“You can toss me on death row, but that’s not going to make me suddenly confess to crimes that aren’t mine.”
The guilty man has spent the last three years stating over and over that it wasn’t him who committed the crimes, but Jessica’s younger brother, Dennis Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim was investigated, however, and it was deemed impossible that he could have killed his sister. The youngest and now sole heir ofthe Wolfsheim fortune has an aggressive form ofmuscular dystrophy, and has been wheelchair bound for over a decade. Despite these facts, Dumas sticks to his story that it was Dennis, not him, who ate the woman.
Emile Dumas will await his execution date in maximum security. He is still getting fan mail from true crime enthusiasts and people pleading for his attention. It is clear that the crimes he was found guilty of don’t dissuade his fans from trying to get him out of prison. Some even have plans for if he gets out. Reporter Bruno Laferte spoke to some of his ‘fans’ outside the courthouse this afternoon after Dumas’s sentencing.
“Emile is innocent!” Kasey Lombard proclaimed while holding a poster with the words ‘Emile can eat my’ above a hand drawn cat. “How could you look into those gorgeous eyes and see anything other than his innocence?” She then proceeded to tell the reporter the same thing the defense had used as the main reason Emile was innocent. He had no history of violence.
Despite fierce arguments from Emile’s lawyer and the man himself, he was deemed guilty by a jury of his peers and will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
A tear fell onto my screen, and I blinked. The pain hit me all at once. I burst into sobs and dropped to the ground, laying my arm on the bench and crying out all the anguish I’d held on to for the last three years.
Gatsby, my one and only true love, had been convicted.
Put on death row.
His crime had been so bad they decided he needed to die for them.
And I had loved him.
No, that was a lie. I still loved him.
I was no better than the fan girls at his trial. I was in love with a man I thought I knew. Some fictional idea I’d builtup in my mind. Behind the screen, he’d created a false identity, convincing me of his inner beauty before I saw his outer, but it was all a lie.
He wasn’t Gatsby. He was Emile Dumas.
And Emile Dumas was a monster.
Emile Dumas ate people.
A sharp knock forced me to rein in my emotions. I stood quickly and grabbed my phone. Taking a deep breath, I steeled myself and hurried out to clean up my face and fix my makeup before my performance.
The show must go on.
Chapter 3
Gatsby
One year after sentencing
“Let’s try this again, Dumas,”Hawkins clipped, and I glared at him from my seat, unable to move. I drummed my fingers on the arms of the chair I was handcuffed to. The psychiatrist laughed and raised the crinkled news article to his face. “This is what has you so worked up? Enough to try to assault a guard?Tsk, tsk.”
A low growl rumbled from deep in my throat, and he raised his eyebrows.
“Emile,” he warned, his eyes flickering to the mask covering my mouth and cheeks. “Would you like me to read the article aloud so we can deconstruct why this upsets you so?”
My chest heaved as I tried to steady my rage. I didn’t want him or anyone else to know a damn thing about me.Everyone just wanted to dissect me, figure out what made me tick.
Figure out why I did what I did.
“Prima Ballerina’s Proposal Steals the Show: Ballet Royalty Engaged to Heir and Owner of Famous Theater,” he read the article’s title. “There’s a photo attached. She’s quite pretty.”
Like I didn’t know that? I knew every line of her face. I dreamed about her every night. Her dark caramel eyes, her long, shiny hair so dark it looked black until it hit the sunlight—in which it turned a beautiful brown, her dimpled smile. All of it was forever ingrained in my memories.
Not getting a good enough response from me, Hawkins continued on.
“Following a performance of the ballet, Coppélia, Max Stanton, ran onto the stage and publicly proposed to Prima Ballerina, Daisy Lovelace.”
I clenched my jaw, and for the first time since I’d been given the muzzle, I was grateful for it. He couldn’t see my reaction to the painful words.
