Sweet Romance11 min read
My Little Princess and the Wheels of Fate
ButterPicks14 views
I was born thin and angry, into a life that learned early to bite back. I am Elina Ward, and this is the life I get to rewrite.
"They're saying it's a girl," the nurse sang through the door like something bright. I blinked, wiped sweat from my mouth, and let the sound land where it ought to: right in my chest.
"Seven and four—healthy as a bell," someone laughed. The delivery room filled with voices, with a heat that made panic steady itself into something careful.
"Grandfather," I croaked, and the next thing I felt was a pair of broad, shaking hands lifting the small warm body into the light.
"She's mine," Baltasar Scholz roared. "My granddaughter." He hugged her like he held every high tide and low tide in his arms.
My daughter, Angela Black, made a tiny noise and curled against my skin. I closed my eyes as my father stepped up and bumped Dmitri Warren playfully on the shoulder.
"Good son," Baltasar said, but his eyes were all on the baby.
Dmitri laughed, more nervous than proud. "We did well, Elina." He kissed my forehead, and for a second I could not breathe because everything had fallen into place—my husband, my child, a family that looked like they believed in mercy.
"Look at those legs," Bridget Schmidt said with a tear in her voice when she held Angela. "Firm as an oak."
"She'll be spoiled rotten," Joel Hudson muttered, smiling like a man who leaves his boots at the door for the storms.
A nurse lifted little Angela, and she woke and grabbed at my finger. The small grip was all the law in the world I needed.
"Don't let anyone take my girl," I told them, voice a rough whisper.
"Who would?" Dmitri asked, and I could see the question around the room—who would?
---
Two weeks later, Angela slept in a soft cradle and I slept in short pockets of dream. The house was full: Baltasar and Bridget, my husband Dmitri, and brothers-in-law who joked like rugby players and tendered like children. The family could be a noisy art, every rough edge polished by affection.
"Let me hold her," West Han said one morning when he rolled over in, chair oiled like a throne.
"Not yet," Baltasar snapped. "You'll tip the bed."
West gave what looked like a faint smile and turned toward the cradle. Angela opened her eyes as if she'd been waiting for that exact second, and the world stilled.
"May I?" West asked me softly.
"Of course," I said, and he eased the baby into his lap as if the world were fragile glass and he knew how to carry it. Angela reached out and touched his cheek with a damp little hand. West's pale face softened. "You like him."
"She reached for me first," West said in the smallest voice anyone had ever heard him use.
Angela made a small bubbling laugh. West smiled like a sunrise.
"She's ours," Gamely shouted a cousin in the doorway, and the room broke into laughter.
---
I didn't notice the way some people watched until later.
"Your sister was at the hotel," a voice hissed. I looked up. Juliet Kaiser hovered at the edge of our sunshine, perfume like a challenge.
Juliet was my older sister. She smiled like an offer disguised as a favour and clasped her daughter, Julia Huang—a small, stormy child—against herself. "Congratulations, little sister," Juliet said. "Funny, isn't it? How the world changes overnight."
"Congratulations," I echoed. But the line of her mouth didn't reach her eyes. I had learned long ago to read thinness of smile. I had learned to know what hunger looked like even when it had a badge.
"You'll spoil her all to pieces," Juliet continued, too sugary. "You know how to let one child be the sun."
"She's my child," I said. "She gets what she needs."
"She'll take everything you love," Juliet breathed like a prophecy.
West's eyes moved toward Juliet; somewhere, a warning bell faint as windlight chimed. Angela fussed in West's arms and West rocked her like a boat.
"Don't be absurd," Dmitri said, and the room shrugged the comment away like lint.
---
The months were all small victories. Angela learned to roll, then to nap… and then she learned to reach out. She reached for West's face like she knew something the rest of us didn't. When she touched him, a thin, dark residue—so tiny I might have missed it—lifted from his skin and faded. He shivered with a softness that made me look twice.
"What's that?" I asked.
"A smear of grease from my wheelchair," West said quickly, but I saw the way his fingers trembled. He had lived with that tremor for longer than anyone knew.
Our house became a harbor. West became a frequent visitor. He came with small twiglike jokes and hands that fought with the ropes of the chair. In a family full of giants, West had the gravity of a lighthouse.
Angela's presence healed him in small, strange ways.
"She makes me lighter," West once told me, sitting by the dinner table. "She tastes of lemon and afternoon."
"She is magic," Baltasar said like a prayer.
Everyone laughed, but there was a line of quiet that tracked Juliet's movement through rooms. She watched me with the calculation of a woman who thought love was a ledger.
---
One night, the world lit itself on fire like sudden oil.
"Where's Angela?" Baltasar barked, voice a cliff. I had been across the room, my back bent over a knitting pattern, when the world went wrong. A nurse said Angela had been sleeping; someone else swore they had seen Juliet near the nursery.
"They were gone," a guard said at the door, and his voice split the air.
My knees folded like paper. "They—who?" I could not finish the sentence.
"We have a call," Joel said, but his voice was distant. "A ransom demand."
"Ransom?" I felt Dmitri's hands grab mine like an anchor in a storm. "How did—"
"They took her," someone said. "From the bathroom. From the window."
I remember Baltasar shouting a name. "Bring them back."
Men poured out of rooms like a flock stirred. We had cars, drivers, men who could do things with a single command. They fanned across the city like shadows.
West, who had been quietly pressing his palm against Angela's cradle, stood like a ship struck by thunder. "Angela," he said, but the word was thin as a reed.
We got the call later: the voice on the line asked for three hundred thousand in bills, and in the background, a child's soft whimper. West listened, his jaw clenched until the bone in his neck showed. He cut the call, his hands small fists.
"Where are they?" Baltasar demanded.
"Out—east. A call from an industrial zone," the detective said. "But the line is messy. We'll need to act fast."
"We have to go," I said. Flames in my chest.
---
We drove east like a pack of wolves. The wind in the city skinned us raw. When we reached the dilapidated compound, men in tattered shirts looked like a bad memory come true.
"All of you stay back," the detective ordered. "We move fast."
Two children were in that pit—one small boy with raw knuckles and a small girl with my daughter's necklace gone. Angela lay on a bed of straw, the gold tag with our number torn from her throat.
"She's—" I couldn't finish. They had taken a company's piece of me and tried to cash it.
A boy—barely older than West—rose from the group. He had the look of a man who had been cataloguing survival for years. Arlo Copeland walked forward carrying Angela like the thought of it was the only straight thing in his day.
"Sir," Arlo said to Baltasar. "I saw them come. I knocked on the door. I cut a lock. I ran."
"How—why did you—" Baltasar's voice broke.
A child's voice came from the tall grass. "They were valuable," the woman in charge hissed. "We were offering them for money. We didn't think they'd send anyone like you."
There was a shot, a sudden bloom of violence. A man named Akiko David—an accomplice—raised his head and went down with a single crack of danger. Someone else screamed. The air was blood and dust, and in the middle of it West rocked as if the world had found a place to put all his old grief.
Arlo looked like no saint. He had dirt under his nails and a survival's certainty. He handed Angela to Baltasar.
"She's safe," he said.
"God bless you," Baltasar managed.
---
Back at the house, the city hummed like an embarrassed insect. We had Angela. We had hands. But we had a list of people who had watched Juliet stand near the nursery and smiled like a ledger had balanced.
Two days later, at a banquet meant to celebrate a child's first year, I watched Juliet sit at the far table while Baltasar recited old stories. Susan's family, friends, and officious faces made ceremony like armor.
"You finally stopped them," Juliet whispered into the ear of a man at her table. "How sweet. I knew you'd make it."
"Are you all right?" I asked Dmitri as Baltasar poured wine.
"All right," Dmitri said. "You see—"
And then everything that had been gnawing at us became sudden. Joel, who had remained in the back, rose and cleared his throat.
"Everyone," he said. "May I have your attention?"
Conversations stopped. Silverware paused midair.
"Two days ago," Joel said, voice steady as a knife thrust, "our daughter was taken from the nursery. The police followed a call to an illegal shelter. Children there were traded and abused. Three people were involved in facilitating the entrance that day."
My heart beat hot and loud. "Who?" I asked, and I did not feel my voice.
Joel moved like a man who had been keeping a ledger. "The shelter marks show complicity—someone from inside helped arrange the abduction. We traced the call and the movement of certain cars. We discovered..." He looked toward Juliet like a man looking for a missing tooth. "Someone provided access."
Juliet's face folded like paper. She smiled and then the smile dropped. "What are you saying?"
"We are saying," Baltasar said, the room orbiting his gravity, "that someone in this room allowed strangers to access our home. That someone then attempted to profit from our daughter."
The table around us shivered. Forks clinked like small bells.
Juliet rose, hands flapping like a trapped bird. "You can't—"
"Juliet," Baltasar said calmly, "we have proof. Your fingerprints were near the nursery window, and your messages to a woman named Akiko David were tracked."
The room inhaled.
Juliet's mother—an enormous woman who had made a career of yelling in cheap clothes—leapt to her feet. "You have no right!" she bawled. "You can't accuse us!"
"I can," Joel said. "And I will. An anonymous tip, photographs, and witness statements. We will present these to the district attorney. But before we do, you will speak here. Tell the family why you allowed men into the nursery."
Juliet's face went through shades—fear, denial, calculation. "I didn't—" she started.
"—Because you owed someone money," Baltasar finished for her. "Because you wanted to be taken care of. Because you thought your daughter deserved more than a life you could give, and you put us to the test."
A murmur rose; a woman at the corner stood and her hand shook as she covered her mouth.
"You sent our child out for coins," I said. The words surprised me; they were not mine to make them sharp, but they cut like a clean blade.
"For three hundred thousand," Dmitri continued. "You arranged to have her moved. You thought we would pay because we feared our names. You miscalculated."
Juliet laughed—thin, brittle. "You—you're going to ruin me."
"You already ruined your reputation," Joel said. "Look around you. Look at who you have chosen."
At the back, West's face was small and hard as a rock. His fingers were white on the wheel. West made an effort to stand and failed, but his eyes were steady enough.
Then the room answered the way families do: with sounds. Soft weeping. Voices that agreed and voices that did not.
"How could you?" Bridget whispered. "A child—"
"What did you expect?" I heard my own voice say, and the echo of all the hours when Juliet had smiled and watched me with something like hunger.
Juliet's mother fell to her knees. "We were desperate," she wailed. "We had no food. I—"
"Did you think kidnapping would buy you life?" Joel asked. "Is that the cost of food? Is that the law you live by?"
The crowd pressed in, pressing with questions now sharpened to accusations. Phones came out. Someone livestreamed. Cameras clicked. Faces recorded themselves for the world to see the ruin of a woman who had agreed to trade a child for money.
Juliet tried to speak, to manufacture innocence, but the evidence closed in like a trap. The detective read messages in court-subtle language that left no room for ambiguity. The hired man was named. The payments were shown. The man we had called Akiko David had attempted to sell, and Akiko was dead—shot while trying to escape—another stain in the pile, but not on us.
"What do you want us to do?" Juliet's mother begged. Her voice was empty of truth, full of the last scrap of a life.
"We want you to stop hurting children," Baltasar said. "We want you to answer for this to the authorities. We will turn what we have over. But we will also make sure this family—your children—are taken care of. We will not let the guilt of your decisions ripple into their futures."
A flush of astonished whispers. Some people clapped—soft, sharp. Others hissed.
Juliet's face had gone thin with the suddenness of exposure. Her daughter, Julia Huang, sat motionless, legs swinging small in the chair, eyes wide and not understanding.
"You wanted a life," I said to Juliet, and the room listened like a court. "You thought stealing mine would give you something more."
Juliet's eyes filled. "It was only money," she said. "I didn't mean—"
"You meant," Dmitri said, "to place profit over a child's life. You meant to see if we'd blink. You were ready to trade blood for currency."
For a long minute, silence sat in the room like snowfall. Then a soft sound: cameras calling, people talking, the herd of public attention moving from curiosity to wrath. A woman in the next circle of food reached for Juliet and spat at her shoes. Someone recorded the act.
Juliet's mother cried and cried like a storm. She begged forgiveness. The world had grown a louder voice than pleading, and someone in the throng had already called the DA to confirm a meeting. The livestream had three thousand viewers in a minute. The public would see the truth, and their appraisal was merciless.
Juliet's parents tried to tell us they were sorry. They received a formal reading of their rights and the evidence. The room—my family’s home, the only place I had thought safe—felt like a small court. And in that court, on a day meant to celebrate a child's first year, a woman realized that her life would be judged by all the eyes she had ever tried to sell.
Around us, people whispered and clicked and chose sides. A diner woman stood and walked over to Juliet and—deliberately, slowly—pushed the plate of celebratory cake away from her. Cameras caught it.
"Shame!" someone shouted.
"Shame!" then echoed like a chorus. The weight of it struck Juliet so hard she sank.
She was called a traitor, a thief, a mother who traded a child for money. She had wanted more than her life allowed, but the price had been our child. Now the world watched her make the mistake of asking for mercy where justice must be served.
When the police finally escorted Juliet and her mother out, it was not silent. The crowd pressed forth, phones raised, faces like a thousand small judgments. Cameras panned in for the smallest crease of the lip and the shaking of a hand.
Juliet's face turned toward me once, and I saw a nameless thing cross it—regret, or terror; I could not tell. She mouthed something. Forgive me, or help me, or I'm sorry—any of them might have been true. The room had no patience for it.
When the door closed, the hush that followed felt like an aftershock. We had won, and we had also become witnesses to the ruin of someone who had once been kin.
But the public punishment was not merely humiliation. The DA's office set charges within the week: arranging the abduction, conspiracy, facilitating trafficking. The livestream and the messages became evidence. Juliet's mother would be tried. The plates on the table that she once thought would feed her instead fed headlines.
And yet—even as justice took over—there was a quiet in the room. Baltasar put his hand on Angela's hair, and she reached for West.
We had survived a thing that could have snapped us. We were still holding on.
---
After the dressing down and the police, Angela slept in West's arms that night as if nothing else mattered. West had brought her a small carved toy; he had scraped his pockets and given her something like a world.
"I promise," he whispered into the curve of her ear, "I will protect her."
"You will," I said. It was not a question.
Warm and safe, Angela dreamed. I lay awake and let the night tell me a small thing: that in this life, I had been given a second chance. I had been given my daughter and a family and a way to make the path less cruel for someone else.
Justice had struck and it had been public and harsh. I had wanted vengeance and I had wanted mercy; the world had given me both. We had made sure the villains were judged by the eyes that saw them. They had failed spectacularly in public, their faces turned into lessons.
I wrapped my arm around Angela, who slept like a small moon.
"Stay," I told her. "Stay, and let us keep you."
Outside, life went on. West's chair creaked as he rose. "I will bring coffee," he said, and his smile was crooked and soft.
"Bring warmth," I answered. "And come back."
He nodded.
When he left, I checked every door and window and then let myself breathe. Our daughter had been snatched and returned in a day like a terrible meteor. We had learned that our enemies could be close. But we had also learned that we had defenders who would risk everything.
"You're safe," I murmured.
Angela stirred and, in her small, clean voice—like the beginning of all kind things—said, "Mama."
I had waited a lifetime to hear it again. I smiled and fell asleep with a heart full of small, stubborn hopes.
The End
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