Revenge13 min read
Blood and Proof: The Wedding on the Big Screen
ButterPicks14 views
I am a DNA analyst. My name is Journi Perrin, and I have hands that know how to read blood and bone like a map.
"Journi," my cousin Claudia Moller said the first day she came to my little lab, "please, I'm begging you. Don't ruin my family."
"Family?" I asked, sliding a sample tray across to an assistant. "You mean the one with the seventy‑two year old husband and the five‑year‑old boy?"
Claudia put her face close to mine and smiled with practiced softness. "Yes. Karim is kind. He takes care of me. You know I never had a mother. Your mother—" She turned to my mother and reached for her hand. "—she raised me. Please."
My mother, Jaelyn Bradley, sniffed and began to cry as she always did when pleading worked. "Journi, you must help her. She's a good girl. She'll lose everything."
I kept my face still. "I will run the tests. Professionally."
Claudia dropped to her knees in front of me like a scene from a melodrama. "If you don't change the results, she whispered through wet lashes, "my husband will leave me. He has heart disease. He will die from the shock. Do you want blood on your hands?"
"That's not how it works," I said. "I can't falsify evidence."
She lifted her chin. "Then you will regret it."
I remember the exact sound of her laugh as I shut the door. It was the kind of laugh that believes rules apply to other people.
The first test was supposed to be routine. Karim England, the so‑called husband, walked into my lab with two burly men who looked like security. He wore a tailored suit and a slight hunch that came with age. His son, a small boy with a serious face, clung to his hand.
"Journi Perrin," Karim said, formal, a touch of old‑world courtesy in his voice. "We trust you."
"Trust me to be accurate," I said. "I always am."
Three days later the report was done. I printed the pages, sealed the conclusion in an envelope, and placed it on my desk.
"Don't open it yet," I told my assistant. "No calls. No forwarding."
What I didn't expect was Claudia showing up the next morning with gifts and a story ready to earn tears.
"She said she was raped years ago and the child was a miracle," my mother told me later, wide‑eyed, as if each detail absolved her. "She begged. She knelt."
"Then why marry the old man at all?" I asked.
"Security," Jaelyn said. "Money. And the boy—she loves the boy."
"Love doesn't explain everything," I said.
Claudia's story had a rhythm: victimhood, sacrifice, and the hunger for a golden finish. She pressed my hands and told my mother about the hardships of youth, about being alone.
"Please," she told me once more, with a voice that was both fragile and sharp. "Change the A result to a B. It will save my marriage."
"I don't change results," I said. "I deliver facts."
She tried a different tactic. "If the truth gets out, Karim will be humiliated. He will die of a broken heart. Is that what you want?"
"Do not threaten," I said, standing. "Leave."
Claudia left, smiling at my mother, hugging her, making promises that would dissolve the moment cameras turned away.
I did my job. The DNA percentages did not lie. I recorded what the markers showed: Karim and the boy had a very low probability of paternity. The results were clear.
When Karim came to pick them up, he held the envelope like a man bracing for a strike.
"Journi," he said, "is this—"
I put the paper on the table. "This is what the test shows."
He read. His face went through the obvious stages: disbelief, anger, shame.
"How?" he said. "How could this be?"
"That is not something I can answer," I said. "But the evidence is what it is."
He left with the report in his hand and a fist of promises bubbling under his skin.
Claudia tore up the report into confetti and flung it at me. "I'll make you pay," she hissed, spitting like venom.
"You think I was afraid two days ago," I told my mother later, "but the threats change. Now it's not begging. It's war."
"I will protect you," Jaelyn said, rationing her fear into a fierce shield.
Days after the report, my mother's life changed. She went to the market one afternoon and never quite made it home the same. A figure, masked and precise, cornered her on the stair. "Think about what your daughter did," the stranger said, brandishing a knife to frighten rather than use it. "You should pay for your daughter's sins."
Jaelyn told the man anything to make him go: "Take my money, take my ring, take the kitchen table. Don't hurt me."
He laughed like a man who only wanted to terrify. He waved the blade along her throat and left. She fell and had a heart attack. She was taken to emergency.
When Jaelyn lost consciousness on the floor, I felt the world tilt.
In the weeks that followed, my lab became a target. Someone broke in, poured gasoline around the instruments, and set them alight. Fire ate through years of my work.
I later learned the surveillance footage had been disabled by clever hands. My lab burned until the alarms screamed and my files became ash. I crawled on the floor and wept as my life's careful maps went black.
Then the lawsuits began.
A client accused me of falsifying a result. Evidence? A transfer of funds into my long‑unused bank account. The courts were hungry for scandal and fed on gossip. The DNA association suspended my license. I became the villain in someone else's story.
They gathered whispers like weapons.
"She must have fixed the results," a neighbor said.
"They say she sold out," another whispered.
I was crushed into a small shape of shame. The city that once trusted me now watched me with distance, eyes like shuttered windows.
I stopped working. I drank to blunt the anger and the shame. One night, as I stumbled out of a bar, a car hit me. I do not remember the color. I remember the sound and the spine‑shattering impact.
When I woke up on a hospital bed, my leg was in a cast. I counted my misfortunes: a mother half dead, a burned lab, a license revoked, and now a body that resisted movement.
I had nothing left but a simmering need for truth and a cold plan.
"I will not let her get away with this," I told my scarred leg in the silence of convalescence. "She will not stand in the sun and laugh."
Claudia visited me as soon as I left the hospital. She wore a floral dress, the same porcelain smile.
"You're getting better," she said, leaning on the banister like a queen looks at a peasant.
"Funny," I said. "What happened, Claudia? Did the truth suddenly become a burden?"
She laughed softly. "You did this to yourself, didn't you? God has a way of making the wicked fall."
"You staged everything," I said slowly, feeling each word as a nail. "You made my mother sick. You burned my shop. You bribed people. You used men and lies and threats."
She cocked her head. "Prove it."
"I will," I said.
I found allies where the world thought they didn't exist: Karim's ex‑wife, Elaina Bray, sat with a cup of tea and a steady stare.
"You want me to help?" she asked one afternoon, smoothing the nap of the chair.
"I do," I said. "You were wronged."
Elaina's voice was thin. "I lost my daughter. She lost the ability to have another child because of poison in her food. My life was taken. Claudia hurt us."
"Then help me fund the plan," I said. "I need money."
She looked at me like someone considering the sharp end of a sword. "One million," she said, deadpan.
"Fine," I said.
Next, I tracked down Claudia's copy of lovers and admirers. Her ex‑boyfriend, a man named Finbar Fitzgerald, lived alone, knuckles callused from his rough trades. I found him at a construction site holding bricks like he held regret.
"I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend," I told him bluntly.
"Why do you need me?" he barked. "I'm nothing to you."
"Because your son might be his," I said. "Because I can pay you enough to fix your grandmother's surgery."
He looked at me the way a man looks at a ledger. "Money," he said. "Then tell me how much."
I promised half up front. He took the money and took the job. He changed his haircut, bought new clothes, and learned to smile like a man who had decided to act.
"You're going to go to their engagement and pretend to be my boyfriend," I said. "You're going to make Claudia jealous. You're going to make her reckless."
He grinned at me with a kind of dangerous relief. "I like the sound of that."
We rehearsed conversations and planted plausible intimacy. We walked into the engagement as if it were theatre. The guests were wealthy and stupid and loud. They cheered when Karim and Claudia exchanged saccharine lines about love.
"She looks radiant," someone commented.
"Don't talk to me about radiant," I muttered, watching Claudia carefully. Her eyes flicked to Finbar across the ballroom.
"Let's sit together," I told Finbar during dinner. "Play this right."
He took my hand under the table and squeezed. "Don't worry."
Later that night, as custom demanded, men of the party milled around. I introduced Finbar to relatives as my boyfriend. The whispers circled like wasps.
"Isn't that the man who looks like the kid?" a cousin whispered.
"Who?" someone else asked.
"Finbar," the cousin said. "There's a resemblance."
Claudia's face changed, the soft color draining out. Jealousy is a poison for a woman who bargains her life.
"What's he doing here?" she asked me, under her breath.
"He's my friend," I said.
That night, the small private room where Claudia and Finbar had arranged to meet was the final scene in our decade's play.
"You're here," she said, pressing herself into him like a secret.
"I am," he whispered, and kissed her hand for show.
Finbar turned on a camera he kept hidden in his collar. The room, once private, was filled with talk meant for intimacy. He filmed their whispers and their easy betrayals.
"Do you still want him dead?" Finbar asked softly, playing to the camera and to his role.
"I want everything," Claudia said, a glint in her eyes. "Karim's money, his house. I want to be free."
They joked and planned, and the camera swallowed their words.
Outside, on a stage so wide the green of the hotel lawn looked like a small sea, Karim stood and recited vows.
"She is mine," he said, tearing. "She is my heart."
On a cue only Finbar knew, the private room's feed rose up across the giant screen above the stage like a thunderbolt.
"What's that?" someone shouted.
"It must be a slideshow," a guest said.
The screen bloomed with the image of two people entangled in a way no engaged couple should be caught.
"Finbar?" someone said, recognizing the face.
On the stage, time curved. I stepped forward and watched the crowd lean in as if the screen had become a confessional.
"What is this?" Claudia screamed. "Who did this?"
"Who indeed?" Finbar said into the microphone he had taken. He had planned his lines too, and a dozen other things. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, "looks like the bride has been unfaithful."
"Shut her up," Claudia hissed, fury and fear painting her face crimson.
Karim's expression went from hurt to rage in a breath. He held the envelope I had given him earlier like appellate proof of an old injury. The crowd began to murmur.
"You can't do this," Claudia cried.
"Do what?" Karim said, voice unsteady. "Tell everyone about my son's paternity? Tell them about lies?"
Finbar walked out into the open and did something only betrayal can make possible: he turned their private shame into public knowledge.
"You would have killed him," Elaina shouted from the audience. "She plotted poison and accident and used men!"
"She's confessed plans right here," Finbar said into the microphone. "She asked me to run him down. She admitted it in private."
The murmurs rose to a crescendo. People stood, phones in the air like tiny stars. Someone whispered "recording" and the room walked into the stream of social punishment.
Claudia's mouth looked suddenly very small.
"You are a bitch," someone yelled.
"Arrest her," someone else said.
Two security men pressed forward. Claudia grabbed a fruit knife from a tray in a panic and went for Finbar.
"She tried to stab him!" a guest shouted.
Everybody moved as one. The hotel's staff tackled her gently but forcefully. Her hair came loose. Her dress rucked. Her face changed like weather—first disbelief, then fury, then frantic pleading.
"Don't touch me," she screamed. "I am being framed!"
"You murdered my career!" I shouted, my voice cutting through the crowd. "You burned my livelihood. You scared my mother to death. You threatened to destroy me!"
Claudia slapped me with words instead of hands; her eyes turned glassy.
"I will sue you," she breathed. "You ruined everything."
"Did I?" I asked. "Or did you ruin everything for yourself?"
Police arrived. They read her rights. People filmed with greedy fingers. The giant screen that had shown her betrayal now looped her greedy smile and her confessions.
She was led away, cuffed but defiant. The world watched—phones, guests, the hotel cameras that had not been bribed.
The trial was a public opera.
"She did not just cheat," Elaina Bray told the court with a voice like gravel and a heart of steel. "She poisoned us, she stole our company, she made my daughter lose her child. She plotted to kill to inherit."
"She set a fire to destroy evidence," I said in court. "She sent a masked man to scare my mother into a heart attack. She bribed people and sold false narratives."
Claudia's attorney said she was hysterical, that she had been framed. She was given room to plead, to deny, to invent conspiracies. For a while she performed the act of innocence.
Then the recordings came—dozens of them. The private videos Finbar had taken. The forged internal spreadsheets she'd kept on her office computer, marking siphoned funds. The messages to a man planning the staged accident.
Her face changed in court as the evidence accumulated: at first a tight‑mouthed anger, then shocked denial, then a tremor of fear as the world shrank.
"That cannot be me," she cried once. "I didn't mean—"
"You meant everything you did," I said, and the words felt like a scalpel. "You used a child as a stepping stone to wealth."
The courtroom buzzed. Reporters filled the seats and live streams hummed like bees.
"You said you didn't care who suffered," Elaina said, voice calmer than a knife. "You said it to me when you asked me to sign away everything."
Claudia's reactions unfolded like a tide. She realized the friendships were gone. She saw faces in the audience—relatives, friends—turn like pages. Some took videos. Some stood with mouths open. One woman I recognized as a former close friend turned her back.
"You told me you loved me," a woman in the front row whispered. "You told me we were like sisters."
Claudia's eyes flicked to that woman and she looked smaller than she had ever looked. Her voice faltered. First denial, then bargaining, then a raw, animal whimper.
"Please," she begged at one point. "Give me another chance."
"Too late," Karim said from the witness box. "You never respected the lives you touched."
The prosecution traced each injury. The fire. The attack. The forged payments. The attempted murder plan. They read messages where she had coldly planned steps and assigned roles. They displayed sums that had moved through accounts to pay for silence and small brutality.
The moment of sentencing was not cinematic so much as inexorable.
"Claudia Moller," the judge said, solemn. "For crimes that show calculated malice, for planning violence and profiting from deception, and for continuing aggression that endangered lives—this court sentences you."
The gallery leaned like a gust.
"You are sentenced to life imprisonment," the judge said.
For a long, strange beat, Claudia did not cry. She stared as if the world had removed its top and she could now see the machinery of consequence rolling. Then she began to scream—first sharp and full of denial, then a cracking breakdown.
Outside the courthouse, cameras swarmed. People recognized her in the van that took her away. A woman held up a photo of Jaelyn with a "Why?" scrawled across it.
Her sister tried to approach the van. Police kept the distance. "Don't touch me," the woman said when someone spat.
Gossip spun. The social feeds framed her in frames that did not allow redemption. The bank accounts were frozen. The house placed under lien. The factories implicated by her forged ledgers were audited.
She had expected the world to stay small and pliant; it turned out to be a mirror that reflected every crime.
Her punishment had several faces. In public she was exposed and shamed. In court she was judged.
But she also faced the waiting rooms of private ruin: estranged friends who went through her contacts and wiped mutual memories like dust. Her son—if he was her son at all—was shuttled, then removed when Karim reclaimed the child. He would grow up not in privilege but in the glare of headlines.
Inside the prison, she cramped. The walls returned every night like glass. People—her former allies—avoided her cell block. The very people who once clapped as she schemed now walked with heads down to avoid recognition.
Bad people, I had promised myself, had to be made to see the full accounting. Punishment had to be more than legal. It had to strip away the privilege and expose the rust beneath the gold.
"Do you feel satisfied?" Finbar asked me months later at a small coffee shop, hands wrapped around a cup.
"Not satisfied," I said. "Relieved. Vindicated. But satisfaction is a long habit."
Finbar looked at me, earnest now, eyes older in some honest way. "Do you regret involving me?"
"No," I said. "You helped me show the truth. You helped your son. And you changed."
He smiled. "Sometimes the truth has cost, Journi. But it heals."
Karim and Elaina remarried quietly. They took the boy, Gage Dominguez, back into a home where the money belonged to the right hands this time. They rebuilt what had been broken in trust.
My license came back eventually. The association had to answer to the court's findings and to the public record. I re‑opened the lab, smaller and more secure.
"Will you ever trust family the same way again?" Finbar asked one afternoon as I stood by the lab window watching the street.
"I will be careful," I said. "Curiosity that saves the truth—yes. Blind love? No. Not again."
The big screen at the hotel—the one that showed Claudia's true face—became a symbol. People still joked about how a wedding could broadcast a crime for the world to see. I keep a photo of that screen in my drawer.
"You were brave," Karim told me once. He had come in quietly to my lab to thank me. "You did not hide."
I put my palm on the report I had written the day the tests were done, the one she had torn, the one everyone later accepted because the chain of custody could be retraced. The paper was worn but real.
"Justice isn't pretty," I said. "It's messy. It hurts. But facts are bulletproof."
"Will you keep doing this?" Elaina asked me over tea one afternoon.
"I will," I said. "For mothers, for children, for the truth."
After everything, the world moved in its slow way. People who had loved Claudia found reasons to feel compassion—sometimes—and then moved on. The headlines cooled. My life did not return to what it was, but it found a new steadiness.
Once, in the quiet of the lab, I opened a small box. Inside was a scrap of the charred paper from when the fire had consumed my files. On it, a fingerprint I had managed to lift before the flames ate it.
I smiled at the small thing.
"Proof matters," I whispered.
"Yes," a voice said behind me.
I turned. It was Finbar, with Gage at his hand—Gage with a solemn face and a cheeky grin.
"Look," Finbar said. "He knows what justice is, I think. He knows you for the woman who saved him."
Gage, all knobby knees and earnest eyes, offered me a drawing. It was of a big screen and little people.
"For the lady who made the big screen tell the truth," he said.
I took the drawing and placed it on the wall. When the afternoon sun hit it, the colored pencils lit like a promise.
I am Journi Perrin. I read the language of blood. I make no threats now. I only measure. Yet sometimes measurement can be as sharp as a sword.
And when the next family comes, the one who wants to hide a lie behind love, I will hold the evidence up and show the light the truth deserves.
The End
— Thank you for reading —