Captive Bride - Alta Hensley Page 0,67

shatter my soul. Lost. Final.

“I’m being sentenced to death tomorrow. Lethal injection. The lawyer says today was my final attempt at overturning the guilty verdict. I lost again.”

Guilty.

The judge and jury had deemed her guilty.

She was guilty. She had placed the bomb in the building. She had killed those men. When she was asked why, she had said it was for the cause. The company housed in the building was testing against animals. She had been the judge and jury in that case, deciding that the experiments they were conducting deemed them worthy of being destroyed. ‘A cause,’ she had stated over and over. She was proud of her cause. She was proud of what she did. Not once did she say she was sorry. Not once did she glance over at the wives and families of the men she killed and beg for their forgiveness. Not once did she look at me and tell me she had made a huge mistake and wished she could take it all back. Not once did she show even an ounce of decency in her actions. When I had asked her why she would kill those innocent men, praying to God it was an accident, she simply shrugged and told me it was collateral damage. The price to pay for a bigger and better cause. So yes, what the media was saying about her was true.

Demon.

Murderer.

Monster.

My momma.

Yes.

So, I had no choice but to carry the shame for the both of us, and what a heavy weight it was. On my eighteenth birthday, I sat in the crowded courtroom and watched my mother stand with an aura of defiance and pride while the judge sentenced her to death for five counts of murder.

Happy Birthday to me.

“Demi?”

“Yes?” My voice cracked. I glanced around my bedroom at the piles of dirty clothes strewn about as my heart threatened to beat out of my chest. My room reflected my life. Dirty, neglected, disarrayed, shambles. My life was in chaos, and all I wanted right now was a fucking cigarette. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be real… yet, it was.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes.”

There was a long pause as darkness suffocated me. As darkness stabbed at my heart over and over. As darkness bludgeoned me to a bloody pulp. Darkness destroyed me as I sat there with the phone to my ear.

Dead man walking…

Correction.

Dead woman walking…

“It’s okay, Demi. I’m at peace. I finally get to be with your father.”

I said nothing as I struggled to breathe. The small room of my one-bedroom apartment shrank in size as the walls appeared to be closing in on me. I was trapped in this nightmare that I couldn’t elude. There was no escape from my life.

“Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down and broke his crown. And Jill came tumbling after,” she sang softly as she had done so many times in my youth. She paused, as if she were waiting for me to say something. As if wanting me to ask for clarification.

I wanted to scream for her to stop. I didn’t want to hear that awful nursery rhyme ever again. I wanted her to shut the fuck up! Yet, I didn’t want those to be my last words to her. No matter what, she didn’t deserve that. I didn’t want her to die hearing my cruel—but honest—words ringing in her ears. A daughter’s truth to a mother who had done her wrong… so very wrong. So, I remained silent. Silent like all the times I watched her and others meet in my living room planning to take down a government agency or corrupt company. These strangers plotting and planning in my childhood home all spoke as if they were the good guys, and everyone else were the villains. I had grown up to distrust our government due to all the conspiracy theories I heard growing up. I never questioned. I never disagreed. I never told a soul of their plans. I only remained silent as a good little girl would do.

“I’m proud. Your father died for his cause, and now I get to tumble down after him.”

I had finally learned all about my father after my mother was arrested. Not from my momma, but by the television. The media had informed me that my father—who I was simply told was ‘gone’—had died in a blaze of police gunfire when he refused to surrender after