Face-Slapping14 min read
I Came Back to Guard Him — and He Nearly Broke Me
ButterPicks14 views
The beeping was clinical and steady: “beep—beep—beep.”
“No—no, I’m not dead yet,” I croaked, though my throat sounded like gravel.
“Stay with me,” a voice said, low and fierce as an alarm. It pressed against every soft place inside me, and I felt it like a hand calling me back.
I opened my eyes with every last scrap of strength. The hospital light made the room bleed into white. A man sat at the edge of the bed, a figure I knew to my bones: Fabian Golubev. His face had the impossible calm of one who had mastered storms. His eyes were a cold, deep sea.
“You—are mine,” he said, and the words hit me like an oath.
I had no business being alive. I had burned and torn and been ruined. And yet here he was. The memory of last life blinked in my skull like a broken film reel—burning glass, a trap set with poison, voices that became knives. People who smiled while they robbed me besides my courage. The man I’d loved and blamed, Fabian, had been the only constant, and he had died trying to save me.
I lunged—foolish, ragged—against him. “Fabian,” I sobbed. “I missed you. I’ll protect you this time. I swear—this life, I’ll guard you.”
Fabian froze. For the first two seconds, something like bewilderment softened his features. Then the old shadow slid back across his face.
“You—what do you want now?” His voice had a hardness that made me tremble.
I gripped him as if to meld myself into him. “I won’t leave. I won’t run. I’ll be yours—forever.”
He put me down like a hot coal. The movement was swift, the distance between us suddenly a canyon.
“You think a few tears change the truth?” He stood, and I realized what day it was—my eighteenth birthday, the day my past life had ended in ruin. The day I had been coerced into an engagement and had plotted my escape for a worthless man named Jackson Elliott.
My chest beat against my ribs. “I won’t go,” I told him, all the naive certainty of a reborn girl.
A phone on the bedside chimed. The screen flashed a name: Jackson Elliott.
My heart sank like a stone.
Fabian’s face darkened visible as storm clouds. “You still plan to lie to me?”
“No—no, I—” My words clumsy, my mouth full of unspent apologies. This time I should have answered the call and condemned the other man myself in front of Fabian. I had learned nothing if I kept doing the same mistakes.
A voice came from somewhere behind Fabian, mocking: “You won’t pick it up?”
“That’s not what—” I tried, but the phone buzzed again and a new message played. Jackson’s voice, smug and light, traveled across the white room.
Fabian snatched the phone, listened, and shattered it on the floor.
“You’re lying to me,” he said, knives for teeth.
He shoved me toward the bed. “Get better,” he said. Then he slammed the door so hard the room rattled.
I had twenty minutes before the world decided I was either faithful or damned.
I pulled the IV out with one hand and ran. Hospital security guards shouted, nurses ran—but I moved like I had no years to waste and a debt to fix. I needed to get to the engagement. I needed to show him I meant it.
At home the mirror greeted me with my own ridiculousness: last life had left me with a hairdo like a green explosion and makeup gone feral. I scrubbed until red marks stung my face. I took off the junk jewelry the other girls had laughed at, the chains that weren’t mine.
Then the one detail that always set my teeth on edge: the woman with a small, spotless smile who called herself my “good sister.” Margaux Davidson stood in a white dress at my doorway—wide eyes, hands soft, the kind that hid claws.
“Joy, where have you been?” her voice was syrup.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I’m going to the engagement.”
She gasped soft enough to draw attention. “But Jackson Elliott is at the airport. Didn’t he tell you? He’s been calling non-stop.”
“Is that so?” I forced a smile. I’d been manipulated before—her tiny wrist sneer while pretending to care was exactly the poison that had ruined me. Margaux wanted Fabian for herself. She had set me up with the wrong boys, given me bad makeovers, and taught me to be ridiculous.
“You can sneak away with Jackson now,” she chirped. “It’s perfect—run.”
I turned the idea over in my head, and I tasted the old stupid fear. No. This time I had a plan. This time I would walk into the ballroom in a red dress and in front of the sea of faces, I would give Fabian one reason to believe in me.
The manor lit up like a jewel box. Guests whispered. They were waiting for the bride—it was her night, the engagement of the city's most talked-about bachelor and the millennial heiress.
Fabian stood on the second floor in the shadows, all height and distance. He looked like the hero in a fable. But his face was a mountain range; warmth stayed on the far side of every cliff.
The doors swung open. The room slowed. I felt eyes stuff themselves into my dress. The dress was red like a promise.
“Good evening,” I said into the hush. The hall seemed to breathe with me. “I’m here.”
Fabian watched from the balcony like he was counting heartbeats.
“Oh my God, it’s Joy,” one woman breathed. “She’s beautiful. Who knew?”
Someone behind me snorted. “She’s been known to be…dramatic,” a fellow guest said.
Margaux’s nostrils flared. She had expected me to make a scene or to flee. I did neither. I walked to the center of the room and asked for Fabian.
He strode down as if drawn by gravity. I took his hand. He squeezed once, like a measurement.
“Fabian, are you happy?” I asked him with all my earnestness.
He nodded, mechanically. “Yes.” His hand held mine like a proof.
Then a voice cut the air. “Not so fast.”
Fabian's mother, Ursula Chen, glided forward in purple. Her voice was a blade wrapped in velvet.
“This is ridiculous,” she said loud enough for everyone. “Why is a woman like this—well, why is she here?”
Gasps flicked through the crowd. Margaux leaned in for a crowd-pleasing little tsk.
And then I let the room see me for what I’d become. I smiled. “If it pleases everyone,” I said, “I’d like to exchange rings.”
Fabian produced the rings and slid the smaller of the pair onto my finger. I slipped his ring onto his hand. The music swelled; we danced. His grip was as sure as ever. My stomach was all lit fireworks.
A voice like a match struck in a crowded room—sharp, small, and hard. “Isn’t she an actress?” someone sneered from the crowd.
Then a ripple began. Margaux, having prepared herself to stoke drama, leaned forward. Her eyes were knives. The party ticked on until a door banged and two people stormed into the garden—Jackson Elliott and Margaux in weak alliance.
I heard them. I had already set up cameras, suspicious of the next betrayal. I’d already made a decision. If I was going to earn trust, I would do it by truth, not by tears.
I looked up. “Fabian,” I whispered.
He looked down, confused—until my assistant, Dax Sasaki, clicked the remote and the giant screens by the stage lit up. My voice from a recorded play echoed through the hall: “Jackson, I will steal your money and run with you. Wait for me.”
The room flowed into a new silence, the kind that eats the air. Faces went ashy.
On the screen, Jackson’s texts and voice notes bloomed now like a dam burst—his planning, his offers, the payoff line: “She’s only useful if she gives me what I need.”
Margaux’s color drained. She realized, in a wrong-footed heartbeat, that she had been recorded too. An audio file—a call between her and Jackson—began to play. “You must stop the engagement. I’ll take Joy. I’ll help you get the family lined up. Fabian hates her, he’ll never forgive her.”
The lights felt hotter against my face than before.
Jackson laughed at first, smug and soft. “It’s a joke,” he said.
Then he saw the screens, and the laughter turned into a strangled noise. “It’s not what it looks like,” he tried.
In the hall, phones came out. The guests began recording. The social middle layer of the city breathed toward scandal—the raw material of gossip.
Margaux’s smile cracked. She shook her head, breathless denial on her lips, an actress pressed in the wrong play.
“I didn’t—” she said, and the sound of the lie was thin and high.
Jackson’s chest heaved. “This is manipulation. She made me say things!” He tried to sound strong and then he faltered into the next act—shock. His face turned white. “You set me up.”
“Stop it!” Margaux shouted. “This is… this is defamation!”
No one bought it. Cameras clicked like rain. Phones were shoved up into the air. The mayor’s party neighbors whispered. Someone said, “She recorded them.”
A silence swallowed Jackson’s next words. His face sank, and the mask slipped—smugness to alarm to denial.
“They’re doctored!” he shouted. “They’re fake!”
But our evidence had a weight beyond words. Dax played the uncut footage: Jackson walking away from the airport gate, laughing with Margaux. The private messages cut away the pretense: “Wait for me at the west gate,” he’d written; “Do this and I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”
The guests circled like predators with their phones. People murmured, “Is that the mayor’s daughter?” “Record it—post it.” “Poor Fabian.”
Jackson’s chest heaved. He steeled his jaw, as if the battle could still be won with one more lie. “You’ll regret this,” he hissed. He looked at Margaux with a pleading that smelled like self-preservation.
Margaux’s eyes darted, from face to face. She had once imagined this room on her side. Now she was a frog on a cold stone as the whole pond became a mirror.
A group of younger guests—what the city called influencers—went still, like a wave sensing blood. “Video,” someone said, and the shutters of phones clicked.
Jackson’s mask fragmented. First he looked smug—too confident to imagine defeat. Then confusion—his mouth working for explanations that did not form. Then disbelief, as the proof unspooled. Then a manic kind of denial. Finally, his face sagged. He staggered back like wind had hit him.
“I—” he began and broke. He fell to his knees on the plush carpet. The first sound that came out was neither apology nor plea, but a wet, animal apology: “Please—please—”
He tried to grab a table, to stand. Hands slid from beneath him. He crashed to the floor, suit knees dirty and ruined.
Margaux followed the sequence: pride, then the slow dawning dread, then furious denial: “This is wrong!” She tore at her dress with trembling fingers. Her face registered a quick intellectual fight: to deflect, to rearrange blame, to pretend she had been cleverer, not less moral. But the recordings didn’t care for her version. They wanted facts.
“Take them away,” someone in the back muttered.
No one took them away. Instead the cameras kept filming. Guests filmed with glee and righteous anger. A woman climbed onto a chair and announced to the hall, “This is what happens when people conspire. Don’t marry into them.”
Fabian watched the scene like a judge watching evidence pile. He had watched his entire life of investments and calculated trust come down to truth. For a moment he looked like a stranger: a man of a thousand transactions forced into the raw economy of heartbreak.
Jackson’s cries turned to pleading. “Don’t—please—don’t ruin me—please—” He reached toward Margaux, who pushed him off fiercely.
Margaux fell to her knees beside him. Their denial turned into begging. “I can explain!” she screamed through hiccups. “It was—”
“Stop!” Fabian finally said, and the baritone of his voice flattened the heating air. “Get out.”
Jackson and Margaux looked up. They expected fury. Instead Fabian’s face went through the same strange path I’d seen so many times—he flicked like a switch from grief to iron.
“Leave,” he said. “Out. Now.”
They scrambled. Guests jostled to get a better angle. Someone shouted, “Kneel!” as if the scumbags owed it. They both fell back onto the carpet, then into a bowing mass of shame. Jackson’s hands were pleading and dirty. Margaux’s manicure scratched as she clawed at the floor.
People filmed as they begged: “Please—please—don’t—” Jackson’s voice broke into a thin rope of terror. He was desperate and weak. Margaux’s face collapsed like sugar put into hot tea. Denial shattered into a raw, wet plea.
“You deserve everything you get,” one guest said aloud, and most of the room echoed. Phones streamed it live. Within minutes, every headline that mattered was touching this hall.
They tried the usual sequence: “It was a mistake”—“I was pressured”—“I will fix things”—“I didn’t know”—“Please!” The act broke into smaller, tinier pieces until all that was left was two human beings at ground level, crawling on the floor. People muttered, “This is what karma looks like.”
Someone laughed. Someone else—two people near the entrance—applauded. That clap multiplied into a small tidal wave of cheering. It was not joy but a kind of communal deliverance. Cameras panned in and out. Recordings will forever show this: the slow erosion of ego and the final, public prayer.
“Get out and never come back,” Fabian said. He turned to me, then, and his face was a geography of pain and something thin and exhausted. “You were right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m here.”
He held my hand. Not like before—this time something heavier and more fragile. He let me lean into him while the world did what worlds do: rearrange itself around a truth made visible.
Later, the videos would break people. Jackson’s name vanished from invitations. Margaux’s carefully curated photos lost their sheen. People whispered, and then they stopped whispering and started recording. And somewhere in the press, her mother Dolores Bentley was on the receiving end of furious calls.
But public ruin wasn’t enough for me. The people who had taken from me took more than money. They had stolen time, family peace, the health of a man who had tried to save me. They deserved to fall not only in rumor but in a place where they could feel the weight of every gaze that had once admired them.
Weeks later, we arranged a second, far crueller sort of exposure.
“Fabian,” I asked one night in a low voice, “can we do more? Can they be made to face—everyone?”
He looked at me like I’d asked him to rearrange his entire life.
“If you mean public accountability,” he said slowly, “it must be fair.”
“I want them to feel scandal,” I said. “I want them to beg.”
He searched my face. “You want to be satisfied.”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his thumb across the purple bangle I had once given him in my panic. The light hit it and made his eyes softer.
“Make them pay for the quiet ways people were hurt,” he said. “Make them answer.”
We built the plan like a clean machine. We walked into a public charity event—a hall full of patrons, donors, journalists, socialites—in full knowledge that those who had helped Jackson and Margaux would turn their heads. We had yearbooks and ledgers, receipts, audio files that had been authenticated. We had witnesses who would step forward to testify. We had Dax and Adeline Chung ready with a line of testimony.
I stepped to the microphone like a woman carrying a torch.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, and my hands did not shake. “You remember the engagement. You remember the celebration. Tonight, I want the truth in front of all of you.”
Jackson walked in, thinking the charity event was for his benefit. He stood in the crowd, smug as a man who had not yet noticed the trap.
“Jackson Elliott,” I said, and he laughed at the first syllable—he always had a laugh for the wrong moments. “Will you join me on stage?”
“Why?” He shoved a hand through his hair. “No. I don’t—what—”
“You will,” Fabian said, stepping from the wings like gravity. His voice was iron.
The room pivoted. Jackson’s skin went the color of bad bleaching. He clutched his cuff. “This is nonsense,” he said. “You can’t—”
“You staged debt,” I said. “You convinced our family to sell assets. You pretended to love me. You schemed.”
“Ridiculous,” he said.
Then we played the ledger. We played the transactions, the bank transfers to shell companies bearing his friends’ names. We played the wire transfers he thought were invisible. Every line read like betrayal.
The room watched. Someone finally recorded him stop talking. The sound traveled: “No—no—”
Margaux tried to stand and speak, and the room extinguished her with silence.
I stepped closer, my voice even. “When you take what’s not yours, you should expect to answer. Your words will be played, your transgressions aired. You will be dismissed from every council. You will be removed from every board. And you will—” I paused so the weight landed—“—kneel.”
He was still in denial. “This is illegal—”
“We have proof,” Dax said. “We have your messages.”
Jackson’s face finally cycled through the stages: the complacent grin at first, the slow dawning of comprehension, rapid denial, and then the collapse. He staggered backward, stumbled into a chair, and then, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, he sank into himself.
“Please,” he begged, as if that one syllable could stitch a past of long con.
At that moment the crowd closed in like a living tribunal.
“You arranged my father’s account to be drained,” Fabian said. His voice called down a sentence like winter. “Get on your knees.”
Jackson’s knees hit marble. The shock echoed through the hall. He clawed at the floor like an animal. “Please—” he choked. “No—no—don’t—”
Margaux crumpled beside him. “It wasn’t me! I was forced!” she cried.
“Deny now,” Fabian said, eyes like a courthouse lamp.
People gathered around. A woman pushed a phone into Jackson’s face. “Say you’re sorry to the cameras,” she snapped. He tried to speak and the words collapsed.
He fell through the next stage—shocked, pleading, scrambling for truth. “It was a mistake. I can fix it. Please, I will—” he promised, but the room was already a chorus of documentary witnesses: “We saw the messages. We saw the plans.”
A man lifted his phone and broadcast live. The tide rolled over the offenders. Journalists took notes, witnesses stepped forward. “He walked into every bank,” an accountant said into a mic. “He falsified records.” Their statements were sharp as knives.
People began to film with glee and righteous wrath. A rumor spread—rapid, certain: the video would be on every front page by morning.
Jackson’s posture went from disbelief to terror. He scrambled to his feet and lunged toward Margaux. “You—don’t leave me alone—” he wailed.
Margaux’s reaction unfurled through denial, then a puff of rage, then a collapse into begging. “Please—please! My mother—” she cried, and the crowd recoiled as if from a live wire.
Phones thudded. The crowd began to chant for an apology, for accountability. A man pushed his camera closer and whispered to a friend, “This is the moment.”
They begged, they shrieked, they pleaded. “Please—please forgive—” Jackson’s voice broke into pieces. Somebody laughed. Someone else clapped.
And then they knelt. They ate carpet beneath them, hands raw, suits ruined. They clawed at the floor while the cameras collected each shameful angle. The press recorded every second: smugness to shock, denial to collapse, begging and humiliation and exit under a cloud of sound.
It lasted for twenty minutes and a lifetime.
When it was over, the victims of their schemes rallied. Our losses were small compared to the scales of justice, but they mattered. Fabian stood beside me, and somewhere between bruised pride and a kind of slow gratitude, he opened his hand and let me place my purple bangle into his palm.
“You trust me?” I asked, feeling ridiculous and brave at once.
He looked at the bangle. “I want to believe you’ll stop running.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I will guard you.”
He exhaled like a machine letting go of a held breath. His thumb stroked the bangle as if memorizing its warmth.
Weeks later, the police followed paper trails. Friends withdrew invitations. Jackson’s phone exploded with messages that were not offers but condemnations. Margaux’s mother, Dolores Bentley, went silent. The city had seen them naked, and there is no coming back from that kind of exposure.
After it all, some guests applauded. Some cried. People who had loved the spectacle swapped stories of how they’d been fooled. I felt a strange lightness—like a heavy backpack finally lifted from my shoulders.
The world took care of itself. Fabian returned to his contracts; I returned to classes and to learning to be less foolish and more cunning—useful things if you intend to survive.
“Do you forgive me?” I asked him one evening as rain stuttered against the windows of Villa Seven.
He watched the rain and then looked at me. “I’m not sure what ‘forgive’ means anymore,” he said. “You hurt me. You frightened me. But you came back.”
That night he held me close, careful and slow, and I learned that care is its own kind of penance.
We rebuilt together in small, exacting ways. I studied harder than I had at any age. I learned to answer not only the heart’s call but the ledger’s cold math. Dax and Adeline taught me to watch people’s hands. Sancho Mustafa, a cousin of sorts, kept watch over public things. Antonio Fitzgerald, Fabian’s assistant, tipped me off when Fabian was choosing to be stubborn and when he was choosing to be kind.
One afternoon I found myself alone in the old library of Villa Seven. I sat with my purple bangle in my lap and thought of the woman I’d been—stupid in love, blithe in trust. I had cheated fate once; it did not mean I had changed the world. But I had learned to see the underside of speeches and promises. I had learned that protection is a practice, not a pledge.
“Joy?” Fabian’s voice came like a soft broom across wind.
“Yes?”
He stood in the doorway, hair wet with rain. He looked at me like someone measuring a map. “Do you know what I feared most?”
“What?”
“That you’ll forgive yourself too easily.”
I laughed—a short thing, brittle. “And?”
“Then you won’t learn to set the trap before you step. I want you to be strong enough that no one can play you for fool again.”
“How will I do that?” I asked.
“By never taking your eyes off the truth,” he said. “By knowing who really stands beside you.”
I traced the bangle with my thumb. It had been my mother’s. It had witnessed my survival. It glowed with memory. “Maybe this time,” I said, “I won’t be the one who dies for mistakes.”
He tucked me against him, and the villa, with its old stone and potted palms, hummed around us.
Years later, when the city had quieted and the scandal was only a lesson in a hundred social columns, I would sometimes wake in the middle of the night and hear a beep—not a hospital monitor, but a memory of the rhythm that had started it all. I would see the purple bangle light on the dresser and remember the night I chose to fight with evidence, not with a bleeding heart.
I had vowed to guard him. In the process, he had given me a place to stand. We were imperfect and bruised. The bangle sat on his desk. When I looked at it, I heard the city's applause and the whispering of a thousand recorded phones.
“You are mine,” he had said in the hospital. I had answered: “I am yours. I will keep you.”
But that was not the entire truth. I kept myself. I kept him. We both kept the bangle and the secret of how fragile trust can be—and how fiercely it could be rebuilt if you knew where to stand.
The End
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