What prison passes? What living off the state?
“Yelena, do it now!” Deirdre urged, feeling a strange sense of unease at Juniper’s words. Once the girl was drugged, blind, deaf, and mute, her daughter’s future would be secure.
“Right.” Yelena’s eyes glinted with malice as she unscrewed the cap and moved to force Juniper’s mouth open.
But just as she got close, a hand shot out and clamped around her neck. Yelena’s face contorted in shock. She stared at Juniper, not even comprehending how she had moved so fast.
The next moment, Juniper effortlessly lifted her up and tossed her to the ground like a bag of trash, wiping her fingers in disgust.
“Yelena!”
Deirdre rushed to her daughter’s side. They both stared in terror at Juniper, who was now looking down on them with a commanding presence. She was supposed to be tied up! When had she gotten free?
“How dare you lay a hand on my daughter?” Deirdre scrambled to her feet and charged at Juniper. “I’ll kill you today!”
With a single kick, Juniper sent her kneeling to the ground. She leaned in close, her voice like ice. “You’ve caused Saskia a lot of trouble, both openly and behind her back, haven’t you?”
“What do you want?” Deirdre stammered, shuffling backward in fear.
“I want your lives, of course,” Juniper said, casually sitting down and popping a piece of candy into her mouth.
Their lives? Deirdre was terrified. She knelt on the ground, her perfectly made-up face now a mask of terror, all traces of her high-society composure gone.
“Mom...” Yelena crawled to her mother’s side, her face ashen. “I heard Juniper is a good fighter. We should get the kidnappers to handle her.”
The officers followed her gaze and saw several large men tied up on the floor, struggling. Then they looked at Juniper. The girl was sitting in a chair, legs crossed, fiddling with a candy wrapper, a look of detached amusement on her face.
“Did you call the police?” an officer asked.
Yelena and Deirdre remained silent.
“I did,” Juniper said, standing up. “They hired those men to kidnap me and then tried to kill me to cover their tracks. I have proof.”
Proof? What proof?
Before the mother-daughter duo could process what was happening, Juniper played a video on her phone. The first part showed the thugs kidnapping her. The next part clearly showed Yelena and her mother admitting they wanted to kill her and force-feed her the poison. Every word was recorded.

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