Face-Slapping12 min read
I Died, Got Reborn, and Ruined a Noble's Plot
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I died with my dog at my side and came back to find my life had been stolen. I thought death would be peaceful. I was wrong.
"You're a mess," said the man with eyes like frozen knives as his hand closed around my throat.
I gagged, saw stars, and thought about the ridiculousness of being murdered in someone else's bed on my first night in a new life. "Let go," I croaked, because of course I had to be polite even while nearly suffocating.
He tightened his grip and hissed, "You dared to do this to me. You will pay with your life."
I did what I always do when threatened: I cursed in my head, plotted loudly in my mind, and reached for anything hard. My fingers found a hairpin. I stabbed and he groaned, released me, and I landed on the floor like a sack of wet linen.
I breathed. I looked up. I saw the face that had been carved into my nightmares: cold, aristocratic, ruined by pain—and oddly, exquisite.
"Who are you?" I said, because it felt polite to ask.
He spat, "I am Isaiah Arnold. You violated me. You will be punished."
"Violated?" I blinked. "I thought I was the one being strangled."
He drew himself up like a statue affronted. "You are a liar. You will answer for this."
"Listen," I said, because why not roll with the absurd. "I'm Adeline Wang. And I have the wrong life."
He laughed like it was my fault the world had the wrong script. "Lies."
I tasted copper on my lip and remembered a falling car, then a bloated river, then a pair of mocking underworld attendants sneezing in a gloomy hall—and then a rush of light. I remembered being told my body had burned to ash. I remembered the dog at my side, restless and patient.
I should have been dead. Instead I was in a silk robe, in a room with carved lattices, in a body that belonged to the pampered daughter of a house I did not belong to. That should have been the worst of it. It wasn't.
"I was on my way to the afterlife," I said, and kept my voice soft. "There was—complication."
Complication was an understatement. The two beings who had sort-of rescued—well, mis-delivered—me were sitting by the paper window like bored clerks, trying to look harmless.
"Erick Herrmann," sniffed the brush-faced one. "We made an error. Again. It is...unprecedented."
"Willem Washington," said the other, equally guilty, "we sent Adeline to the wrong place. Or rather, wrong time. The paperwork is a mess."
"Paperwork?" I shouted. "My dog is dead and you call it paperwork?"
They flinched as if pierced by an invisible spike. "Dane Guerrero is not dead," Erick said hurriedly. "He lives in a system pendant. We can—"
"System pendant?" I repeated, because nothing in my prior life had prepared me for underworld bureaucracy or digital dogs. "You replaced my affection and career with a cheap trinket?"
Willem coughed. "This is not the time—"
"It is exactly the time," I said. "Either give me my old body back or fix this properly."
They exchanged a look. They had grown used to people begging. People died, people wept, and the underworld did paperwork until midnight. Then sometimes they made bargains.
"Fine," Erick said. "We will compensate. We will give you a chance to live. But we cannot reverse death in your original timeline. We can—"
"Transfer?" I said.
"Rebirth."
I felt the universe tilt again, like someone had pulled the rug away from a table and the chairs followed.
When I woke up, my throat still ached, my body smelled of herbs, and the room tasted like someone else's past. My clothes were wrong, my hair messy, and I had the weight of a story I didn't write.
I learned quick. I learned that I had been shoved into a novel called "Phoenix Over the Realm" and cast as a despicable side character: the fake eldest daughter of the Jing family, a woman who stole another girl's life and met a horrific end.
"You're telling me I was cast as cannon fodder?" I said aloud.
"Yes," sighed Dane Guerrero through the pendant that was suddenly warm in my palm. "No refunds."
He spoke like a shaggy, loyal friend who had somehow been reincarnated as a talking device. He whined when I dropped him on the bedside table and then, embarrassingly, wagged his nonexistent tail.
I was Adeline Wang now: a maligned, pampered scion whose name had been stolen by fate. I had a father who loved a daughter that was not truly his, a rival named Vera Daniels who had everything, and a handsome, dangerous man who would have every reason to hate me: Isaiah Arnold, prince of a fractured court, crippled by a poison long ago.
I had been dumped in Isaiah's bed while he was at his weakest. The memory made my stomach flip—I'd been planted there, perhaps to be sacrificed, perhaps to be humiliated. But I had enough in me to stab back, both literally and metaphorically.
"You're lucky," Erick said. "We gave you training. We patched your marrow with a small library of martial arts."
"You're evil if you think this will make me thankful," I said.
"We are what we are." Willem shrugged. "We are bureaucrats with a soft spot for paperwork and mischief. Trust us: you learn, you survive."
They kept their promise. In one night, muscles that had been sleepwalking woke. I felt inner energy coalesce, strange rules and an old rhythm clicking into my bones. The underworld's weird gift included a "life-and-death token" that could suppress poison, and a set of internal steps—like a dance—that let me move lighter than air.
I remember sticking the red token into my palm and thinking of the dog I had loved. I killed the nostalgia and put on a face.
Isaiah's eyes watched me from the wheelchair like he was counting how many lies I was made of.
"Adeline," he said, because in his mind I carried the name of the body I inhabited. "You will answer for what you have done."
"No, Isaiah," I said, tasting how foreign his name felt in my mouth. "My name is Adeline. I was murdered. I am not your enemy."
He stared. "You killed me."
"I stopped you from dying," I said, and that was the truth.
He let out a cold laugh. "You will not leave this wheel until we know the truth."
So I stayed. A deal was made. They could not remove Isaiah's memory of the night's events entirely—Erick and Willem confessed to a limited bureaucratic power—but they could give me tools and a choice. I could cooperate, help solve a string of disappearances and deaths that had haunted the nearby estates, and in return he would be my shield.
"Why would I trust you?" I asked him.
"Because I don't want to be poisoned again," he answered plainly, and his honesty felt like a threat and a lifeline at once.
The first case I touched was ugly and old: children missing from the woods, bones buried under roots. Isaiah's team had found bones and called them coarse things. I saw patterns. I saw cruelty in the angle of a joint, in the way a child's teeth wore down. My hands, guided by something dark and steady, worked like a sculptor's.
"Bring me a skull," I told him.
"Why?" Carlo Vega, Isaiah's chief aide, asked.
"Because I can make faces from bones," I said. "And faces make stories. Stories bring family. Family brings witnesses. Witnesses bring justice."
"Is this some ploy?" Liam Ogawa, another aide, asked.
"Not if the skull can speak," I answered.
They humored me. They dug. They watched. I worked with mud and clay and reverence, reshaping the dead into the living.
When the first face came together, it was like pressing a seal on a wound. The town saw a child's features—clearly kin to a family that had been missing a boy for a decade. When the matron from that family, a woman with a knotted face, walked in and screamed the child's name, everything shifted like tectonic plates moving beneath a house.
"It is him," she said, eyes blank and wet. "He was my Tien. He should be weaving baskets."
When we brought the tests and the reconstructed face to the estate of Ernst Chapman, the lord whose son had been missing, the air turned poisonous. The gentleman's face went white, then pale, then cracked with the sound of a violin string breaking.
"You cannot!" he cried at first, voice loud and proud. "This is slander."
"Silence," Isaiah said, and his voice carried a poison of its own. "We have evidence."
They found more bones, more faces to bake from the clay of history, and the estate's carefully layered lies began to peel.
A public hearing followed. They would not—could not—hide this one. Isaiah called the house open, and the courtyard filled with servants, neighbors, minor officials, and a few women in silk who lived on gossip and children's marriages.
Vera Daniels smiled from beside the lady of the house. She had always smiled like a blade. When I first saw her, everything inside me went cold. This was the woman who had soared on fortunes and stolen my childhood's future.
"You're certain?" she asked, prim, as if we discussed the price of tea.
"Yes," I said. "And we can prove it."
I told them everything I knew: the burial places, the manner of the killings, the pattern that led to the private orchard. I spoke without melodrama, and the crowd listened. People leaned forward like hungry fish.
When the first accused—an ill-starved page—collapsed and confessed under pressure, the room erupted. The being whose hands had hidden the worst secrets of that house—the child of bone and sugar who had learned cruelty as a toy—standing rigid in the center, realized their world had broken.
At first they were arrogant. They had been taught to expect impunity: "You will never find me guilty," they said, with lips thin and cruel.
Then the copper taste of fear replaced bravado. When the servants began to point—remember, we had faces now—some took to their phones and some to gossip, but everyone's eyes were a jury.
"You're insane!" the accused shouted. "This is lies! Slander from the underclass!"
"The bones," I said quietly. "Tell us why you buried him under the old plum tree."
He swallowed. He laughed ugly. "I did no such thing."
My voice was calm as the sea. "Then explain the rope marks on your arms. Explain the child's hair we found woven in your garment."
He sputtered denial and at first the crowd hummed with doubt for him. But then a neighbor—the one who tended the plum tree, the one who had seen things but had been bought silent—came forward.
"They're his," she said, pointing. "I saw him with my own eyes dragging sacks. I thought it was meat. I am tired of being bought."
It took minutes for the tide to turn, but it turned ruthlessly.
"You did this," a woman cried. "My child!" A father cried too loud and big; he pounded the wooden bench until a sound like thunder rolled.
People shoved forward. The accused went from confident to pale to flailing. "I didn't do it," he moaned. "I didn't—"
They called for the law.
We brought the evidence to the market, to the temple, to the magistrate's table. The magistrate read the records. He turned pages, his face an even mask. He did not like being wrong. He did not like being shown how badly the great had hidden truth.
"Bring them out," he ordered. "We will hold a public reckoning."
They made them stand in the market at noon—open market, where traders shouted prices and children chased chickens. The accused, once smoothed and perfumed, now had cuffed hands. Vera Daniels watched with the shallow stare of someone who believes the world exists only in terms of power and leverage.
At first her expression was amusement—she had always been above consequence; she was the kind of woman who ordered fate and expected it to move on a carriage. She was smug as a cat perched on a balustrade when she saw us ascend.
Then, as evidence mounted and neighbors began to point, her face went through a terrible, ordered change. Her smile froze. Her eyes darted for allies. She faltered.
"You can't!" she said, louder now—an attempt to rewrite reality by speaking louder than it. "This is impossible. You are mistaken."
"Denial," I said softly, because she had chosen the classic route and I had seen it before. "We have sand from the burial, threads from the garments, witness statements, and the reconstructions."
"False," she repeated. "Lies. I am a lady. I attend the finest salons. I cannot be..." Her voice trailed, and the syllables she needed failed.
The crowd turned. People pulled out small mirrors and snapped photos of the scene with their tiny sorcery boxes. The town's gossipers began to film. "Is that not Vera Daniels?" someone whispered. "Look—her jewels."
She felt the walls of her life give. The first crack came when a servant she had dismissed years ago stepped forward, eyes blazing with the sort of righteous hunger that had been sleeping too long.
"You bought my silence," he said. "You gave me coin and told me to look the other way. I was ashamed. I was poor. Now he is dead and I can see."
Her face turned a shade paler than silk. She tried to sway the crowd with a practiced smile. "You are mad," she hissed. "I would never..."
The crowd's answers were now a chorus. "You would." "You did." "You lied."
"Don't you dare!" she shrieked. "I will not—"
She sank on her knees like someone whose stage bombed. Her hands clawed at the air. "Please! Please! No—"
Her voice had gone thin. The same crowd that once envied her—women who had purchased fine ribbons and men who had learned to kiss the right hands—looked at her as if at a struck animal. A child pointed.
Someone began to clap. Then another. It started like a cough and grew into a roar. The clapping became accusation. People laughed, people spat, some wept; his mother wailed. A few brought bowls of water as if to wash the stain of the day.
She begged. "I'll pay whatever you want," she cried, at first bargaining for money. "I'll confess to anything—"
But the law had teeth, and the magistrate's gavel was a hammer that had no hunger for jewels.
"Rise," the magistrate said to Vera, voice like winter. "Face what you have done."
She looked up, eyes wild, like a woman whose carefully painted mask had been scraped away to reveal raw, red skin.
"You will speak. You will tell the truth for all to hear. Do you hear?"
"I am innocent," she said at first—then, in a terrible sliver of sound, "I didn't—" then nothing. Fear ate her voice.
She fell apart in front of everyone. Her aristocratic posture tumbled away. She crawled like an animal. People filmed, they whispered, they shoved. She tried to identify allies and found none.
Her usually immaculate hands trembled, dirt gathering beneath her nails. She went from beg to bargain to scream to whimper. "No! No! It was for the house! For my name!"
"Your name is built on bones," the magistrate said. "We will do right by the wronged."
They stripped her of titles in the town square—an emblematic act that sent a shiver through the elite. They took the jewelry; they ordered restitution. The real punishment would be made in the legal record, and in the days that followed, her salons closed, invitations stopped, and the phone calls that once made the roofs of the city creak dried up.
Through it all, I watched Vera change from a woman used to smiling her way out of storms to someone who tasted fear so raw she could not digest it. She went from smirking to rigid, to denial, then to pleading, and finally to collapse—the arc the old texts call "fall from grace."
I told myself this was not sweet revenge. It was justice.
After the market, after the magistrate's orders, after the neighbors had decided that their social life would continue without her, she was paraded—not to a gallows but to a hearing room—where she had to recount her misdeeds in excruciating clarity. The entire town's ledger recorded it. The humiliations were countless: confiscations, public apologies, and the ruin of marriages arranged by prestige now withdrawn.
She begged for mercy and then tried to swallow her words when nobody gave it. She knelt before parents and wept. "Forgive me," she said. "Forgive me." She repeated it until her throat was raw and the crowd turned to leave like a tide receding.
When she cried for help, those she had used turned their faces away. Some left without a backward glance. Others filmed the last minutes of her pretense for the village's memory.
That was justice in a market square. It was animal, messy, and real.
Isaiah and I watched from the magistrate's dais. He did not smile. He never smiles when the world gets its balance back. It makes him feel too human, and he does not like that.
"Was it necessary," he asked at last.
"It was," I said. "It stopped another family from waking to a child's absence. It gave faces back to bones. It took away the lie."
He looked at me then, really looked, like someone who had been counting a debt and finally found a payment. "You did well."
This time he did not speak the old threats. He had no cause. He had a debt he could now call even.
After the hearing, when the crowd had scattered like dried leaves, Delilah Montgomery—Isaiah's mother—took my hand like an old friend and said, "You stay with us. You are one of mine now."
I laughed. I cried. I looked at the small pendant in my palm and felt Dane Guerrero's warm presence.
"You promised you would give me back my real life," I told Erick and Willem later, in tones that were part complaint and part warning.
"We did what we could," Erick said. "We corrected what we truly could."
Willem only shrugged. "Lives are messy. Sometimes skeletons want to be spooked."
"Fair enough," I said. "But there are more skeletons to bring to light. There are more bones to give faces."
Isaiah turned his head, and for once his expression was soft enough to be mistaken for gratitude.
"Then we will work together," he said. "You help me solve the rest; I let you go when you have paid your due."
"I will not be owned," I said. "I will be a choice."
He looked at me, and it felt like two old enemies deciding not to fight for the moment. "Very well. We will bargain on honest terms."
"Yes," I said. "And when this is done, I will walk away if I wish."
He inclined his head. "As you wish, Adeline."
I thought of the underworld's clipped promise, of the dog that had been my other half, of the clay that could make a dead boy's mouth open again. I thought of grainy market faces and people's hunger for truth. I thought of Delilah's hand, like a tether to a life I had not been given until now.
I slept in a proper bed that night, under a blue canopy someone had affectionately arranged. Dane curled inside my pendant and hummed like he had a little heart, and I woke to a plan.
There were more bones to dig up, more names to pull into daylight, and—best of all—there were debts to be repaid.
When I left the long princess's house the next morning, Delilah squeezed my fingers and said, "Stay out of the soup pots of politics."
"I plan to," I answered, and laughed.
In the market, a child tugged at my sleeve. "Miss Adeline," he whispered, "my cousin's face looked like the one you made."
I reached down, ruffled his hair, and felt that peculiar heavy lightness a woman gets when she knows she is finally doing what she was meant to do.
"Show me where," I said.
We walked. The city's breath went on, and the bones waited under soil and straw for the day someone would remember.
This is not a story of a woman who becomes a queen at the end. This is a story of a woman who refused to be a footnote, who refused to die like a sentence.
And somewhere, in a small pendant, a dog barked—a small, stubborn sound that promised that I would not be alone when I dug up the next truth.
The End
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