Chapter 1 - The Iron Spark in the DarkThe suffocating heat inside the storage room settled over me like a heavy, sodden blanket. Without the central air conditioning, the Louisiana summer turned the windowless space into a dark, stagnant oven within twenty minutes.
I lay flat on my stomach, my useless legs heavy as wet sand, my chest heaving in shallow, desperate gulps.
Beneath the rusted metal base of the commercial washing machine, three inches beyond my outstretched fingertips, lay the metallic glint I had spotted.
I dragged my body forward inch by inch, using my forearms and elbows, my fingernails digging into the dirt-caked linoleum. The rough floor scraped through my thin cotton shirt, leaving burning trails across my stomach, but I didn't care.
My fingers finally brushed cold steel.
I pulled it out into the dim sliver of light bleeding beneath the locked door.
It was an old, heavy iron plumber's wrench—fourteen inches long, caked in dried grease and rust, left behind months ago by a contractor who had serviced the secondary drainage pipe.
My heart gave a sudden, violent thud against my ribs.
Sheila Barrett had taken my phone, stripped my room of my wheelchair, ordered Rosie to hide my fifteen-thousand-dollar IVIG vials, and turned off the main water and power breakers in the garage. She had planned every single detail of my quiet, slow execution so she could enjoy sixty-eight days of lavish parties, champagne toasts, and five-star dinners celebrating my half-brother Jordan’s graduation from the Sorbonne in Paris.
She wanted to return to a corpse. She wanted to weep dramatic, frantic tears for the local media, play the heartbroken mother who had "tragically lost her sick daughter to a sudden medical complication," and claim the two-million-dollar private inheritance trust my biological father had left me—a trust that reverted to Sheila if I died before my twenty-fifth birthday.
My twenty-fifth birthday was three months away.
"Not today, Sheila," I rasped, my voice dry as sandpaper against my swollen throat.
I gripped the iron wrench with both hands. I turned onto my side, dragging my lower body toward the back wall of the storage room.
Behind three stacks of rotting cardboard boxes holding old holiday decorations sat the secondary drywall panel—the panel that covered the clean-out access pipe for the main kitchen sink.
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I raised the heavy iron wrench with both hands and brought it down against the drywall with every remaining ounce of strength in my body.
CRACK!
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