Face-Slapping13 min read
Divorce Today, Revenge Tomorrow
ButterPicks15 views
I still remember the news crawling across the hotel lobby television when I first heard it: "New starlet Eva Bacon photographed entering a suite with a prominent businessman. Rumors fly." I watched the scrolling text, then switched the set off. No one suspected the woman on the screen would be my husband's new headline, and no one knew how carefully I was scripting my own exit.
"My wife is making dinner tonight," I told the housekeeper, and she smiled in a way that sounded like applause. "Aren't you sweet to cook for him," she said.
I smiled, too, but the smile was a prop. "You go do the cupboards. I want to handle the table."
Two hours later I watched the dinner cool on the table. I sent the rehearsed message I'd typed a dozen times: "Tonight is our anniversary. Come home early. I have a surprise for you." The blue ticks never came. The chill on the other side of the screen felt like glass.
Then I heard his keys in the foyer. I went to greet him, practiced the soft lift of his coat, and felt instead the callus of his hand fold my chin and drag me forward. His first kiss was possession, not greeting. I tasted someone else's perfume and tasted my own failure to be interesting.
"You called me back for this," Kai Berg murmured, voice low in the hall.
"I called you home to celebrate," I said. "It's our anniversary."
He smoothed his collar like an apology he hadn't meant. "So what? What of it?"
I should have kept my mouth shut. Something in me snapped. "You know what a marriage is, don't you? Do you ever think about your promises? About duty?"
Kai's eyes, flat and dangerous, cut me off. "You have no right to ask me anything. Sit down, keep your place. I am tired of you."
"Then let's divorce," I said.
He laughed the kind of laugh people mistake for disbelief. "Fine. Today."
"Why?" I asked. He preferred to say less when collared by me. "Because you brought your little starlets into our house? Because you have no courtesy on a day that might mean something to us?"
Kai Berg smirked. "You want the title, the position? Be clever."
"Not anymore," I told him.
He told our lawyer to prepare papers. He told his assistant, Mason McDonald, he wanted it clean and fast. The house door slammed. The engine of his car devoured the night.
I walked back into the dark kitchen and breathed out a laugh. I had rehearsed this long enough that my relief tasted like victory. I sent one text, coded: "Fish on the hook. Proceed as planned."
Three years ago, I had come into this contract of a life because my stepmother had promised safety and received a fortune in return. The marriage had been a ledger: my name, three years pinned like a bookmark. Today I chose to press the page and walk away with a small, secreter prize.
The lawyer's office looked as sterile as the future I refused. "We can offer you stock, two villas, and a comfortable allowance," he said.
"Show me Kai," I said. "He will not sign without eyes on him."
The lawyer, sweaty and anxious, dialed. I snatched the phone. "Please, listen to me," I said, playing the performance I had refined for months. I cried, choked, begged. "Don't leave me. I won't take money—I'll change."
On the line Kai's voice was as cold as winter water. "Fine. Don't say I didn't warn you."
The papers arrived. "You will leave with nothing but what is in this list," the lawyer said, reading the clause labeled in bold. I laughed as I signed—netting smaller things than I'd demanded but keeping important details out of sight.
Downstairs in the foyer, the in-laws assembled like a chorus waiting for a cue. Leilani Ibrahim and Florence Palmer watched me with thin smiles. "Where do you think you are going with that," Florence taunted, staring at my suitcase. "What did you steal?"
I set down my bag and, with a motion as elegant as a guillotine, struck Florence's smug hand away. She went flying, face to the carpet, and a wail rose from her like a broken bell.
"You murdered me," she cried, clutching her cheek.
"Anyone else want to try?" I said. "Save time—do it together."
For a long moment nobody moved, and then the fury in the room congealed into a single, ugly sound. Bodyguards shifted forward with cautious hands. Leilani's face lost the smile; she sharpened it into a blade.
"Kai!" Leilani pitched her voice high, scandalized. "Your wife has turned violent. Do something!"
Kai came back like a winter storm, eyes colder than before. He had watched the scene from the threshold, and his presence made the air harder to breathe. "Get out," he said to me. "Get out of my house."
I left, pulling the suitcase as if carrying nothing: a ridiculous load, a symbol. I planned, all the while, and my plan loved the word drama.
Later, at the hotel, my phone buzzed with messages from Fielding Chen. "Be careful." "Don’t trust the hawks." Fielding was an old friend from a world of herbs and poisons—my ally when I had fled three years before after a trap nearly killed me. He had helped me survive, taught me to use the tools that had been my mother's last gift: a knowledge of the rare, the toxic, and the antidote.
"Keep to the plan," I typed back. "If Kai signs—let him sign. We want the record."
"Always the actor," Fielding replied with a string of emojis that did not suit him. He had the calm of someone who kept venom in labeled jars.
I arranged the contingencies. I messaged Kaiya Chung, my hacker friend who ran small wars with misinformation and charm. "Be ready to stir the pot at the right second," I told her. "Bring the lights."
Kaiya's reply was both a promise and a smirk: "Consider the pot scorched."
The day the papers were filed, the internet turned the story into a fever dream. "Kai Berg and his former wife finalize divorce," the headlines screamed, then softened into leaks of my alleged tantrums, my poor shows, and finally the scandal that had always served as a shock to those who wanted me small: photographs of Kai with Eva Bacon. The world cheered or spat, depending on its appetite.
It was all theater, and theater needs an audience.
The next day, with the divorce final, Kai's assistant Mason McDonald rushed into the office one breath too many. "Sir, online the hot threads are spinning—there's a video on a paid site. Your presence in a suite with a woman—"
"Take it down," Kai said, ridiculous in his composure. "Trace it."
Mason did as he was told. Kai hunted in digital dark corners with a tireless gaze. He bribed, threatened, and turned over accounts. He thought only of damage control. He did not notice how often his jaw tightened when my name entered the conversation. I watched him from afar, wrapped in a coat that smelled like freedom.
But the reason he was busy didn't matter much—my concern was larger. My mother had left me a promise and a list. She'd taught me to preserve what was hers: a seed bank of rare herbs, a ledger of debts and favors, and a lineage of people whose titles meant nothing without a hand to wield them.
That dynasty belonged to me. The night I drove into the first city where my family still breathed its old pride, I felt the air like a blade. The gate to the old compound opened like an invitation to war.
At the compound's guesthouse, I ran into Kaiya, who was busy with cables. "You look dangerous," she said like an accusation with a grin.
"You'd better be," I said. "This is my night."
"Then let's get loud," she said.
We did. I walked into the ballroom of the most pretentious party in town—my sister's birthday-subtle-bachelorette-substitution—and took the stage like an announcement.
"Please welcome our honored guest," the host intoned—completely unprepared.
The lights swelled. I was not wearing mourning or apology; I had chosen white in honor of the funeral wreaths I had left at my family's gate, a joke that would sting later. The cameras panned. I had told Kaiya to cue the reels.
On the giant screen behind the dais, a slideshow began: fields where I had once learned to dig roots, the farmhouse where I'd fallen in love with the smell of rain and crushed leaves. Then it jumped—abrupt and ugly—to a hotel corridor, to a man's voice speaking in a way that made the room shift: "Did you get paid? Did you send the tape?"
The video showed a mixture of images, angles, and short clips: a man entering a room, a blurred hand, snippets of a conversation that made the blood hot in people's ears. The voice on the audio was recognizable—mercenary, calloused. The crowd's hum changed into a ripple.
"That's impossible," Leilani's mouth formed around a word like a child seeing thunder. She had been poised to stand at the center of her daughter's new dawn, but the screen stooped the script.
I had them. It was time for the punishment I had promised myself: public, inevitable, thorough.
"Stop it," Leilani cried, and the words reached the back as a plea. She looked at the screen and nothing made sense. Her terror was a theater for the center; she had directed herself so often that her instincts spoke in acts.
Florence was white-faced but still struck with the old arrogance: "This is slander," she snapped. "This is a vendetta. Who would do such a thing?"
"Play the next clip," I said.
Kaiya obliged, and the next sequence cut straight to the conspirators' voices—Leilani and an unnamed contractor—planning the attack: "Make it look like an accident. Make sure she is blamed. No witnesses, and send me the footage. We'll make it permanent."
The chandelier trembled from the collective intake of breath. Someone in the front row vomited quietly. People reached for their phones. Hands raised. A hundred lenses found the moment like lightning.
Leilani's smile evaporated. It was first smugness: she had imagined herself safe on a stage of power. Then shock when the film showed her vertical voice. "No," she whispered. She pointed with shaking fingers at the screen, "You can't—this is doctored."
"Denial," I said softly, and the words were a blade.
"No! I didn't—" Leilani stammered, then louder, "This is edited. Fabricated. Who set this up? This is an attack on our family."
The room hummed with cameras. A woman in a designer coat began to film. "Get her!" someone yelled. "Call the police!" others shouted. The press, trained in the language of carnage, pressed forward. Their phones recorded Leilani's unravelling like a nature documentary of a predator losing its teeth.
Florence repeated the script her mother fed her: "She must have enticed someone—this is theater, people, theater." She tried to push the blame back toward me, to treat herself as the injured party—a ridiculous claim any prosecutor might find laughable after the voice on tape.
But the crowd wasn't a jury; it was a live audience hungry for closure. They wanted spectacle. They wanted the villain to bleed in public.
"Do you deny you called them?" I asked, my voice folded into a calm that made everyone listen.
"Of course I deny it!" Florence shouted. "This is impossible. We never—We would never—"
She trailed into denial, rocking on her heels. Her hands trembled. The crowd circled like tides. Someone started to whisper, and the whispering became a chorus: "murder plot," "bribery," "blackmail."
Then the proof rolled: a clip of a man with a coarse voice, placing cash onto a palm, and Leilani answering, "Pay double. We want her off the road. Don't leave traces." Florence's voice is heard, firm, "Do it right. Make it look like guilt."
The screen showed Florence's text-to-a-contractor: "Make sure she hits a tree. Do it clean."
She went from denial to collapse in three breaths. Her knees buckled. Someone had the bad manners to cry out, and she sank into a chair as if the room had become a sea. The cameras pounced.
"You can't!" she moaned. "I didn't mean— I only wanted to— I wanted to protect the family!"
"Protect?" I repeated, the word elastic. "You tried to erase me for money and status."
She scrambled to her feet and lunged toward me, a last instinct to reclaim center. Security moved in. People recorded. "Get off her!" a voice cried, and online commentators no doubt typed by the second.
Leilani had moved through these stages: smug, shocked, denial, then collapse. She cupped her face and sobbed into designer gloves. The crowd felt a satisfying justice; they had been waiting for this.
Then, the final stage: the begged mercy. When she realized the evidence was irrefutable—contracts, voice prints, bank transfers—Leilani began to kneel before the dais.
"Please, please," she said, voice thin. "I'm sorry. I didn't know what I was doing. Forgive me. I can fix it. Forgive me, please—"
Silence fell. Florence mimicked the kneel, wanting perhaps to seem contrite, but the sound of cameras clicking drowned the performance. People took photos; some recorded with a clinical focus; some recorded with the delighted cruelty of those who had bought front-row seats to shame.
"Record everything," I told Kaiya through my smile. "Let this become a lesson."
The guests had faces I half-expected: incredulous, outraged, satisfied. A woman in the front cheered. "Good!" she shouted. "Finally. She deserves worse than that."
A chorus of applause rose like a storm, and the claps sounded thin and brittle, like it had always been planned this way.
Security called the police. By the time sirens leaked through the windows, Leilani and Florence were in pieces—denouncing, pleading, crying—and the crowd filmed every instant. The footage spread fast. In every hand a phone, in every app a story, and their public fall was complete.
But the spectacle was not only punishment; it was the opening I needed. When the murmurs died down, I went to the microphone.
"You heard everything," I said. "They arranged to have me killed. They paid men to make me die. They believed they could erase me and keep my mother's estate."
In the hush, I added, "My mother taught me a different kind of certainty—use knowledge not only to survive but to return what is owed."
People wanted a hero or a villain as much as they wanted their dinner. I told them the truth: how they had poisoned a life and then pretended to be victims. I named accounts. I produced emails. I held up printed pages of bank transfers. The crowd's attention was a knife turned slowly.
When the police led Leilani away, her face crumpled into the mask of a woman who had spent years practicing control and finally found none left. Florence begged as well; she fell onto the carpet like a child. Cameras did the rest.
The story hit the news. The clip of them kneeling—laughable remorse, mumbled apologies, and then their tormentors' cheers—went viral in hours. Overnight the judge had to act. In court, their denials had no purchase. The tape and the transfers were clear. The men who'd been hired were arrested. Lawyers circled like sharks.
What I had not told anyone at the party was how I'd made sure their plot could be proven. I had relied on Fielding and Kaiya, on lines of credit that could be traced, on bank records and on the arrogance of women who believed they could buy away conscience. They had not.
"You did well," Fielding said later, voice low. He had never been comfortable in crowds. "But this won't be the end. They still have influence. You must hold your ground."
"I know," I said. "I have something else to claim—more than revenge."
In the weeks after, the garden gate of my childhood became a place of negotiation. People who had celebrated my supposed death now came to bow, to bribe, to apologize.
I walked the perimeter with Fielding at my side and met with Saul Sauer, the old patriarch of my family—my father—to retrieve what was legally mine. He had been a principal signer on my mother's will. He tapped the ledger like a judge. "My name's on the papers," he said. "We have proof."
"Then give it back," I said. "Transfer the shares to me."
"I will. But there are complications," Saul said. "There was a clause: marriage to a recognized heir of a certain household for consolidation. Your mother placed conditions because she feared our family's ruin."
"She feared wrong people," I said.
We fought the usual battles—lawyers with air of piety, shareholders with sour faces—but the world had changed the moment the banquet footage went public. No one wanted to attach their brand to someone who'd backed Leilani and Florence and lost the moral high ground.
"There's another problem," Fielding told me one evening, eyes stormy. "Your mother's old friend, Jayda Morin—the healer everyone's looking for—she will not appear easily. No one knows where she is. Finding Jayda is why Kai Berg has been so restless."
"Of course he is restless," I said. "He thought me small, a neat checkbox. He was wrong. He should have been more observant."
Kai tried to move closer after the public fall. His offers were small and soft, as if kindness could unmake cruelty. "Brielle," he called one night at the entrance of the compound, "we can talk. I can help find Jayda. We can reconfigure this."
"I don't want your help," I said. "You made your choices."
For a while he tried to bargain, then he tried to beg, and finally he tried to pretend disinterest. The world insisted on watching him—every ill-chosen photograph, every faintly heated text, every late-night departure. He could not breathe without the internet logging his yawns.
But the real war was not with him; it was with the old architecture of the city, an arrangement of houses and men and favors. I had to reclaim the seeds, the ledger, and the right to name a successor for the family business. I had to outwit the people who had once considered my existence expendable.
Fielding and Kaiya orchestrated small operations—documents recovered, bank accounts frozen, a few quiet conversations with uneasy lawyers. Leo—Leonardo Carpenter, the actor with a conscience—helped divert attention when needed. My allies were practical and stubborn.
I learned to use that stubbornness in the courtroom and in the boardroom. I sat at tables where men with reputations sat and reminded them of their own future if they sided with monsters. I reminded them of how quickly gratitude turns to disgust in public.
On the day we finally sat with the last of the estate documents, Saul signed over shares with a slow hand.
"For my mother, and for what should have been kept," he said. "For Brielle Ford."
It felt like a coronation without fanfare. I was not a queen. I was the survivor who had made sure mercy would have a ledger and that greed would be recorded.
I still had enemies—Leilani's arrest did not heal old pain, nor did it remove the traces of threat on my doorstep. But the banquet had shown the world that people who thought power was only money had chosen the wrong currency.
Months later, when the last of the press had left and the garden's wreaths had withered into compost, I sat alone in a small room that was mine. On the desk lay a small black pill in a wooden ebony box. It was one of my mother's last formulations—an antidote for the rare toxin that had nearly taken my life, and the token I'd promised myself I'd keep.
I set the box close, touched the pill once, and whispered, "This is for the day I decide how much mercy to offer."
The world kept turning, people resumed their small wars, and new partnerships formed. I had taken back what was mine. I had not forgiven Leilani or Florence. They had been exposed, humiliated, and taken into custody. They had knelt, pleaded, and had their names splashed across the feeds—less than royalty now, more than ghosts.
When Kai Berg tried to court me with words and favors, I smiled like a closed door. "You had your chance," I told him once as a final courtesy. "You took it. The rest is business."
He understood the word. He left me his signature as payment for the past, and the public saw it as closure. But I knew the truth: I had changed something more important than his heart. I had changed my own center.
Weeks later, on a dull gray morning, I walked through the place I had once left and saw the old wreaths I had placed outside the gate months before—faded, ragged, a ridiculous parade of flowers that had once been props for a funeral I never wanted. I picked up one and let the petals fall between my fingers.
"To unfinished things," I said under my breath. "To the black pill in the little wooden box. And to those who thought I would never walk back into my own life."
Someone in the street heard me and laughed. It was Leonardo, of course. He tipped an imaginary hat. "You look dangerous," he said.
I smiled, but this time it wasn't a prop. It was a promise.
The End
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