Chapter 2 - The Injustice of Status
The interrogation room was a sterile box of grey paint and flickering fluorescent lights—a far cry from the opulent, velvet-draped corridors of the Brookstone District I had been evicted from. I sat with my wrists still shackled, my knees throbbing where the skin had been torn away on the concrete. The man who had grabbed me, Noah’s father, paced outside the glass observation window like a caged tiger. He was a titan of the city, a man whose name was etched in gold onto the hospital wings, and every officer in the building treated him with the terrified, sycophantic reverence reserved for those who could buy and sell the law.
"You have no evidence," the lead detective said, his voice a rhythmic, droning threat as he leaned over the table. He didn't bother offering me water, even though my throat felt like it had been scrubbed with wire wool. "A witness saw a street girl running with a kidnapped child. The boy’s father is prepared to press every charge in the book, and the hospital staff is ready to testify that you were casing the lobby for hours. Tell me, girl, who are you working for? Was it a trafficking ring? Did you leave him to die to cover your tracks after the ransom failed?"
"I didn't steal him," I whispered, my voice sounding like gravel. "I found him. In the park. Behind the old fountain."
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"The park is under heavy surveillance," the detective scoffed, tossing a file onto the table. "If someone dumped the boy, we’d have them on camera. But the tapes show nothing. They just show you, running like a banshee toward the hospital with a dying child. Tell me, how does a kid like you—someone who barely has a roof over her head—find a millionaire's son, alone, in a locked-down park, and expect us to believe you’re a hero?"
I bit my lip until I tasted iron. I couldn't tell them about the woman in the red coat. Her face—sharp, angular, and cruel—burned in my mind. She had looked at me with a hatred that felt ancient. She had told me that if I whispered her name to a soul, my little sister, Maya, would be gone before the sun set. Every minute I spent here, playing the criminal, the real monster was slipping further into the shadows. I felt the familiar, crushing weight of being invisible—the way the world looked at people like me and saw nothing but a nuisance, a threat, a stain on their pristine marble floors. I was a shadow they wanted to sweep away, and the detective was the broom.
