like a cockroach scurrying around the house as far as I’m concerned.”
“Oh, you love your grandfather so much but you’d enlist his care to a cockroach?”
Not knowing what else to do, I kicked the boards again, this time causing dust to rain down from the ceiling. It fell over her, sticking to the sweat across her chest.
“You may be worthy enough to care for our grandfather, but barely. Outside of that, you’re irrelevant. You’re the ugliest woman of your lowly class that I’ve ever been forced to lay my eyes on.”
A defiant grin curled along the corners of her lips. She trailed her fingers along the collar of her ripped dress - the same one she struggled to take cover under moments ago. “Ugly,” she cackled. “Is that why you’re always staring at my body and licking your lips? Because I’m so ugly?”
Dario and Jorge tried to hold back their laughter, only inciting my anger more. No one had ever dared to speak to me in that way before, and it took everything in me not to crash through the stall door and teach her a lesson right then and there whether she was guilty or not.
Dario could see the anger boiling up in me to dangerous proportions. He quickly rushed over to wrap his arms around me and try to lead me away before I did anything stupid.
“Forget her for now. Let’s go call the hospital back and find out when we can see our grandfather. We’ll come back to her later.”
“Or not!” I howled. “Leave her out here to starve for all I care! Jorge...make sure she can’t get out of this shitty old barn. Hell, maybe some wolves will find their way in and tear her to shreds. Then we don’t have to bother dealing with her at all.”
Jorge did as I ordered and stayed behind to make sure it was secure. Dario kept his arm around me the whole walk back to the house, ensuring that I didn’t lose it and go charging back after her.
“The way she spoke to me is nearly proof enough,” I hissed under my breath. “A woman filled with that much spite wouldn’t hesitate to poison our dear old grandfather.”
“Well, you did snatch her up and expose her to everyone. Then you threw her off into a shed and said some pretty awful things yourself. I can’t blame her for fighting back. You’re just not used to the workers standing their ground when you lay into them is all.”
“The nerve to do that with what she’s being accused of though…”
“Maybe that in itself is enough to tell you she’s innocent.”
I shook my head and continued silently fuming, refusing to believe that was true. He carried on anyway, leading me inside to sit and wait while he called the doctor back. They told us they would keep him overnight to monitor him, but he could return home the next day.
“We have to get to the bottom of this before he gets back, or else the same thing could happen all over again,” I told my cousins, cradling my head in my hands.
Dario groaned. “What do we do? Fire everyone on the property and scramble to replace them all? No way we can do that within a day, or even weeks.”
Jorge paced nervously in the corner. “I’m less worried about that, and more worried about telling Donña Angela.”
We all lamented over that to ourselves. It was the scarier thing to face. Once we heard Don German was going to survive, we decided to wait before telling her.
“She’ll go mad,” I scoffed. “She’ll fly off the handle even more than I am. And she’ll race back right away. It’s been nice having her gone for a few days...even with all this chaos.”
They both nodded in agreement. For as much as they loved my mother, she made everything tense. Of course, that very effect on the staff might have prevented this act against our grandfather. I knew it was no coincidence that this happened while she was out of town.
We decided to wait until Don German returned home before getting a hold of her. Maybe we could even wait until she returned home to say anything. Meanwhile, we had to get through the rest of the evening, not knowing who in the staff we could trust. Dario still seemed open to the possibility of any one of them being responsible, but Jorge and I knew better. It was hard to sleep knowing that someone as despicable as Lucia was resting outside in the stables.
4
Lucia
I sat in the corner of the shed in complete shock and disbelief. It all happened so fast. One minute I was feeding Don German, the next he couldn’t breathe. Then I was thrown into a locked closet before being drug out here. What would happen to me next? I wondered if they would leave me out here to starve, or worse. Would Leonardo come back and unleash more of his rage on me?
One thing was certain. I would not tolerate this treatment. I had done nothing wrong, and I had tolerated terrible treatment even before this happened...more than any person should. I didn’t know how, but I would get out of this. I would find my way back to freedom from these monsters, and they would be sorry when I did. I would make sure of it. For every minute I spent locked away in that old musty, broken-down shed, I swore my vengeance on Leonardo and his weasley little cousins. I would make them pay.
Someone had been delivering bread and soup to me under the stall door, but they always did it so quickly that I couldn’t make out who it was. One of the workers must have figured out what happened to me and taken pity on me. Whoever it was would sneak up, almost too quietly for me to hear, leave the food and then scurry off before I could see their faces. I couldn’t even catch a glimpse of them enough to know if it was a man or a woman.
As the sun went down on my second day of being locked up, I had exhausted every possible attempt at breaking out. I accepted that I was going to be stuck in here until someone helped me, or until Leonardo came to his senses and realized I was innocent - which I wasn’t holding my breath for. I curled up in a ball on the cold, hard floor and hoped I would find myself too exhausted to care about how uncomfortable I was.
Just as my eyes closed, I heard something outside. The night before I could hear wild animals traipsing behind the shed in the woods, and I was grateful that the structure was so secure. If I couldn’t find a way out, hopefully, wolves couldn’t find their way in. But as the noise got closer, I realized this wasn’t wolves. These were human footsteps.
“Psst, Lucia,” a man’s voice called out in the darkness.
I rushed over to the biggest opening in the boards to see Dario standing there. “You! Have you been the one bringing me food?”
He nodded. “I had a feeling you were innocent,
and now I have proof.” He held up a small bag in his hands. “Powdered peanuts. I found this stashed in Greta’s room.”
“I knew it! That old hag! She hated me because her nephews had been fired! She blamed me and hated that I was hired at all!”
“You don’t have to worry about any of that anymore,” he assured me. “I’m getting you out of here.”
“What? But what about…”
The door was jiggling open before I could finish. I wondered if I could trust him and considered fleeing right past him out into the night, but he insisted that I follow him. He took my arm and led me off into the woods. I felt uneasy in my gut. Maybe it was a trick.
“How do I know I can trust you?” I asked in a hushed tone as we ran through the trees, struggling to see where we were going. He had brought a small lantern that he lit only after we were a ways into the pitch-black darkness, well out of sight from the main house. But it was so dark that it barely showed us where we were going.
“Didn’t I feed you? And find some way to prove your innocence?”
I couldn’t argue with that, but I still didn’t quite trust him. No one could blame me after the way his cousins had treated me. But I didn’t have many other options for escaping, so I was at his mercy. I followed him to a clearing in the woods that led out to a road, and there was a horse cart waiting for us. He held up a corner of the cart’s tarp and ushered me to climb on.
“Get on. They’ll take you wherever you want to go. And I will show Jorge and Leonardo the proof that Greta was responsible for what happened to Don German, so you won’t have to worry about the police coming after you.”
I hesitated for a moment, still afraid that he might be tricking me. But my gut told me to go with it. It was still hard to accept that he would be so kind and that I was finally free. There wasn’t time to stand around and ask a million questions. I thanked him and kissed his cheek. Once I climbed onto the back of the cart, I climbed to the front to give the driver the address to my mother’s house. I was on edge for the entire journey, just waiting for something to go wrong and rip this all away from me. I didn’t want to get my hopes up that everything could work out, but my heart still swelled with happiness. Soon, I would be home in the loving arms of my family.
Bullied Cinderella (Olive Skin Devils Book 2) Page 3
