Chapter 8 - The Mirror of Justice
Six months later. July 2026.
The Cook County Women’s Correctional Facility in California was a grim, gray concrete building surrounded by razor wire.
Inside the institution’s cafeteria, the air smelled of bleach, boiled cabbage, and old floor wax.
Margaret Whitcomb sat on a low metal stool, wearing an oversized, coarse orange jumpsuit with state prison numbers stamped across her back. Her once-dyed blonde hair had grown out into a messy, dirty gray. Her hands, which had once been adorned with gold and pearls, were rough, dry, and cracked from daily labor.
"Inmate Whitcomb!" a female prison guard barked, slamming a heavy mop and a plastic bucket of soapy water at Margaret’s feet. "The lunch hour is over. Get on your knees and scrub the soup spill near the kitchen line before it sets."
Margaret looked at the heavy mop, her wrinkled hands trembling. "I... my back hurts... I have arthritis..."
"I don't care about your back," the guard sneered coldly, pointing down at the dirty floor. "Scrub it, inmate. Or you spend the weekend in solitary."
Tears of pure, bitter humiliation welled in Margaret’s sunken eyes.
Slowly, painfully, the former queen of Beverly Hills lowered herself onto her bony knees onto the hard, cold concrete floor. She reached into the dirty grey water, pulled out a rag, and began to scrub the sticky spill on the ground.
Across the room, sitting at a separate table under guard supervision, Ashley was wiping down tables with a filthy cloth, her fingernails broken, her face devoid of any designer makeup, weeping silently as other inmates mocked her.
In the male wing three miles away, Michael was carrying heavy trash bins toward the industrial compactor, his head bowed, terrified of the inmates who knew he was a broke degenerate who couldn't pay his debts.
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The world they had tried to build by destroying an innocent woman had collapsed entirely, leaving them trapped in the very nightmare they had designed for someone else.
Margaret wiped a tear from her cheek with her rough sleeve, looking up at the gray ceiling, realizing that no matter how much she cried, no one was coming to save her.
