Bullied Cinderella - Hollie Hutchins Page 0,12
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