She paused, her hands gripping the sides of the podium with enough pressure that her knuckles showed white. "I want you to understand what that means. What it's like to be innocent but treated as guilty. To have everyone you trusted turn away in just a matter of weeks. To have your family disown you. To have your name become synonymous with betrayal and violence."
Her voice stayed steady, but Lu Zeyan could see the slight tremor in her hands, whether genuine emotion or carefully crafted performance he could no longer distinguish. "In prison, I was poisoned." This revelation got another strong reaction from the crowd: gasps of shock, more frantic note-taking, and whispered exclamations. "By inmates who knew my case, who believed I'd killed an old woman and wanted to punish me for it. I nearly died. The poison damaged my nervous system, changed my eyes from brown to this."
