Chapter 50
[ 518 words ]
Chapter 50:
The triumphant, malicious smirk Melanie shot her was sickening. The entire floor now believed Caroline was an incompetent idiot who was only there because she was sleeping with a powerful man.
By 6:00 PM, Caroline was physically and mentally exhausted. Her feet ached, and her jaw was tight from clenching her teeth all day.
She walked down to the basement locker room to change.
The room was empty. She walked down the aisle to her assigned metal locker.
She stopped dead.
Someone had injected industrial-strength superglue directly into the locking mechanism. To make the violation personal, a crude, vicious message had been scrawled across the gray metal in thick black permanent marker: Colonel’s Whore. When she looked down, a pool of stagnant, foul-smelling liquid was seeping out from the bottom vent, soaking her backup pair of nursing clogs inside. It was a calculated, insidious act of professional sabotage, and the sheer malice behind it hit Caroline like a punch to the gut.
She stood there, staring at the black ink. A lump formed in her throat. Her eyes burned. She was a highly trained operative who could disarm a man in seconds, but she was entirely defenseless against the slow, grinding cruelty of high school mean-girl tactics.
She took a deep breath, forcing the tears back down.
She opened her purse, pulled out an alcohol prep pad, and began to scrub the metal door. She rubbed until her knuckles ached and the black ink dissolved into smeared gray streaks.
But the marker was the least of her problems. The lock was completely fused shut. She tugged at the metal handle, bracing her foot against the locker frame, but the door wouldn’t budge. The industrial glue had hardened into an immovable seal. Her street clothes, her purse, her phone charger—everything was trapped inside.
A hot surge of frustration rose in her throat. She slammed the flat of her hand against the locker. The metallic bang echoed through the empty room.
𝗪𝗁𝗮𝗍 e𝘃e𝗋𝗒о𝗇𝘦 𝗂𝘴 re𝗮𝗱іn𝗴 𝗈𝗻 𝗴𝖺𝗹𝗇𝗼𝘃𝖾𝗅ѕ.cо𝘮
She stood there for a long moment, breathing hard, her forehead pressed against the cool metal. Then she straightened her spine and walked out to the maintenance office on the ground floor.
The janitor on duty, an older man named Gus who had always been kind to her, took one look at her face and grabbed his crowbar without asking questions.
It took fifteen minutes of prying and the screech of tortured metal, but the locker door finally popped open. The locking mechanism was destroyed beyond repair, the metal frame warped from the force of the crowbar.
Caroline stared at the ruined door, then at Gus, who was wiping sweat from his forehead with a rag. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’ll file a report about the damage.”
Gus just shook his head, his expression weary and knowing. “No need, miss. I’ve seen worse. You take care now.”
She changed into her street clothes in the stall, grabbed her bag, and walked out of the hospital.
The evening air in Washington D.C. was biting cold. The sky was a dark, bruised purple. Caroline pulled her coat tight around her, keeping her head down as she walked toward the Metro station.
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