Read Snowfall at Willow Lake: Lakeshore Chronicles Book 4 for Free Online Page A

a press badge appeared. “Brooks Fordham, New York Times . Please, tell us what tonight is about.”
    Sophie offered a restrained smile. “Mr. Fordham, if you really want the story, it would take hours to tell.”
    â€œI really want the story. Why don’t you give me the digest version. And please, call me Brooks.”
    Sophie knew his type—spoiled, ambitious, overeducated, handsome, and he knew it. But she obliged, summarizing the situation that had brought them to this night. Umoja had been a nation enslaved, oppressed by a semi-legal syndicate of European diamond merchants and their African collaborators, led by a notorious war criminal named General Timi Abacha. For two decades, the nation had been run by a ruthless militia funded by the blood diamond trade. In time, the atrocities became so severe that finally the world took notice.
    Then came the photograph, the one that finally put Umoja on the map and in the public consciousness. The picture showed a young native boy, missing a hand and an ear, glaring at the camera with eyes that had lost all innocence. He had been ripped from his family, forced to work and punished by mutilation, all because he was small enough to fit into a mine shaft. The photograph made the front page of newspapers and journals and galvanized the world community to take action. A team of international investigators verified incidents of slavery and abuse, of child conscription and rape. The case was built with meticulous care, imperiling many of the key players. “Accidents” befell those who questioned the wrong people or found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    Sophie knew the tale by heart, perhaps better than anyone in the room. In preparing for the case, she had sunk herself deep into the red clay earth of the landlocked nation. On a map, it was shaped like a pitcher, its spout tipping down into the top of South Africa.
    And that, of course, was what made it such a rich prize. In its borderlands were some of the most prolific diamond mines in the world, yielding up rough stones of exceptional quality. For untold generations, the native tribes had defended themselves from European colonists and rival tribes. Finally, ten years before, a rogue tribe, armed and financed by diamond interests, took over the nation in a bloody coup.
    Its people suffered tortures beyond imagining—rape, ethnic cleansing, genocide. Little boys were conscripted as soldiers; young girls were used and discarded, or forced to bear the children of their rapists. In preparing the case against the dictator and warlord, Sophie and her team had interviewed victims of every possible crime. There were so many stories of unspeakable brutality that some members of the staff had resigned, traumatized. Others turned numb as a defense, desensitized by an overload of horror.
    Every time Sophie heard of a boy, no older than her own son, brainwashed and forced into drug addiction, and turned into a killing machine, she bled a little. When she heard of a young woman, a teenager perhaps her daughter’s age, raped within an inch of her life, she bled a little more. Every story ripped at her heart, and very early on in the case it became personal.
    Protests and calls for international sanctions were insufficient. Calculating as coldly as the diamond lords who called all the shots, she set about building a case against the regime, ousting the government and restoring the natives to power.
    The process had taken two years. Sophie had worked herself into exhaustion. She’d lost her marriage and now lived an ocean away from her children. But tonight she reminded herself that the battle had been won. Tonight was about recognizing those who had restored a nation to its rightful keepers. No longer did villagers flee before armies of thugs. No longer were people forced to work in the mines, suffering abuse and starvation until they died at the hands of the inhuman jackals who had stolen