Face-Slapping14 min read
I Came Back to Steal My Own Wedding
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I died with his knife in my ribcage and the taste of betrayal in my mouth.
"Margot," he had whispered, "I've never loved you. Even your body disgusts me."
"I will be grateful," I had said, staring at him with my last breath, "if you die with me and spare that bitch."
He smiled like a gentleman as blood spattered his face. Brooks Lefevre, my husband of ten years, walked away from my body as if he had washed his hands. He left me for dead and used my family's ruin as his ladder into the world he coveted.
And then the car hit me.
"Are you all right?" a voice asked later, like someone turning the page on my life.
I opened my eyes to morning light, to the smell of pine, to a world ten years younger. I was twenty-two again. Ten years ago. The wedding was still a month away. Everything that followed—my parents' death, the slow poisoning of my body and soul, the final knife—hadn't happened yet.
I pressed my palms to the steering wheel and counted my blessings with a cold, steady breath. Rewind. Retake. Rewrite.
"Do you think you hit me?" he asked, leaning down to the car window. He looked like a statue. He was ridiculous and perfect and dangerous in a way I had only ever dreamed in nightmares.
"You?" I said. "You hit me?"
Roman Marshall smiled, bored and amused. "Only enough to get your attention."
Hazlee Matthews shrieked behind me from the passenger seat. "Margot, are you insane? You told him—"
"I told him one sentence," I cut in. "‘Next month, the 18th, I'm getting married. Dare to steal my wedding?’"
Roman cocked an eyebrow. "You want to be kidnapped at your own wedding?"
"I want you to come. If you're there that day, you'll take me away," I said. "If you're not, then I'll keep my plan. But if you come, I will go with you."
Roman's hand, warm and lacquered with arrogance, produced a black card and tipped it toward me. "Look after your head," he said. "Consider this an engagement gift."
"That's half a million," Hazlee hissed. "Who is this man again?"
"Roman Marshall," I said. "Brooks' only man who can stand him."
Roman's thumb brushed the card's edge. "If you want me to play 'rescuer' for the cameras, show me sincerity. Make the wedding worth walking away from everything."
"I will be there." I said it like an oath. "If I see you at the wedding and you ask me in front of everyone, I'll go with you."
Roman considered me for three long heartbeats. Then he laughed, low and delighted. "Fine. Put that on a calendar."
That night, when my phone buzzed with a charge alert, I read the message: "Charge: 100,000,000." Roman had turned his promise into a public coin toss.
He had no idea I wanted more than money. I wanted him to be the man who saw me—truly saw me—and then not let me go.
"I never thought you'd hand me a black card," Hazlee murmured. "You actually meant it?"
"I meant every word." I had a map of revenge in my head like a blueprint. Brooks had killed me once. He would not do it again. This time, I would make him crumble in the light.
---
"Margot, your voice is wrong." Hazlee said the morning after we met Roman. "You're not the same. Are you sure you didn't hit your head in the crash?"
"I didn't hit my head," I said. "I hit back."
When Brooks called that day, his voice was honey. "Are you glad you came to the mountain today for me?" he asked.
"I bought your future," I said, cool and controlled. "I spent the morning blessing you at the mountain. I even prayed for your success."
"How considerate," he said. "You always put me first."
"I put myself first now," I said, and hung up.
When I told my parents that I wanted to call off the wedding, Muriel Brady—my mother—gasped. "Margot, why? They will talk. Your marriage to Brooks—it's been arranged since childhood."
"I want to call it off," I said. "I want you and Dad to sit back and watch me break him."
My father, Ike Chavez, folded the newspaper and looked at me with something like pride. "Do you know what you're asking, Margot?"
"I'm asking for the truth to be known," I said.
And so I began to plan. The old version of me would have quietly accepted the life Brooks offered and died for it. This version—this Margot—was meticulous and cold as winter steel. I made lists and moved chess pieces. I called Roman back. I explained: half my plan was for him to make Brooks look small in public. The other half was mine to execute.
"Make his image crack," I told Roman in a private meeting. "Not by strength—by truth. The kind of truth that everyone sees and no one denies."
Roman's laugh was a blade. "You know the kind of truth that ruins men. Do you want me to ruin him?"
"I want him to panic," I said. "I want the world to watch him try to hold everything together and fail."
He leaned forward. "And you? What happens to you, Margot?"
"I will be the woman who chose herself," I said. "And if I must, I will be the woman who takes him down with everything I've got."
Roman's answer was a nod. "Deal."
---
The charity gala that would become a turning point arrived like a storm. I had not planned to attend many social functions; Brooks' world was all gala and staged smiles. But a chance to sting him in public was a light I could not resist.
"You look incredible." Hazlee squeezed my hand in the velvet seating of the theater. "Please don't do anything reckless."
"I won't," I lied.
Brooks arrived in a suit that fit him like a second skin. "There she is," he murmured, as if I were his to gaze upon.
Roman sat behind, smoking something that smelled of arrogance and cedar. He caught my eye once, then again, and in that glance was a promise.
The auction began with glitter and practiced voices. Brooks raised his hand easily. He wanted the centerpiece item—an heirloom sapphire rumored to be worth a fortune and intended as my wedding gift.
"Five hundred thousand!" Brooks called with an easy generosity.
"One million," a voice rang out.
It was Roman, voice as casual as a coin drop. The room angled toward him like iron filings to a magnet.
Brooks' jaw tightened. "One point five," he said.
"Three million," Roman answered.
The bidding was a war of posture and pedigree and public displays. Brooks held the stage like a man who believed in his own gravity. He had the smile of a man powered by illusions.
When the gavel fell in Roman's favor at three million, the room shivered in surprised applause. Then Roman did something no one expected: he walked across the hall, lifted the glass case, and placed the sapphire in my hands.
"For your mother," he said, voice low but not private. "Happy birthday, Margot."
I felt everyone's breath on my shoulders. Brooks' face cut like a tide. "Margot," he said, almost accusatory, "you accepted a gift from another man."
"Roman offered," I said, and that simple answer looked like a declaration. "If anyone faults me, look at where they stand."
People watched Brooks like an animal at the edge of a cliff. He smiled, but it barely concealed the roiling panic underneath. Roman had not merely bought a jewel; he'd bought a fracture line in Brooks' armor.
After the Gala crowds thinned and the headlines did their work, Brooks' veneer broke. The next morning, all the city was a chorus: "Brooks Lefevre, the miser? Brooks the hypocrite?"
When the market opened and his firm's stock dipped on rumor and whispers, I did not celebrate. I observed, clinical and careful. Ruin is almost always messy and often pays forward consequences to the innocent; I guarded against collateral damage.
---
I had set two traps. One for Brooks. One for his network.
Fletcher Rashid, my uncle by blood and greed, had spent years carving backroom deals and steering our family into debt. He had counted on me being obedient, pliant. He had expected that when Brooks took our ruin and remade it as his ascension, we would have no fight, no bite left.
"An asset is a tool for those who can wield it," Fletcher had said to me once. He lived in the language of power.
I lived in the language of exposure.
At the shareholders' meeting, surrounded by men who had once sneered at my mother's apron hem and the silent woman who had been me, I spoke.
"I would like the minutes to show that the loan advanced to Brooks' enterprise is now a subject for arbitration," I said, in a voice the room could not ignore.
Fletcher's face drained. "Margot, you're stepping beyond propriety."
"No," I said. "I'm stepping into truth. We co-signed for his project. I agree to pay—but with terms. Six months, or the shares as collateral."
There was a truth he could not refute: the paperwork existed, unsigned and incomplete. I had prepared the documents in my father's desk years before. I had planted them so they could be found. Fletcher's face reddened as colleagues shifted. "You are a child."
"I am your heir," I corrected. "And I will not let our family's name be sold to pay for someone else's ambition."
When Fletcher exploded, he tried to shout me down. I recorded him. The tape was later aired in an anonymous expose, and the town watched him unfold: threats, slurs, the small noises of a man discovering his power slipping. He begged, then spat, then stormed out of the meeting with a public fury that all of Bluehaven's wealthy houses witnessed.
His punishment was a collapse of influence—a board removed his privileges the next day, investors pulled back, and the man who had relied on malign influence lost his favored seat. The way he went from predator to pleading man was not a dramatic collapse; it was surgical. I had given him enough rope and the cameras to tie it.
It was not mercy. It was a lesson. The house had eaten its own.
---
The night of my mother's fiftieth, the banquet was opulent—chandeliers like frozen constellations, a crown resting in my hand that shone with Roman's sapphire, and my mother, Muriel Brady, glowing like a woman who had finally been given a voice to stand beside her husband.
"Thank you," she said to the room. "Thank you for being here."
I watched Roman across the crowd. He had agreed to stay, to look like a man of interest, to show Brooks that there were other options for me—beautiful, improbable, dangerous options.
Halfway through the evening, I saw the players converge exactly where I'd planned. My cousin Lesly Roth—greedy, sharp, and promised the house's favor—had been primed with a lie that promised her a place at my side if she played the right part. I had fed her the rumor that Brooks liked "fresh" company and would reward those who propped his vanity.
"What are you doing?" Hazlee hissed from behind a crystal goblet.
"I'm watching," I said.
Lesly smoothed her dress and walked the room like a cat. She found Brooks in the moonlight by the terrace. I had put cameras there earlier, hidden behind a row of potted palms—small, elegant devices that would capture everything.
"Brooks," Lesly purred, "you look tired. Do you want a private cup?"
He smiled like a man with nothing to hide. "Why would I hide from light?"
They had only each other's company for a few minutes. They were not careful. He had always been a man who thought himself above consequence, and Lesly was a girl who needed to be seen.
Roman, watching from the shadow, sent the feed through channels I had prepared. In half an hour, the live screen in the banquet hall flashed images: Brooks in a private embrace, Lesly on his lap, the argument that followed, the denial, the shove, then Lesly's tears.
"Stop!" my voice cut through the murmurs like glass.
Brooks' face shifted from affront to panic in an instant. He tried to talk, to soothe, to wrap his arms like armor, but the cameras had him. He tried to sound dignified. "This is a private matter," he said weakly.
"In front of everyone?" Lesly screamed later, when she understood he'd used her. "You promised—"
I let the footage play. I let the room watch the man who had called himself my husband act like a man whose privacy was built on other people's ruin.
He denied at first. "They're lies," he said. "They're malicious edits."
"Your hands are on her waist in a video we recorded," Roman said, stepping forward as if to defend what he had purchased in the auction and what he'd promised in the corner of my life. "Buyer's remorse is not slander."
The crowd turned like a hurricane. Phones came out, hands shook, whispers became recorded confirmations. Brooks began to sputter.
"This is theater," he said. "You are fools."
"Brooks," I said, standing. The room focused like a camera. "You left me in a pool of my blood and carved my life into nothing. You poisoned our marriage slowly for ten years. You stole from my family. You have no right to ask for respect."
He laughed then, a brittle sound. "You always had a flair for drama."
"Then watch the drama end," I said, and I pulled from my coat a yellowed paper—copies of bank statements, text messages, receipts. "You thought you had hidden the pills. You thought everyone would believe the sterilization was my choice. You thought my parents' deaths were an accident."
Brooks' face—handsome and cruel—turned pale.
"You murdered them," I said. "And you murdered me."
Gasps filled the room. "You can't say that," someone shouted.
"I have proof," I said. "Here. Here are the payments you made to her—" I pointed to Lesly's phone, "—and here the forensic reports on the chemicals hidden in my food. You sent men to 'fix' a car. You paid them. You arranged everything."
Brooks' eyes were wide and bright with a heat I had never seen before. "You're insane," he said.
"Am I?" I asked. "Am I crazy because I learned the truth, or are you the thief who thinks he can steal a life and call it a destiny?"
People recorded. The maid with the silver tray held up her phone. Someone in the back whispered that they had a relative who worked in a laboratory and could confirm the traces. Phones pinged as messages with images were shared across the room and across the city.
Brooks went through stages. He smiled—too quickly, like a man on a stage who has forgotten his lines. He denied. "I loved you—"
"You fed me poison in the tea for years and called it concern," I said. "You told me I was barren because of fate, then doctored my food. You testified to my tenderness and framed it as docility. And when I became inconvenient, you drove the car, you arranged the crash, you slit my throat."
He staggered. He reached for me and my father's hands.
"Don't!" I stepped back.
Then he did what villainous men do when they are exposed: he tried to reframe himself. "I saved you. I made us rich."
"You made yourself richer by stealing our legacy," I said. "You used our tragedy as your leverage."
He turned to my parents, to the donors, to the journalists. He tried to build a theater of pity: "I'm a victim too," he said. The room recoiled as if he'd spat.
The crowd's reaction was a chorus: shock, then disbelief, then a slow, bitter applause. People began to stand, voices rising like a rain.
"You did this," a woman shouted. "He killed them!"
Brooks' last act of cowardice was to try to leave. Security—hired by the hall for drama and order—moved instinctively. The cameras followed him. He reached for his phone, to call his lawyers, to call his defenders. The feeds caught the fingers that had once written wedding vows now trembling.
Then he broke.
He slumped to the floor as if the room had physically weight to it. His face, once polished, now small and raw. He tried to speak, then silence. He vomited apologetic phrases to people who could no longer believe them.
Someone recorded the sound of him begging. "Please—wait," he said. "I didn't mean—"
The cameras kept rolling. The hotel beeped, the guests recorded, the city watched. The man who had smiled through my funeral now had to sit in the shame he had created. A dozen phones streamed the scene into comment threads. People who had praised him before posted pictures and then deleted them. Attorneys were called. He was disinvited from his own circles overnight.
It was not a legal execution. It was a public ritual. The fall of Brooks Lefevre was a public spectacle: the reversal from a man who owned respect to a man who needed to beg for it.
And yet as he cried and pleaded, I did not feel joy. I felt a slow, empty victory. The truth tasted like ash. The world had given him a moment to beg, and the world had watched him ruin himself.
It was punishment. It was necessary. It was public. It was final enough for me.
---
When Brooks' name flooded the headlines the next morning, the water in the glass trembled. He had been stripped of appointments. Sponsors withdrew. People who had once kissed his hand now refused to look at him.
Fletcher Rashid's downfall followed, but differently. He could not be made to kneel in the banquet. He lost favor in boardrooms: partners pulled offers, and his company was reorganized away from his hands. The man who had gambled on our family and our silence found himself without the leverage he had once used.
Lesly Roth, my cousin, had played her part and found only hate and isolation. She could scream until she broke her voice, but no one wanted her story. She had thought herself clever. I had let her dance with a predator and be exposed to the light. Her punishment was social: the whispers, the losing of friends, and the reputation of being the woman who threw herself at a married man for gain.
The punishments were varied—public humiliation, social exile, financial recoil. Each fit the crime.
---
When the dust settled, I stood in my mother's dining room with the sapphire crown in my palms. Muriel's fifty-year story had been rewritten into a celebration the entire city talked about. She smiled at me over a cup of tea—the same tea Brooks had used to poison me once.
"Is this what you wanted?" she asked.
"More than that," I said. "I wanted you to be seen."
She touched the sapphire, reverent, and then laughed. "You always meant to make me proud, didn't you?"
"I meant to make myself proud," I said. "I meant to stop being someone else's ornament."
Roman sat across from us, casual and impossible. "You look like a queen today," he told my mother. When he looked at me, the smile in his eyes was softer.
"I kept my promise," he said to me later. "You asked me to come. I came."
"Did you mean it?" I asked. "The gala, the auction... did any of it feel real to you?"
"It was all very real," he said. "But truth is heavier than money. You should have known I'd regret the lighter things. I prefer bringing storms."
We stood on the balcony, watching the city simmer under a new sun. The headlines were still yelling, but their sound was a backdrop now, like distant thunder.
"I want you to know one thing," Roman said quietly.
"What?"
"I didn't do this for the sapphire."
"I never thought you did."
He smiled, a dangerous tilt. "Then why did you let me buy it?"
"Because some things are clearer when you hold them," I said. "Because I needed the spectacle. Because I knew what would happen when the world saw who had chosen me."
Roman's expression hardened for a moment, then softened. "And if I asked you to leave with me, now—right now—would you?"
I looked at him. Hazlee had taught me what it was to laugh even when your ribs hurt. My mother had taught me how to survive. My father had taught me stability. I had learned from ten years of love that wasn't love and a death I wouldn't accept twice.
"I will go with you," I said.
Roman's jaw unclenched, and for once his arrogance was a bench built out of honesty. "Say it in front of everyone," he teased, remembering our bargain.
I stepped back into the ballroom, light a carriage of a woman who had been reborn. Cameras lifted and followed. My voice didn't tremble.
"Everyone," I called, "if any of you thought I was someone's ornament—see me now."
Somehow, in the glare of the lights and the sparkle of the crown still balanced on the table, I felt less like a prize and more like someone who had rewritten the rules.
Roman found me after. He took my hand like a contract and like a promise. "Will you come?" he asked, gently.
"I will," I answered.
He led me through the crowd, and for the first time, I felt the press of truth as a shield, not a cage.
When later Brooks tried to crawl back into the picture with lawyered words and staged apologies, he found only closed doors. He posted letters, he begged for meetings, he paled in interviews. The city had judged him, and the market had answered.
As for me, I kept a black card in my wallet and a sapphire crown on the dressing table. I kept Roman's last laugh like a private sun. I had called my shot and walked away with my name intact.
"Did it hurt?" Hazlee asked me one night, cups of tea cooling between our hands.
"What?" I asked.
"Losing ten years."
I thought of the man who had slit my heart and of all the mornings I had wasted loving him. "Yes," I said. "It hurt like a winter that doesn't end. But I learned how to build a summer out of the stones."
I slept well that night, finally not because the knife was gone, but because my hands were empty for the first time of false promises. The blue sapphire caught moonlight through the window and threw it back like a small, honest star.
The city had watched Brooks fall and Fletcher stumble. It had watched me stand, and for once the applause was not a trap but a verdict.
I wound the old clock in my mother's study—an inheritance from a grandfather who had loved truth as a virtue—and set it to tick. Time moved forward. I had been given a second life, and I intended to spend it unafraid.
When I took Roman's hand at the small registry office—no florid speeches, no gilded cages—he whispered into my ear, "You came back to steal your wedding."
"I stole it," I said. "But I kept the crown."
We both laughed.
And when years later someone asked me if I regretted the night on the mountain, I would still say no. I had been stabbed and had lived. I had taken back everything, not with claws but with witness. That night I held the blue sapphire up to the light and watched my reflection bend—no longer a wife who died for a man, but a woman who had learned the cost of truth.
"Keep the crown," I told my mother once. "It is beautiful, but it is not mine. I will keep the black card as a reminder of who helps me and why."
She kissed my forehead. "You keep whatever makes you safe."
Roman and I walked away from the registry with simple rings in our pockets and a city that had learned to listen.
I had woken up a second time into a life that I had the right to live. I had written a new ending out loud, and the world had read it.
And I, Margot Zhao, kept a crown, a black card, and a carefully signed list of names who would never take my life again.
The End
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