Rise of the Formidable Ex-wife (Lucia and Alex) novel Chapter 215

Chapter 215

Chapter 215

One week.

One week since they came home. One week since the warehouse on Carver Street. One week since Monica sat on a courtroom floor holding her father’s hand while he went still.

The courtroom was nothing like what Lucia had imagined. She had imagined something grander, something that felt like the weight of what had happened. Instead it was a medium-sized room with wooden benches and fluorescent lighting and the smell of old paper and coffee from somewhere down the hall. The kind of room where ordinary things happened every day, which made it wrong for this.

She sat in the front row with Alexander beside her. Ria and Lucas sat on her other side, close enough that their arms were touching. Behind them, the benches were filling with journalists, court observers, a few faces Lucia recognised from Hart Industries. The room had a particular hum, not loud, just the compressed sound of people waiting for something significant.

Margaret was brought in through a side door.

She was wearing grey prison clothes, her hair pulled back, no makeup, no jewellery, no coat. She looked nothing like the woman who had descended basement stairs in expensive shoes and a gold bracelet. She looked reduced. Not broken, not yet, but smaller in every dimension than she had been.

She sat at the defense table and her lawyer leaned toward her immediately, speaking in low tones. Margaret looked straight ahead while he talked.

Then she looked across the room and found Lucia.

They held each other’s gaze for a moment that stretched past comfortable. Margaret’s expression did not shift into hatred or anger. It was something more complicated. Something that had been burning long enough to go from flame to coal, still hot but no longer visible.

Lucia held the gaze until Margaret looked away first.

The judge entered and the room rose and sat again, the collective movement of it settling something into place.

The charges were read. Kidnapping. False imprisonment. Assault causing actual bodily harm. The murder of Marco Hart. Each one landing separately in the room, each one carrying its own weight. Lucia watched Monica’s jaw tighten on the word murder. Watched Lucas close his eyes briefly and then open them again.

The prosecution began with Monica.

She walked to the witness stand in a dark blue dress that Lucia had not seen before, her hair neat, her back straight, and she sat down and looked at the prosecution lawyer and waited.

She was thirteen years old and she looked like someone ten years older sitting in that box.

The questions were careful and methodical. Margaret’s lawyer had tried to have her testimony limited given her age. The judge had declined. So Monica sat in the witness box in a courtroom full of adults and answered each question in a voice that did not shake.

She described the mall. The fire alarm. The cloth pressed over her mouth. Waking up in the basement.

She described the ropes and the cold and the hunger and the dark.

She described Margaret coming down the stairs.

“When you saw the defendant,” the prosecution lawyer said carefully, “what did she do?”

Monica looked at the lawyer. Then she looked at the jury, eleven faces looking back at her with the expression of people trying to stay professional and not entirely managing it.

“She brought a bag,” Monica said. “She took out tools and a gun, She told us she was going to end our lives before she and Marco left the country.” Her voice was steady and clear. “Then my father came down the stairs.”

The courtroom was completely quiet.

“Can you tell us what happened when your father arrived?”

Monica’s hands were flat on the railing in front of her. She looked at them for one moment, then looked up.

“He stood between me and the gun,” she said. “He spread his arms out.” She paused. “She shot him.”

Someone in the gallery made a sound. The judge did not intervene.

“He died on the floor next to me,” Monica continued. “He held my hand until he couldn’t anymore.”

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She stopped. Looked at her hands again.

“He told me he was sorry,” she said quietly. “He told me he loved me. And I told him I forgave him.” She looked back at the jury. “I need people to know that. That he was forgiven before he died.”

The prosecution lawyer said nothing for a moment. Then, gently, “Thank you, Monica. No further questions.”

Margaret’s defense lawyer stood. He was careful with Monica, clearly aware of the room’s temperature, and his questions were brief. He asked about the sequence of events. He asked whether Monica had seen his client fire the weapon or only heard the shot.

“I saw her raise the gun toward me,” Monica said. “I saw my father stand in front of me. I heard the shot. Then he fell.” She looked at the defense lawyer with the same steadiness she had shown throughout. “If you’re asking whether I saw her pull the trigger, I was looking at my father.”

The lawyer sat down.

Lena took the stand after Monica. She described the same events from her position against the wall. Her voice was direct and factual, the voice of someone who had spent six days in a basement finding ways to keep her mind clear, and it had not stopped working that way.

When the defense lawyer asked whether she could be certain of the sequence of events given the chaos and fear, Lena looked at him.

“I was trying to keep my sister alive,” she said. “I was watching everything very carefully.”

He sat down.

Margaret did not take the stand. Her lawyer made the choice. She sat at the defense table throughout and looked at the witnesses and at the jury and at the photographs the prosecution entered into evidence, photographs that Lucia did not look at directly but that she knew were there.

The prosecution closed with the image from the security footage at the warehouse. Margaret descending the basement stairs. The bag in her hand. The girls visible against the wall.

The jury was out for four hours.

Lucia sat in a corridor with a paper cup of bad coffee going cold in her hands and Alexander’s knee pressed against hers and did not look at her phone. Ria sat across from her with her head back against the wall, eyes closed. Lucas walked the length of the corridor slowly, back and forth, the same measured pacing that had been his way of processing things since childhood.

Monica sat beside Lucia and leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder and said nothing.

The jury came back.

They filed in without looking at the defense table, which was answer enough for anyone who had been in a courtroom before.

Guilty. On all counts. Every one.

The judge set sentencing for three weeks. Margaret was led out of the courtroom through the side door. As she passed the front row she stopped for one moment, despite the officer’s hand on her arm.

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