Bullied Cinderella - Hollie Hutchins Page 0,11

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