The question was: who?
And more importantly:how could she prove it from inside Blackwater Maximum Security Prison?
She had one week to find out.
One week until Mama Bear came to collect what she'd been paid for.
One week to survive.
The rest of the morning passed in a blur of pain and unyielding tension. Shuyin returned to the cell after breakfast, every step a fresh ordeal. Tank helped her back onto the bottom bunk, and she lay there perfectly still, fighting off waves of nausea and deep exhaustion while her cellmates maintained their silent watch.
The pain medication had worn off completely now, leaving her with nothing to buffer the constant, radiating agony that emanated from her injuries.
The afternoon shift was designated as yard time for the inmates. It was two hours of what the prison administration optimistically called "recreation" in a concrete wasteland surrounded by imposing thirty-foot walls topped with glinting coils of razor wire.
The sky overhead was a sheet of gray and oppressive clouds, heavy and threatening rain at any moment.
Shuyin sat carefully on a rusted metal bench near the perimeter of the yard, her body functioning as a symphony of pain. Every breath she took was a sharp, stabbing effort that sent painful reminders flaring through her damaged ribs. Her broken hand throbbed with a persistent, deep-aching pulsing that seemed to have its own relentless heartbeat. Her swollen face felt like someone had pumped it full of hot sand, stretched unnaturally tight and burning under the skin.
Tank stood nearby, her powerful muscular arms crossed over her chest, watching the yard with the unwavering vigilance of a sentinel guarding valuable territory. Blade and Razor were sitting at a nearby table, playing cards with two other inmates, but Shuyin knew with absolute certainty they were keeping watch as well. The protective formation they had established around her hadn't dropped or relaxed since breakfast that morning.
Other inmates in the yard gave their group a wide berth, deliberately avoiding their section of the space. Word had spread quickly about Mama Bear's ultimatum and the week-long deadline. Everyone in Blackwater knew Shuyin was living on borrowed time, counting down the hours to an inevitable reckoning.
Some of the women looked at her with genuine pity in their eyes. Others watched with a barely concealed hunger, waiting eagerly to see what would happen when the week ran out and Mama Bear came to collect.
"You're thinking too hard about all this," Tank said, her voice a low rumble. She didn't look directly at Shuyin, but kept her eyes on the yard. "I can practically hear your brain working overtime from where I'm standing."
"I'm trying to figure out who wants me dead badly enough to pay for it," Shuyin replied, her voice still rough and damaged from her injuries. "It's turning out to be a much longer list than I ever would have expected."
"Start with who benefits the most from you being gone permanently," Tank advised, her tone practical and grounded.
Shuyin had been doing exactly that for hours now, turning it over in her mind. Her family's fortune was substantial and complex, with extensive real estate holdings across multiple cities and diverse investment portfolios, as well as her grandmother's considerable personal wealth, accumulated over several decades.
The will had been intricate and complicated, but Shuyin remembered the basic structure and distribution. With her grandmother dead and Shuyin herself convicted of the murder, the inheritance would be forcibly redistributed according to specific legal provisions.
"My stepmother," Shuyin said slowly, the realization crystallizing into a cold, hard certainty as she spoke. "She married my father twelve years ago, after my biological mother died. She has a daughter, my stepsister. They both stood to inherit absolutely nothing while I was alive and free."
"But that changes everything with you locked up here for murder" Tank prompted, finally glancing her way.
"The will can be legally contested now. I'd be declared unfit to inherit due to the murder conviction. The money and assets would default to my father, and when he eventually dies..." Shuyin's throat tightened painfully around the words with the dawning horror of the realization. "It all goes to them, according to his will. Everything."
"There's your motive," Tank said, her voice grim. "What about means? Could she have actually had the reach to frame you for this?"
"Everything looks just so complicated now, so tangled..." Shuyin's mind raced, the personal betrayal cutting as deep as the financial one.
"Yesterday was supposed to be my wedding day. My stepsister is pregnant with my fiancé's... They had abandoned me when it all fell apart, when I was arrested..." She shook her head, a futile gesture of confusion and pain. "Everything happened all of a sudden, a whirlwind. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't stop it."