Chapter 3 - The Price of Freedom
The cold metal cuffs bit into my wrists as I sat in the back of the police cruiser.
I could still feel the sticky warmth of Sophie’s blood on my hands.
Every instinct in my body screamed at me to break the windows and run to the hospital.
But I knew that fighting the police would only give David and Preston more ammunition against me.
I sat in a sterile interrogation room for three agonizing hours.
A detective finally walked in and threw a file folder onto the metal table.
He told me that my parents had hired the most expensive defense attorneys in the city for Preston.
They had also paid my bail, completely out of nowhere.
The detective unlocked my handcuffs and told me I was free to go, but I was not allowed to contact my daughter.
I ran out of the precinct and hailed a taxi to the pediatric hospital.
When I arrived at the emergency wing, my mother was standing outside Sophie’s room like a heavily armed guard.
She held up her hand to stop me, her face a mask of absolute contempt.
She told me that Sophie had received six stitches and was resting comfortably with her father.
I tried to push past her, but two massive private security guards stepped into the hallway.
My father emerged from the room, looking down his nose at me as if I were a stranger.
He told me that David had agreed to sign over all of his voting shares in the family company.
In exchange, my parents were funding David’s custody battle against me.
They were literally buying my daughter to punish me for standing up to their golden boy.
I backed away from the guards, realizing that brute force would never win this war.
I needed the raw, unedited CCTV footage from the hotel to prove they had conspired against me.
I pulled out my phone and called the hotel manager, begging him to send me a copy of the video file.
The manager answered the phone, but his voice was trembling with fear.
He told me he could not send the footage because the police had confiscated the hard drive.
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And then he whispered a warning that made my blood run ice cold.
He said the detective who took the drive was the same man who had just let me out of jail.
