Sweet Romance16 min read
I Came Back to Take What Was Mine
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I woke up with the scene playing again, the same cruel replay that had ended my life last time.
"Chana, even if you die, you still won't get Francisco," somebody's voice had hissed in that past life, warm and triumphant.
"Ha. Francisco is my fiancé now. You should be happy for me, little sister." Kayleigh's laugh had swallowed the room like a greedy animal.
"Don't be sad. There are more men in the world," Marjorie had cooed, all honeyed smiles and a knife in the palm. "Besides, your sister really loves Francisco. You only had a contract with him."
Pieces like that—those knives disguised as words—had run through my skull again and again until I reopened my eyes in my own room.
Cold sweat clung to my spine. My hands were clenched so tight the knuckles paled. For a scary second I thought I was still buried under the snow of that winter night, when the world had turned its back on me.
"Miss, the madam says get up now, go through the back door with the driver. Don't ruin the front-door gaiety," Zhang's voice—so familiar, so insulting—came from the corridor.
"Bang!" The door was kicked open. It was Giles's face, the housekeeper's expression carved into contempt.
I sat up, the air smelled of dust and old boxes. Surrounded by cartons with damp corners, the room looked like a secret nobody wanted discovered.
I breathed in cleanly. The smell of flowers drifted from the street below. I felt it like a promise: I'm alive. I had been given one more turn.
"Second miss," Giles said, fussing and fanning at my hair. "Hurry. Drive the back way. Don't trouble the front."
I let the memory settle in like armor. The day Kayleigh had crawled into my bed with Francisco—my contract fiancé, the man my family had arranged for me—was replaying, but this time the projector in my brain was not a tomb. It was a weapon.
I would not be the same woman who left crumbs of trust in people's hands and begged forgiveness for them later.
"I won't forget any of it," I whispered to myself.
I pulled on the dress I'd kept in a corner of my memory: composure. Then I walked out.
At the gate, the sun was high and honest. I took a taxi to the Bryants' tower. The BN Group building cut into the skyline like an accusation. Fleming Bryant's name—Fleming Bryant—was stamped across pages and murmurs, an invisible crown. He was the man behind Francisco's shine. He was the man who could make or break an empire with a gesture. And he was the man who, by the conditions of fate and family, had become my small-stepfather in name only: the "little dad" who sheltered and smoothed over every scandal.
"Miss, Mr. Bryant sees no one," the receptionist told me, all cold professionalism. "Please come another time."
"I am his girlfriend," I said.
She rolled her eyes like a shutter closing. "Many say that every day."
I smiled, a small, dangerous upturn. "He'll know when he sees me."
Time thinned and the night reclaimed the day. A black Maybach slid out of the underground. I tossed one shoe at the window without thinking. It hit glass with a crispness that startled me more than it startled the driver.
The door opened, and a man in a tailored suit stepped out. He had the carriage of someone used to being obeyed. He did not speak at first. He watched me, and when he did, his words were like a challenge wrapped in ice.
"Are you messing with me?" the driver barked, pointing.
I walked in like I owned the moment. "Are you Mr. Bryant's driver? Is Mr. Bryant inside?"
"Yes," the driver started. "And since you know—"
I cut him off by opening the back door and sliding into the passenger seat. I could feel a hundred eyes on the car as the driver froze, waiting for orders that did not come.
The man at the wheel moved with the same measured presence everything in him had. Darkness wrapped around half his face but the slice of jaw I could see was perfect: a high bridge to the nose, a mouth controlled and unreadable. This was Fleming Bryant, the legendary Mr. Bryant, inventor of a rumor or two and murderer of others' reputations in a signature shrug.
"Mr. Bryant," I said, as if it were the most natural introduction.
He finally looked at me properly, the light catching his eyes. "Have business?"
"I want to be your girlfriend." My voice did not waver.
There was a long silence. Then he said, blunt as a blade, "Do you think I'd want a woman discarded by another man?"
"I know how to cook," I said. "I can keep house. I can warm a bed."
He repeated the last two words as if testing them. "Warm a bed?"
"I do," I said, and before my shock could scramble thought into chaos, I leaned forward and pressed a light, defiant kiss to the corner of his mouth.
"Charming," he said, dry as paper. For the first time the mask of rumor didn't match the man. He moved closer, took my jaw between careful fingers and let his voice come with a warning: "I do not play with girls who lie."
I answered with the most absurd truth I had: "I'm not like other women."
He paused, then closed the distance in one smooth move and kissed me properly, not the way people kiss in movies but the way a man who had measured the world kisses—slow, decisive, precise.
I remember the taste: peppermint, faint and clean. When the car finally moved, the city blinked around us.
We drove to the back garden of the Bryant estate. He told the driver to wait. He did not go to the party. I did not either; instead he shut the doors and sat beside me like a shadow I had begged to keep.
"What's your name?" he asked at last, when I had stopped worrying about the old life and instead watched his face for any crack I could exploit.
"Chana Powell," I answered.
"Chana," he repeated. He said my name the way people learn the name of something they plan to keep.
Theirs—Kayleigh, Marjorie, my father Philip Castle, Francisco—had spun a trap for me once. This time I would learn every string attached.
"Tell me about him," Fleming said.
"Francisco Ayers?" I flinched but kept my voice steady. "He was my fiancé on paper."
"On paper," he echoed. "But paper burns."
He had that kind of humor only men like him had: a smile pulled thin across the face of a man who built satellites and pressured empires.
We sat in the dark and talked like people rearranging a chessboard.
"I will help you," he said finally.
I laughed because the industry of promises had always failed me. "Help me how? Give me a title? A house? If you help me, you must want something in return."
He fixed me with that faintly smileless look. "Then be useful. Learn to stand. Come to my company tomorrow. Learn what you need. Be capable."
"That's not what a lover asks for," I said.
"Then be my weakness," he told me simply.
I fell asleep in that truth: a man who had the world in his lap offered me safety in exchange for acceptance. I accepted because I had no other currency but my will.
The next morning, I followed his rules. I wore the badge—a black card Fleming's people issued—and walked through BN's marble lobby like a girl who had always belonged. The receptionist had the same polite dismissal until a woman with a tray of gossip stepped in and said, "That woman from last night—"
"She's Mr. Bryant's guest," the receptionist said, and the tone changed from peppery curiosity to tight-lipped respect.
At the top floor, in the glass-and-steel that housed the family office, Giles—Fleming's lieutenant—sat at the door and said only, "Mr. Bryant's people see no one."
"I'm here to work," I said.
"Work?" Giles blinked like someone at a stage told the script had been rewritten. "Who are you?"
"Chana Powell. I'm here to be useful."
He stared, then, with the precision of a gatekeeper deciding your fate, he nodded and let me step into a world I had not been meant to enter.
I was given the smallest office—bare, practical—and a business card. It was the first step, and in that first step there was a sound: a door opening in the direction of my future.
The engagements began small. I sat with numbers, read reports, learned the rhythms of meetings. Fleming's presence hung over everything like a mild storm. Francisco Ayers—Francisco—laughed in the upper rooms, all easy charm and borrowed debts. He saw me and something in him stirred like a sleepwalking animal. Kayleigh noticed him staring and puffed up like a queen about to strike.
"Who is she?" Kayleigh asked one victory-seeking afternoon, watching me walk past the floor's glass.
"That's Chana Powell," Francisco answered, all sweet civility. "She's... working with Mr. Bryant, I hear."
Kayleigh's lips curved like a trap. "My God, a commoner playing at the high life. That is entertaining."
I did not answer. I had learned silence the hard way; it could be more powerful than any retort.
I wanted to be close to Fleming without being used. I had come back to collect what had been mine: my name, my dignity, my rightful place. The house had been the first step, this job the second. There would be more.
A few days later, at an engagement party in the Bryants' mountain villa—meant as a showpiece for my sister Kayleigh and Francisco's announcement—the world would arrange itself into a public stage for justice.
The garden glittered with imported roses and the air hummed with pretenses. The guest list was a map of little empires: local magnates, bankers, socialites, the kind who would spend an afternoon whispering a scandal then forget who told them.
Kayleigh glided through the crowd like a rehearsed smile. "Everyone," she said when she saw me, "how brave of you to show up, Chana."
I smiled openly. "I came to congratulate you."
She bared teeth. "You should be grateful, sister. Francisco chose me."
At the center of the garden, I saw Francisco in his pale linen, an image of once-chosen gentility. He watched me the way a man watches a toy he has tired of: with thin tolerance.
"Chana," he said, "you shouldn't be here. Your father—"
"Philip?" I interrupted. "He is here. He invited me himself."
The crowd turned to look. Rumors fluttered like moths. I took another breath and told a truth they were not ready for.
"Do you remember the day Kayleigh 'found' Francisco and me?" I asked loud enough that the chandeliers shook. "Do you remember the dress I bought with my own savings? The knock on my bedroom door? The sight that burned me—my sister and Francisco in my bed—"
Gasps. A few polite snores of denial. Kayleigh flushed so fast her cheeks were a live thing.
Fleming stood at the edge of the crowd like a dark god. Giles held the perimeter like a brother of secrecy.
"You're lying," Kayleigh said.
"She is not," Giles said, stepping forward. "Chana is Mr. Castle's daughter. The marriage contract..."
"Stop," my father Philip said unexpectedly, voice tired. He was there, a man whose lapses had been many but whose bones still remembered being a father. "Stop this. I want to hear no more insults."
I looked at him. For a moment there was a child's memory in his eyes. "Dad," I said. "This is for you."
"She will not shame you here," Kayleigh said, claws out.
I stepped closer to the stage, feeling the cool of the stone under my shoes. The crowd leaned in. This was the scent of prey.
"I have evidence," I said. "I have a video, and records. I also have Mr. Bryant's word. If anyone here doubts what I say, Mr. Fleming has agreed that the truth can be presented."
"What is he doing?" Kayleigh snapped. She had not planned for this. She had planned me to be erased.
Giles raised a small device. The projector hummed and the big screen in the rose garden whirred to life. Faces shifted between amusement and attention.
I watched Kayleigh's reflection on the screen as the first clip played.
There was the bedroom. There were the curtains. There was Kayleigh—my neighbor in cruelty—laughing, and there was Francisco moving with the arrogance of a man who thought he owned whatever he touched. The camera cut to another clip: my gift box dropping from my hands that day, the dress spilling onto the floor like a confession.
The guests went silent, the kind of silence that is full of sharp edges.
"That's my dress," someone whispered.
Kayleigh's face had gone a color someone should patent as worthily grotesque. "That's a lie," she cried. "That camera—who put it there?"
"I did," I said. "Last time I was alive, I kept every humiliation like a ledger. I kept the proof. You all saw me as a joke. You all ate that joke."
Francisco stepped forward, slick as ever. "This is preposterous. Chana, if you have something, present it properly."
"I already have," I said.
Then the next clip rolled: a voicemail message Kayleigh had left to a private number with laughter in it, arranging for the servants to lie about where I had entered the house that day. There was the time when I had been pushed down the stairs—caught now on an old hallway camera. There was a discreet hand, unstable and mean, slipping a small vial into my drink at an afterparty. The camera caught the face of a man who would later deny everything, who would later take the "right" side.
Francisco's jaw hardened. He had always been a man of advantages; he thought he could shift blame. He thought he could use others as apes to climb.
The crowd watched him undo himself in slow motion.
"Is this accurate?" someone in the back asked. It was a woman I had seen once signing a million-dollar check and then buying a mood for breakfast. Her eyes were cold, but not unkind.
"It is," Giles said. "And Mr. Bryant has verified the lines."
The music in the garden fell out like a broken string. Kayleigh's smile was shredded; Marjorie stood pale and useless, the chess piece that had misread the board.
"You're finished," I said to Kayleigh. The words tasted of iron. "You used my life as your cushion. You stole my house, my clothes, my name. You took everything and you believed no one would ask for it back."
She laughed then, a broken bark. "You think you can—"
"Stop her!" Kayleigh's friends cried, but the sound was disordered and small compared to the hush.
Giles stepped forward. "Mr. Bryant says these are enough to revoke certain privileges," he announced.
At that, Francisco's world—the one built on the assumption of certain outcomes—began to crack. His sponsors checked their phones. A man with a small empire cannot be seen consorting with scandal and expect investors to remain serene.
"What are you doing?" Francisco demanded to the crowd, his composure starting to crack.
"This is public," I said. "And public means consequences."
I had planned this like a surgeon's incision. You do not remove a tumor by stabbing—there is method and mercy and cruelty when necessary.
The first punishment was social exposure: Kayleigh's photos with high-society friends were pulled off the tables like weeds. Her invitations to charity galas were quietly withdrawn. Her fashion sponsors called with "schedules" and suddenly had "previous commitments." I watched the ripple, the social equivalent of parchment burning.
But social ruination is rarely enough for people who have money and the ability to buy silence. They need a fall where people can see the gravity of loss. So I prepared the second act: the professional apocalypse.
"Mr. Francisco Ayers," Fleming's voice cut through the murmurs like a scythe. He had always been mild in public, but tonight he was a judge. "You have been seen in these clips behaving in ways we cannot condone. BN will not be associated with gentlemen who weaponize women."
Francisco's face was pale as milk. "You—you're ruining me."
"No," Fleming said. "You did."
Within an hour, the feeds were buzzing. The press that had sworn not to touch Fleming's life suddenly found that they were free to speak when a man like Fleming opened one door. Headlines were clinical: "Local Scion and Socialite Entangled in Scandal" and "BN Affiliates Sever Ties with Francisco Ayers."
The crowd watched as Francisco's sponsors—those masks that held a man's public persona together—unmanned their half-smiles and quietly retreated. The bank manager he relied on excused himself. The PR firm that had crafted his smile sent a curt email. The empire that had looked untouchable now leaned and teetered.
Kayleigh collapsed into the crowd of those who still wanted to be her friends; their hands did not catch her.
For the third punishment—because the rules of justice demanded variation and theater—I wanted him to experience humiliation with an audience. I had recorded messages of his own, where he laughed at other women and discussed possibilities of manipulating me. We played them in the garden. Francisco broke like glass.
"You're a coward," he stammered at me when I passed him near the citrus trees. "You were the one trying to get close to Mr. Bryant."
"I was trying to get something real," I said. "Something you never learned to keep."
By midnight, Kayleigh's supporters had fractured; some whispered that she'd always been a parasite and it had no longer been fashionable to feed parasites. People took pictures, posted them. The internet, that indifferent jury, loved spectacle. Kayleigh texted the few men who had promised her safety; some answered with single-space messages, others ignored her.
Then came the public moment I had planned as a lesson: the banquet hall, full of guests, their plates like mirrors.
I climbed the small dais. My voice did not shake.
"Listen," I said. "This is not revenge for revenge's sake. This is a reckoning. People think they can use the weak because the weak will apologize and leave. I will not apologize."
Kayleigh pressed a hand to her mouth and wept a silent, stunned cry. Marjorie, who had once been clever with smiles, now had nothing.
They would be punished differently, as the rules of justice dictated.
Kayleigh experienced social ruin and loss of status.
Marjorie—who had engineered and counseled and executed cruelty—would lose the thing she cared about: reputation and access to the circles she used to flaunt. Her contracts on local charity boards would be rescinded, invitations rescinded, partnerships dissolved.
Francisco faced professional annihilation: sponsors gone, investors called away, his name scrubbed from PR pieces. BN's affiliate companies issued statements that he would no longer represent them. He watched his network collapse like scaffolding in a storm.
But the punishment I had saved for last was the one meant to linger—an exposure under the open sky for all who had been witnesses.
I asked that Kayleigh and Marjorie stand and allow me to read out what I had found. They tried to refuse. Fleming's gaze was cold as a blade.
"You promised me," I said to him once, quietly, and he nodded. He had been the shield and the blade when needed.
I read out the message threads, the shopping receipts, the audio where Kayleigh and Marjorie had laughed about how they'd "manage" my father. I narrated the cameras, the timings. The garden watched their faces. They understood in real time that their lives would not snap right back into the comfortable lies they had woven.
The crowd's reactions shifted from curiosity to disgust to a clinical satisfaction. Phones were lifted, recording. Somebody gasped, then a woman tsked, then someone clapped, cold and slow. Voices said, "Not for me," or "Good." A man in a white suit took a picture then quietly left. A little girl stared with wide eyes.
Kayleigh's mask cracked. She tried to speak, to protest, to beg for forgiveness. Her voice changed like a singer apologizing for a wrong note. "It's not true," she pleaded. "I—"
Francisco went pale and then red and then quiet. He had lost more than his tie. He had lost the currency of trust.
After it ended, after the last clip and the last gasp, Kayleigh's friends were gone. Someone had already called a photographer to rush out with an exclusive. Someone else whispered there would be legal action, and the whispers braided into rumor: Kayleigh had to leave the country to avoid more scandal; Marjorie would return to live far from the city where no one knew her.
But there was a final twist. I wanted them to see that I was not only taking back what was mine, but that I had a new life forming: one of my choosing.
Fleming stood beside me then, a quiet island of certainty. He placed his hand over mine, just once, and with that small gesture he showed the garden that I had a protector. He looked at the crowd and said, with voice that made men shiver, "This woman is under my protection."
Giles closed the event with a simple instruction that had weight of law in it: "Any further slander will be met with legal pursuit."
The punishment took shape in many forms: social, financial, public, and legal. It was not a single dramatic act of cruelty. It was an unpicking of everything they had relied on. And the best part of justice was how the crowd responded—some with pity, some with a small applause, some with satisfaction so loud it hurt.
Kayleigh's reaction had gone through the stages I'd expected: the confident smirk, the disbelief, the angry denial, the pleading, the collapse, and finally a hollow, shocked silence. The people who mattered—the sponsors, the backers, the friends with clout—skittered away.
For Francisco, the change was worse: the market retracts from scandal. Sponsors mail letters with tidy phrases: "We regret the association." Investors call with immediate concerns. Deals evaporate: people do not like scandal when their brand is attached.
Marjorie, stripped of the shields she'd purchased with charm and careful smiles, found doors shut. Invitations that once fluttered onto her table now landed like closed fists. She protested, called names, tried to bribe the narrative with money, but the narrative had been underwritten by evidence. Money could not erase video. It could not pull back the people who had witnessed the truth.
When the night ended, and the garden returned to its murmurs and the roses to their pale business, I walked away with Fleming's hand in mine. We went back to his villa where the cherry tree—an ornamental sakura planted between the front walkway and the gardens—threw pale petals in our wake. Under that tree there had been boundaries before: a place where the back garden became the main grounds. That tree would be my witness.
The punishments had been severe and public and they had been necessary. They were not violent. They were not petty. They were final.
My life was no longer acceptable as a thing to be taken. I had reclaimed what was mine by standing and saying no.
And along the way, between the projector and the guests, Fleming had taught me how he would look when he protected someone. He wasn't soft. He was careful. He would be the shield at moments I needed him, and the blade at moments others needed a reminder.
There were moments—three, at least—that made my heart veer.
The first: when he reached into the car to take my phone after I dreamed my confession to him and he slid a black card into my hand without explanation. "Use this," he said. "It opens doors." For the first time in my life someone gave me power and didn't expect it to be gratitude; they expected it to be use.
The second: when he forbade me to enter the kitchen the first morning I stayed and then sat across from me while I worried over a burned pan. "Don't cook for me. But don't stop cooking for yourself," he said. That small paradox made me feel seen.
The third: when the garden fell quiet and he stood, his hand warm over mine, and said in that precise voice, "This woman is under my protection." The weight of those words landed in my chest and warmed something that had been a cold taut string for years.
I learned how to fight and how to surrender. Both were necessary things.
We did not end with vows that would fit in a thousand novels. I did not want a line that could be printed and re-used. My ending was the cherry tree.
Under that tree, I opened a small, battered box. It was the dress I had once saved for Kayleigh. I had the same gift box in my hand. I did not give it away. I pinned it back in my wardrobe like a victory.
Fleming took my hand, and I looked up at the petals. "You will grow strong," he said.
"I already am," I answered.
He smiled, and it was a real thing now—no rumor, no mask. It was a man who had chosen me in a world that had never expected such a choice.
The night moved on. The scorch of the punishment cooled like iron taken from flame. The people who had fed on my past found their tables empty. My father Philip appeared at the edge of the property later, his demeanor humble, shuffling toward us. He had lost the capacity to ignore me this time. He came to return what had been kept from me: trinkets, papers, a small file of inheritance that belonged to my mother. I accepted it without hysterics and with a dignity that had been taught by fire.
"Will you forgive?" he asked, eyes wet and frightened.
"That is for me to decide," I said. "For now, I want what I lost."
He bowed his head like a man who had been struck into recognition.
We walked back inside beneath a rain of petals. The cherry tree stood silent, a witness to a life reclaimed.
When I fell asleep that night on the couch with Fleming's jacket across my shoulders, I dreamed not of dark things but of doors opening.
The End
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