Revenge15 min read
He Came Back in Two Faces
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I woke up to bright white lights and a voice that said, "Sofia, you can breathe now."
"Where am I?" I croaked, my throat raw.
"You're safe," Drake said, hands steady on my shoulders. "You're home."
"You—" I tried to hold the name, but the room blurred. "Drake?"
He didn't answer like I expected. He only held me like a man afraid the world would blow me away if he let go.
"You're tired," Jaelynn whispered somewhere behind him while someone lifted a towel for me. "You get cleaned. I'll—I'll be right here."
"Does it hurt?" Jaelynn's voice broke when she saw the long white scar across my lower belly. She cried as she washed me, her face wet and terrified.
"No," I lied.
They didn't know the truth yet. The scar and another along my waist had saved my life in the cellars and the river and the cold. I had survived with them.
Later, seated at my parents' table with the smell of Sichuan food that no longer fit my broken stomach, someone handed me a plate of spicy chicken. Jaelynn offered it like it was a relic from before everything broke.
"You should try it," she said softly.
"I can't," I said. "I…can't eat spicy."
"Eat a bit," Drake said suddenly, the first time he'd spoken in days, and his voice didn't have the ease I remembered—only a flatness. "You can have one bite."
Jaelynn took a piece and ate. She gagged and ran to the bathroom.
"She's pregnant," my mother said like a sentence dropped from the ceiling.
"She's married?" I whispered, because my brain couldn't hold onto any sudden news.
No one answered me. They only watched me like I might shatter.
"Drake and Jaelynn are together," my father said finally, flat and calm.
My world tilted and everything else became colors and noise. I was quiet and small like the child who had always given away the last cookie.
Two years and three hurricanes of silence and grief—then this revelation, a simple sentence that detonated everything under my feet.
I had liked Drake before I was taken. I told Jaelynn that thing that lives like a secret in girls—I'd told her how I felt when we were teenagers.
"Do you remember the peach trees?" I asked her once while we sat on the old dorm steps.
"Yes," she said. "I remember you being dramatic."
"You helped," I said. "You climbed that stupid tree. You broke my bike tire, all to make us meet him."
She only smiled, the kind of smile that had sheltered me. I had trusted her with my heart.
When my rescue day became a kind of birthday for everyone else, Drake folded sheets on my bed like nothing had burned. Jaelynn adjusted my pillow and laughed when she couldn't stop heavy with nausea. She had a tiny bump and a glow and a look that was new and private.
"I'll be her child's godmother?" I laughed weakly when she asked.
"Of course," she said, grabbing my hand. "How could I not?"
Drake watched us. He moved quietly, and his hands shook in the way only men with something too big to say show.
He was later supposed to be the mirror of the world I had left—kind, ordinary, someone who could be counted on. I wanted him to be that.
But the world had been skewed. It was a world where a smiling stranger had become monstrous and where smiling strangers could wear suits and call me "sister-in-law" with a polite bowed head.
That night, I logged back into the last accounts I had used before the capture. My QQ had a login note from a strange address. Someone had been inside it—someone who had renamed a group "him."
"Who is 'him'?" I asked no one. I closed the laptop and tried to sleep but couldn't.
Three nights later a car stopped outside my building: a tall, neat man in a suit with a jawline that cut shadows. He stepped out like he owned the street and he carried himself with a light, precise restraint that made my skin crawl.
"Good afternoon," he said when he came to my door. "I'm Everett."
I froze. The face was the same face I'd seen for three years in nightmares: the lean eyes, the ridge of cheekbones, the way the mouth could be polite and blank. He moved with a kind of quiet discipline I had never seen from the man who'd kept me trapped.
"You're—" I started.
"Everett?" Drake's voice came from behind me, surprised and thin. "You back early."
Everett inclined his head politely. "I have some time. I'm here to help get Sofia home."
"Home?" Drake's mouth pressed thin.
Everett opened his palm like a gentleman. "I'm happy to drive her."
I sat in the back of Everett's car like I was going to be examined. He was soft-spoken and careful. He asked about my classes and about books and about the small things. He never asked where I'd been in those three missing years.
After that night Everett started to appear at the railings and the libraries. He would walk past and hold the door for me like a ghost of protection. He was always clean, always polite, and I could not look at him without feeling the cold iron of the past.
When I tried to tell Drake that the man resembled something from my worst days, he laughed and shook his head.
"Impossible," Drake said. "Everett has been abroad for years. He's always at his studies. He calls his parents on FaceTime every month."
But I had seen the man who had laughed in the rain and spat curses under a motorcycle helmet and thrown me in a river. He could not be "one of those nice men."
One night at the campus cafeteria, Jaelynn and Drake mixed up the old easyness—grinned, fed each other, painted the world ordinary. The room hummed with the kind of intimacy people take for granted.
I sat there like a ghost. My chair scraped and the world rotated. Someone at the next table started the old murmurs and then the whispers became a net.
"Isn't that the girl who was kidnapped?"
"She really looks like she hasn't slept."
"Do you think she was… used? They say women like that get ruined."
Voices like thin knives.
Jaelynn walked up, lips bright, hand on her belly, and a stupid, perfect smile arranged. She looked at me and misread my blankness.
"You okay?" Jaelynn asked in a tone that was too sweet.
I stood up slowly. I wanted to be small. I wanted to disappear. Instead I found my voice in the rough of my throat.
"You?" I said. "Did you tell everyone I was dead?"
"Everyone thought you—" Jaelynn began, and then her eyes narrowed with that strange falter I knew too well.
"You lied," I said. "When I was gone, you didn't fight. You stopped answering my mother. You turned off a phone. You told them the things you needed to tell yourself so you could sleep."
"Don't—" Jaelynn said. "I—"
"Why did you steal him?" I asked, and the cafeteria went quiet like the air before rain. "Why give him your belly to carry what I could not? Was it me or the chance he gave you of some life you were afraid to fight for?"
Jaelynn's face changed in a second. Her eyes were a machine at work: she recalculated defenses. Her answers were practiced.
"I loved him," she said. "You left us."
"You left?" I snapped. "You did not leave. You agreed to his comforts and you took him like you took a prize."
People gathered like a small city. Phones appeared. Cameras pointed. The university had gossip and cruelty and the strange pleasure they took in seeing the soft get pricked.
"You lied about me to the school. You connived to get close to Drake. You laughed in the quiet rooms where you knew I could not stand. You told my parents I was dead while you kept quiet on the nights they called to ask for me."
Jaelynn's lip trembled. She put a hand to her belly, as if that would protect her.
"You're being dramatic," she said.
"No," I said. "I'm telling the truth."
I told them the story. I painted the nights in the little details that break illusions: the date I missed the flight, the rain, the broken driver, the man under the motorcycle helmet who swore in obscene phrases, the old woman who brought a "helping umbrella," the drugs that made me blackout. I told them about the hotel, the knife-smile men, the wooden cells. I told them about the dagger and how the man who bought me downplayed me at markets. I told them about the river where I almost drowned and the scars that still smelled of alcohol and iron.
People listened like a crowd that had been gifted a show.
"You told them I was dead?" I asked again, because I wanted to see the reflection of the betrayal. "Did you think a girl like me deserved you? Did you assume I'd never come back to take what's mine?"
Jaelynn stared at the ceiling. Her voice was so thin she could have been accusing me of a sin.
"Everyone tried to move on," she said. "We were told—Sofia, we grieved."
"You grieved by grabbing my future," I said. "You didn't grieve. You moved. You moved into my life like you owned it. How could you think that was okay?"
Phones recorded. People leaned in like jurors. Some applauded when my voice shook and then hardened into a precise, sharp anger.
Drake stood up, face white, hands clasped. "Stop," he said. "Sofia—stop."
"You thought she deserved you?" I asked him, and my words were small arrows. "Did you ever call my number when I couldn't call? Did you ever sit on the curb and wait? Or did you just let the nights of your life be rearranged?"
Drake stumbled. Jaelynn crouched as if to defend herself and cried, and the cafeteria turned inside out.
Then I did something nobody expected.
"Jaelynn," I said softly, and the hush came like a tide, "you came to my dorm two nights ago. You knocked. You left food. You asked me how I was. You cried on my pillow. You lied to me with your eyes."
Her face went slack for a moment. Then her jaw tightened. She tried to laugh it off.
"That was me being a friend," she said.
"Friend," I echoed, "or a thief?"
I slapped her.
The sound landed like a punctuation mark. People flinched. Jaelynn's mouth formed a perfect O. It hung there like a portrait of betrayal.
"How dare you hit me?" she shrieked to the humming crowd.
"It wasn't about hurting you," I said. "It's about stopping the lies."
People took photographs as she stumbled and reached for her belly. She tried to call Drake. He turned away and then looked at me like I had stabbed him.
"You're insane," Drake said. "You have no proof. You're just hurt."
"We have proof," I said. "I have every text she didn't send to my parents. I have every call I made that was unanswered. I have the person who found me in the river. I have her confession in her own voice that she tried to get him at any cost. And I have—" I crushed the remaining words in my throat and then pulled out the one thing that never lies: photos of Jaelynn taking items from my room, snapshots of her packing small things into her bag when she thought no one watched. "I have these," I said, and the cafeteria surged like a tide.
Her face went through the motions: rage, denial, cunning, and then, at last, collapse.
"You're a liar," she said weakly. "I did what I had to do."
"You had to do nothing," I said. "You had every choice and you chose him."
The punishment that followed was not the police or a drama of arrests. It was worse for Jaelynn. It was the public pealing of the life she'd built around the lie. A student with a camera read a transcript of messages where she admitted to letting Drake into my room when she knew I was not safe. Another student pulled up an old voicemail where Jaelynn had laughed about how she'd be 'first to comfort' Drake if I never came back.
"She took advantage of a dead girl's grief," one student said. "You used sympathy like a cloak and then walked out wearing it."
By the end of the day, the crowd had shifted. The office had called. The campus newspapers had a headline that was not kind.
Jaelynn's punishment was slow and public. Professors who had praised her called and asked pointed questions. Volunteers who had stood beside her at bake sales and orientation looked away. People who once whispered that she was "the loyal pal" now whispered her exact betrayal. Her mother called to plead. Drake's family sent condolences and then stiff messages. Jaelynn's pregnancy, which had seemed like a shield, became fragile and brittle.
Her change went through stages: first stupefaction—"No one understands—" then denial—"That's not what happened," then rage—"You ruined me!"—then begging. People would shout at her in the library: "How could you?" Kids in the dorm hall wrote her name on post-its with venomous notes. The campus group that did community service with Jaelynn canceled her sponsorship. Professors asked her to step down from the student committee she had chaired. A video of her boasting in private about leaning on me when I "was out of the picture" played across lunch tables.
She tried to walk through campus that week. Phones were up like torches. Students followed and asked questions. Professors chastised her in hallways. The friend who had once shielded me became a spectacle of shame.
"Please," she begged one night outside the auditorium, under sodium lights. "I didn't mean to hurt you. I was scared."
"You were never scared for me," I said. "You were scared of your own life."
She crumpled to her knees in the dim light. Her hands went to the belly she held like an armor. Phone cameras flashed. A professor scolded her gently and told her to go home. A crowd gathered, murmuring.
"You're a coward," a woman said. "You made your choices."
Jaelynn's face drained. Her last act of defense was to tell a tiny lie about some piece of information. People could see through it. It was that public, that raw, that irreversible.
What she experienced was not purely punishment; it was exposure. Doors closed. Priors were overturned. The life she had tried to secure by stepping into mine crumbled. She lost positions, friends, trust. Some days she sat in the counselor's office and wondered how the world had become so loud.
The public punishment lasted weeks. I wanted to leave it alone. But every time a stranger came to me with pity or scorn, I would say the simplest thing.
"If you can protect your comfort at the expense of someone's life," I'd tell them, "you have already chosen which side you are on."
And Jaelynn's reaction ranged from screaming in the cafeteria to collapsing in a professor's office to admitting in a recorded whisper that she had, indeed, considered the gain more than the cost.
At the center of all this was Drake.
"Why did you not go after her?" I asked him, when he tried to kneel and apologize.
"I didn't know what to do," he said. "I—"
"You were my boyfriend then," I said. "You were supposed to call. You were supposed to sit in the dark and wait. Instead you let me die in everyone else's story and then married the story that made your life easier."
He fell silent. He tried to say the thing apologetic men say, the one about not understanding, about naivety and errors. But it came out small and bitter.
"Drake, you had a choice," I said. "You chose."
When the campus burned with gossip, Everett kept away. He watched from the edges in neat clothes and patient eyes. He did nothing rash. He stayed silent. His silence was like a cool stone in a river I could not cross.
One evening he came to me with the same polite head-bow he always wore.
"Can I walk you home?" he asked.
"You're welcome to," I said.
We walked in the low light and I told him, because the truth of him had to be told. "You look like him in ways I hate. You hold yourself the way he held himself the night by the river. But you aren't him, are you?"
"I am not him," he said softly.
"But you are his twin," I whispered, remembering the first time the illusion of him had filled my nightmares.
Everett didn't answer. He only walked closer and, without ceremony, put his hand over mine.
"You're not the first to be haunted," he said. "But people live in two faces sometimes. You should know which one is near you."
After that, Everett didn't leave my side. He disrupted people who spoke badly about my wounds. He made sure no one stepped beyond certain lines. He answered questions on my behalf when my throat failed. He took on the role of a man who refused to let the world bite me again.
"You don't have to hate me," he said one night on the roof of the library, where the sky was wide and the stars were ruthlessly bright. "You can be whatever you want."
"What's your name when you pretend to be normal?" I said, half-laughing.
"It's Everett," he said. "It will do."
We began to live in the small mercies: Everett's call before class, Drake's occasional presence that had become awkward and brittle, Jaelynn's slow disappearance from our lives, my father (Boyd) and my mother (Lourdes) mending their fractured trust with odd phone calls and small meals.
But the man I took as a nightmare returned to life like a bruise that would not heal.
One afternoon, without warning, the black car pulled up like a punctuation to my day. The doors opened and a man stepped out in a suit with an even softer smile.
"Cade?" I whispered when I saw him.
He wore the same face I had seen in nightmares, but now tailored, clean, and polished like the rest of the city's chrome. He moved like the man who had a passport and a bank account instead of a rifle and cheap beer.
"Cade?" Drake asked from the hall, and his voice went thin.
Cade smiled in an appraising way. "Sofia," he said. "Do you remember me?"
Everett watched like a sentinel. Jaelynn's betrayal had cracked open the world. Cade's arrival slammed it shut again.
"You're alive," I said, stunned, because I had seen his bones in the fire—I'd watched the photographs of the burnt house and listened to the rumor the police told me until they all became smoke.
"I never left," he said in a voice that could be honey and steel. "But I've learned manners."
He called me "sister-in-law." He used it like a small weapon. "You're Drake's sister-in-law, aren't you?"
"You're not dead," I said.
He smiled. "I never liked the idea of dying on someone else's terms."
From then on, my days were a map of small terrors and tender unnatural kindnesses. Cade would say the exact thing that made me drowsy: "Don't go out alone," or "You should eat this," and then the next breath he would order men to strip a building or break a door like a storm.
He balanced kindness and brutality like a delicately weighted scale.
Everett became more possessive in an unnameable way. He decided for me. He got angry at people who spoke my name with anything less than a hush.
"You can't just watch the world cross her," he said once in my kitchen. He took my hands and squeezed them like he was checking if I was real. "You ruin their noise."
He was not a man who gave himself away in small things. He was careful and deliberate and then he would flip to something fierce in the way he protected me.
One night he dragged me up to the hill above the city and kissed me like a man who had spent his life making contracts. "Don't love anybody else," he said. "Love me."
I laughed in shock.
"Why would I—"
"Because I can keep you safe," he said.
He said it like a promise and like a threat. I hated the way it made my knees weak.
But he wasn't him. This man whose gentle hands had the same bone structure as the man who had once forced me to kiss him in a ruined kitchen was a different person when the sun left the sky. He could be kind without the convulsion that came from the other man's cruelty.
Cade's past crawled out like a wound. He told me, once, about the little woman who had taught him to read in a foreign village. He told me how he had made himself into someone people feared so he could protect the things he loved. He told me he had been left without a family and learned to devour or be devoured.
"Do you regret?" I asked him, late one night when the damage on his back smelled like a battlefield and we were closer than the world allowed.
He smiled without happiness. "I regret the part in which I listened to the wrong people."
"Why save me?" I asked.
"Because you asked to be saved," he said, and when I thought of the river and the people who had taken me, that was the most honest thing anyone had said in years.
When things came to a head, they did so in a way that made stories.
One afternoon, Cade's enemies ambushed the car he used. He took the ghost of the fight as one who'd practiced dying a hundred times. He was hurt badly. They left him with knives like punctuation.
He came back to my house, bleeding and silent, and I found myself the one to hold puzzle pieces together. I fed him and dressed him and watched his flinches. In those moments he was not a leader of shadows. He was a human who needed help.
"You could have left me to rot," he whispered once when his chest heaved.
"But I didn't," I said.
He had killed people whose faces I would never see in my sleep again, and when the police eventually came to our house with a case that smelled of crossing borders and old vendettas, they told me the things stories like to blur. They said that he had arranged for them to walk away with something to die for. They said that he had been "cooperating" with authorities. They said things that made me dizzy.
"Is he dead?" my father asked that day, voice small and brittle with something like hope.
"No," I answered because I did not know how else to keep feet under me.
The hospital rooms smelled like other people's grief. Cade, in a flannel shirt and bandages, told me he would go away. "I will go," he promised. "I have to make this right."
I knew the story would bend. Those who had hurt him would be punished. Those who had hurt me would be broken like little things. Jaelynn's world was already unstitched. Drake's sleep was thin and hollow.
Everett claimed space entirely by being the man who refused to be the monster.
"You want to leave?" Everett asked one rainy night when we stood by my window and watched rain like urgency. "You can tell me."
"I don't know what I want," I admitted, and it was the truest thing I'd said.
Everett looked at me like someone looking at a map. "Then we'll make a small life. One day at a time."
I believed him then. I believed him because he didn't drip poison into every kindness. He didn't make me fear my own breath.
When Cade died—when he took that one step into the light and fell—people said the words "hero" and "monster" and used them like kindness in a funeral prayer. I had been ready to hate him. I had been ready to call him the villain he had been in my life.
But when I stood at the graveside and watched earth fill a lidlike shape, something finished and began in me: tenderness for the man who had been both terror and savior, a knowledge that people are not tidy.
"Why did you come back?" I asked the empty sky that day.
For an answer, the wind gave me a memory: Cade humming to a small wooden horse, the whisper of rock and the memory of a nursery not mine. I could still see an old letter he had written about a child named "Dawn"—a name he had used for his son. The baby was dead now. The grief for both of them was a long lope of sorrow inside the man I loved and feared and mourned.
In the months after, life smoothed its edges. Jaelynn was in a hospital for her mind; the baby was gone; Drake left the country to study as if running could wash him clean. My parents made a small peace. My father, Boyd, learned to make soup that fit a new life. My mother, Lourdes, learned, late, how to apologize.
Everett and I continued in the small things—the library, the slow meals, the stubbornness that binds two people who prefer to be guarded.
One night, months later, I found a box of old letters in a chest Cade had once left behind. There were notes he had written to a child he adored. The last line in one of them read, "If you can find your way back to the sun, I will meet you there and buy you a wooden horse."
Tears came like a slow mercy.
I pressed my palm to the old paper and said the thing I hadn't said in a long time.
"Goodbye," I whispered. "Rest."
And I did not add the other words I thought about—the angry ones, the polite ones, the farewell vows of enemies. I folded the letter and slid it into my pocket. It would be my secret.
There would be work. There would be nights and classes and small stitches of life to be sewn back into my arms. There would also be Everett—steady, careful, quiet—and the occasionally unbearable memory of what I'd survived.
At the window that night, with the city's lights like a scatter of uncertain stars, Everett put his hand on mine.
"Stay," he said simply.
I looked at him. "I will," I said. "One day at a time."
He waited. I fell asleep to the press of his hand and the idea that some people do not ask to be saved so they can own you. Some people come to you to stand in the small dark and promise they will not let the world take everything again.
The End
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