Cruel Shame by Sofia Daniel

They say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die.
Not mine.
At the click of that gun, a kaleidoscope of Elizabeth-related encounters whizzed through my mind—the day she exposed Mr. Burgh as my grandfather, the night she got me dragged naked from my room by the police, and that kiss she had forced on me in the snow.
Bitterness rose to the back of my throat. Elizabeth Liddell despised, desired, and wanted to destroy me. Yet it was Elizabeth Liddell’s twisted, sneering face that occupied what could be my last moments of life.
I crouched on the floor as still as death. Shards of broken glass sliced into my forearms, my shins, the soft skin of my wrists and palms.
The shooter stood behind me like a specter, their excited breaths rasping in the breeze. They grated against my eardrums, each inhale and exhale sending pin-pricks along nerves pulled tight enough to snap.
My throat spasmed, and I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the next gunshot to blow my brains across the bedroom floor.
This was no professional. A professional would have shot me from outside the academy, preferably from beyond a large hedge and would be halfway to Glasgow by now.
“Turn around,” said a familiar voice. It was female, but not Elizabeth’s or her wretched mother’s. “I want to see you.”
A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead and nestled into the corner of my eye. I clenched my teeth. “Why are you doing this?”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?” she said.
I clenched my fists and pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. The movement tore open my cuts, making me wince.
The gun woman stepped out of reach, her feet crunching on the broken glass. “Sit on your ass and place your palms on the floor where I can see them.”
With my cuts feeling like they’d been doused in vinegar, it was a struggle to maneuver myself into position. Somehow, I managed to clear a small space among the broken glass.
Myra, the witch-faced girl who followed Elizabeth everywhere, stood in the middle of my room holding a pistol in one hand and a smartphone in the other.
Sunlight streamed in through the blasted-open window, making the ends of her tawny hair shine like honey. The dry strands frizzed over her large head like a brim, casting shadows over her deep-set eyes.
She wrinkled her hooked nose with exaggerated disgust and stretched out the hand holding the smartphone. From the pinprick of light next to the camera lens, it looked like she was recording me groveling on the floor.
Anger rushed through my veins. Shooting at my window was bad enough. Holding me at gunpoint was worse, but recording my humiliation was beyond twisted.
“Aren’t you in enough trouble already?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed. “You framed Elizabeth and me with your stepfather’s cocaine.”
A dozen denials rose to the back of my throat. She and Elizabeth had been the ones to frame me with cocaine in my first term of Templar Academy. They had also stupidly decided to keep the drugs for themselves to sell to the other girls under the guise of diet products. Now that they’d been caught, they had the nerve to force me to take the blame.
I wanted to shout all of that in her face, but I clenched my teeth. In any situation involving a gun-toting lunatic, the winner of the argument was the person holding the pistol.
“What do you want?” I asked instead.
She lowered the hand holding the gun. “You’re going to tell the truth.”