Chapter Forty-Six: Poisoned Justice
The news came quietly.
No sirens. No headlines screaming for attention. Just a brief mention tucked between stock reports and political updates: Amara Okoye found dead in her apartment. Authorities report no signs of struggle.
Lucia read the line once. Then again.
She felt nothing at first.
The mistress's death unfolded like a whisper rather than a storm. Officials said it was sudden. Private. "Unfortunate." A word often used when powerful people wanted things to disappear neatly. There were no suspects, no urgent investigations—only speculation that faded as quickly as it appeared.
David didn't comment publicly.
That silence told Lucia everything.
She replayed the days leading up to it in her mind. Amara had stopped attending public events. Her social media went quiet. Meetings were canceled. The woman who once laughed easily now moved carefully, nervously, as though the world had tilted beneath her feet.
Lucia knew fear when she saw it.
But Lucia had not touched her. Had not followed her after that warning. Had not acted.
Which meant someone else had.
Justice, it seemed, had been poisoned long before death arrived.
Lucia sat at her desk that night, notebook open, pen unmoving. The room felt colder than usual. Not because of grief—because of understanding.
Her father didn't clean up messes.
He erased them.
Amara had outlived her usefulness. She knew too much. She had panicked. She had become unstable. And unstable people, in David's world, were liabilities.
Lucia remembered her mother's voice from the video: "When someone stops being useful to him, they become invisible."
So this was what invisibility looked like.
David paced the house that evening, phone pressed to his ear, voice low. Lucia watched from the staircase, unseen, listening to fragments.
"It was handled.""No mistakes.""She won't talk now."
Lucia's stomach twisted, but her face remained blank.
In that moment, something hardened inside her—not into rage, but into certainty.
This wasn't revenge anymore.
This was documentation.
She wrote Amara's name in her notebook and drew a line through it. Not as a victory. As a marker. Proof of pattern. Proof of guilt.
Later that night, Lucia searched quietly. The cause of death was still vague. No official explanation. Just silence wrapped in authority. The kind of silence that protected men like David.
Lucia finally felt something then.
Not satisfaction.
Resolve.
Her father believed this death closed a chapter. Believed he had cut another loose end. Believed fear would keep the rest in line.
He was wrong.
Amara's death wasn't the end of justice.
It was the evidence that justice had been corrupted.
Lucia closed her notebook and whispered into the darkness, voice steady, eyes dry:
"You should have let her live."
Because now Lucia knew the truth with absolute clarity—David wouldn't stop until everyone who knew his secrets was gone.
Including her.
And that meant she could no longer move slowly.
Poisoned justice had drawn the first real line.
Lucia was ready to cross it.