“You look terrible, Carmen,” she said, her voice a smooth, low purr.
“You monster,” I spat, leaning forward as far as the handcuffs would allow. “You tried to kill me. You put cyanide in that cake to get rid of me, and you accidentally poisoned your own daughter. How do you sleep at night? How do you look at Andrew?”
Sophia didn’t flinch. A slow, terrifying smile crept across her perfectly painted lips. It was the same sweet smile she had given me on the FaceTime call, but here, in the dark interrogation room, it was the smile of a demon.
“Accidentally?” Sophia echoed softly, tilting her head.
I froze. The words hung in the air between us, heavy and toxic.
“What do you mean, accidentally?” I whispered, a new, even deeper horror beginning to take root in my chest.
Sophia leaned across the table, her eyes locking onto mine with absolute, venomous certainty.
“Do you really think I didn’t know you were on a diet, Carmen? Do you really think I didn’t know you would never touch a single gram of sugar?” Sophia whispered, her breath smelling faint of mint and expensive perfume. “I have known every single detail of your life since the day you forced your way into my son’s heart. I knew exactly what you would do with that cake.”
My mind fractured. “No… no, you said… you screamed that I killed her…”
“I had to give a good performance for the phone records, dear,” Sophia murmured, her smile widening into a grotesque grin. “Lucy was a liability. She was weak, she was foolish, and she was about to ruin the Velasco name with a scandal I could not allow to see the light of day. But you… you were an infestation. A parasite from the lower class clinging to my family’s wealth.”
She leaned in closer, until her face was only inches from mine.
“I didn’t miscalculate, Carmen. I knew you would give the cake to Lucy. I designed the trap so that with one single baked good, I would eliminate my useless daughter, protect our family secrets, and send you to a maximum-security prison for the rest of your miserable life. Andrew belongs to me again. You’ve lost.”
I stared at her, my mouth open in a silent scream of absolute terror. She hadn’t tried to kill me. She had sacrificed her own child just to frame me.
“And the best part?” Sophia whispered, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a small, clear plastic bag containing a familiar, elegant gold pen—my pen, the one Andrew had gifted me, which I kept on the kitchen counter. “The police haven’t checked the lining of your winter coat yet. But they will. And when they do, they’ll find the vial of potassium cyanide I slipped into your pocket while you were screaming into your phone this morning.”
Before I could even find my voice to scream for the detectives, Sophia stood up, smoothed down her skirt, and restored her mask of grief.
She turned toward the one-way mirror and let out a sharp, ragged sob, collapsing against the door as if she were a broken, mourning mother.
The door burst open, and Detective Miller rushed in, looking at me with absolute fury.
But as Sophia was led out of the room by an officer, she glanced back at me over her shoulder. For a fraction of a second, the grief vanished, and she gave me one final, parting wink—and then, she muttered five words that made my heart completely stop beating.
