Face-Slapping13 min read
I Found Him in Her Arms — Then I Broke Everything He Loved
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I pushed the villa door and the warm light hit my wet coat.
“You’re home late,” Matias said without looking up.
I froze. The coat in his hand was not mine. There was a woman on the sofa, hair half loose, mascara streaked down her cheeks like fake grief. She laughed when she saw me, sweet and practiced.
“Matias, I was just leaving,” she cooed. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Leave, now,” Matias said. His voice was flat, sharp as glass.
Heat rose in my throat. I had come home to sleep, not to fight. I watched her get up, button her blouse, walk straight past me. She looked at me with the wide-eyed look stars are taught to give cameras.
I smiled.
“Go,” I said. “Stay a while.”
She glanced at him, then at me. “Mrs. Duffy—”
“Just go,” Matias repeated. He pointed at the door with a bone-cold finger.
The woman left. The door clicked. The air in the house changed. I did not move. He turned to me slowly like a man approaching a wild animal.
“This marriage was your plan,” he said. “Are you happy now?”
I pressed my palms to my sides. “Very happy. Your house is big. The servants are efficient. I’m grateful.”
He laughed, not a kind laugh. “Grateful? Your gratitude sent someone I love away. You left her no choice.”
My throat closed. “Matias—”
He did not listen. His hand closed around my neck like a vise.
“Answer me. Do you feel guilty?” he hissed.
I slapped his hand. I clawed at him. I gasped for air. In the dark of the living room his shadow looked gigantic and cruel.
He let go after a long moment. He stepped back, grin unreadable. “I won’t let you die easy. I want you to suffer until you’re finished.”
I got up off the floor later and climbed the stairs. I was hollowed out. I lay down and pretended sleep would hide the ache.
The next morning I went to work.
“I told you to stop using those cheap ones,” a voice snapped from behind the dressing room curtain.
I recognized the voice: Vittoria Bolton. She was a micro-celebrity with good PR and bad habits. Her voice carried like smoke through the room and people gathered to watch.
“You’re mean in real life,” someone muttered.
I pushed the curtain aside. Vittoria stood over a young assistant, her face perfect but her mood not. She waved a hand at me.
“Oh look,” she smiled with all the charm of a staged storm. “Joyce Adams. The makeup girl from my nightmare. Want to try your tricks on me?”
I stepped forward and touched her cheek. She slapped my hand away.
“You don’t hit me,” she said.
“I don’t hit small girls,” I said. My hand moved like a trained thing. I slapped her. Then I poured a bottle of remover over her face.
Her mascara ran. Her false smile fell apart. She screamed and scrambled. Staff panicked. My anger was sharp and clear. I had been walking on broken glass long enough.
“Get out,” she shouted, screeching like a bird of prey. “Get out of my face, you filthy—”
A smooth voice cut in from the doorway. “What’s going on?”
Matias stood framed in the doorway. He looked over me as if measuring whether I had broken. He did not move to help the girl he had just used.
“She started it,” Vittoria said quickly, her voice back to honey. “This woman attacked me.”
Matias sneered. “You tell lies well. You always have excuses.”
He called me “liar,” “schemer,” “white lotus.” An hour later I walked out without my badge. He reached into the pile of fallen items and picked up my ID. He tucked it into his pocket like a trophy.
“Leave the job and I’ll let you stay in my life,” he said.
My chest tightened. “I can’t.”
He laughed. “Then go. I don’t want you in my house, at my events, at my name.”
I left. I took a taxi that wouldn’t stop. Rain joined my slow walk. I tried to hail one, and an old woman shoved me aside and got in. Luck had abandoned me.
I cried under the umbrella of a stranger, until a familiar voice said, “Are you all right?”
He stood there like a steady thing: Canaan West. I had known him in school. He looked older, sharp and calm.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“You’re not,” he said. “Come. My office is warm.”
He gave me his spare shirt when I shivered. He asked me why I was crying while he made coffee. I told him everything, the nights, the humiliation, the choke, the public lies. He listened.
“Work for me,” Canaan said softly. “I need a makeup artist for my roster. You start tomorrow.”
I stared at him. Was it that easy? No. I knew money left stains. But I accepted.
Later, a video appeared online. Vittoria had posted a clip: me slapping her, the messy makeup, a cut caption that said “Monster attacks innocent star.” The internet had a good night’s snack.
A boy on the street dumped milk tea on me the next day and shoved me down. People pointed phones. “She’s violent!” they shouted.
I did what I always do. I picked up my things, wiped my face and recorded the moment. I turned my phone on him.
“This is assault,” I said. “You have no proof I started anything.”
He pulled a post from his pocket. Vittoria had posted. Her followers raged. I knew then it was a planned thing. She wanted me crushed. He called himself her fan and pushed harder. I sprayed pepper spray in his face and ran.
Canaan’s company was a city away. When I ran into him later, he wrapped his coat around me, held me steady. He was not pretending to care. He was careful.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I will be,” I said.
Canaan had power. He also had reasons. He watched the Duffy empire and said quietly, “Matias thinks he can take anything. I plan to take back what he took from me.”
I did not ask what he meant. I only knew when Vittoria’s post got traction, Canaan’s team pushed out the full security footage. Suddenly the net found the whole truth. Vittoria’s staged tears. The moment she left Matias’s house. The truth spread like wildfire in reverse. My phone filled with “I’m sorry” messages. People who had shouted at me now looked guilty.
Vittoria’s PR fell apart. Her followers dropped. Her projects were put on hold. She begged. I did not answer.
Matias’s face, in contrast, remained unreadable. The sting of exposure had not softened him. He still called me liar. He still accused. For him, the war had only just begun.
I signed the papers. He wanted divorce. I wanted anything that let me breathe.
“You can’t walk away with him,” he said hours before I signed. “You will not have the name, the money, the quiet. You are nothing alone.”
I signed anyway. I wrote my name. I left the keys on the table and walked out.
“He’s a monster,” Canaan said later, when I told him how small I felt. “He will not stop here.”
“You want something in return?” I asked.
He smiled. It was not a kind smile. “I want you safe. And I want him to pay for what he did.”
The truth is, I did not know how to fight him. I only knew how to survive. Canaan had the money and the lawyers. He had men who would sit in boardrooms and rewrite narratives. He placed a video—my attack on Vittoria—side by side with Vittoria’s staged cries and the security footage from the villa.
At first, it was fine. I had a job with Hadley Allen. Hadley was blunt, loud, and kind in strange fits. She let me work as her traveling makeup artist, and the gigs paid in numbers that covered my grandmother’s hospital bills. I slept in a small apartment and cooked for my grandmother on Sundays. The new job kept me busy and quiet.
But the war is never quiet.
One night at a charity gala, I stood next to Canaan in a black dress. He said my name like it belonged to him. I hated that it felt like home.
Someone interrupted us. Men in suits whispered. Matias had agreed to show up that night. He was there to impress the elder Duffy and to show strength. He had never so openly wanted to show he won.
When the lights dimmed and a speech was called, a lawyer stepped up. He was Matias’s lawyer. He showed projection screens and figures. “This company will not be pushed,” he said, “by cheap tricks.”
I felt for the first time that the world was thin. Later, in the shadows, Matias found me. He pressed me to the wall in the back stairwell and said, “You always think you can swap men like coats. You think Canaan will keep you? He will use you and throw you.”
“You can say what you want,” I spat. “It won’t change a thing.”
He struck me then, not with his hand, but with words. He asked if the surgery on my neck was cosmetic. He accused me of faking injuries. I slapped him.
Matias did not like being slapped.
He called security, but the room was full. People saw us. A man in white—William Davies—intervened and took me away. William ran the clinic where my grandmother stayed. He walked me to the car as I shook.
Canaan found me by the fountain later, gave me his coat and put me in his arms. I felt like a child, and his arms were safe. He carried me home that night.
His plan took shape in slow merciless layers. He did not just restore my name. He built a case.
Canaan sat me down in his office and said, “I want you to speak in public. I want you to be brave in my way.”
“How?” I asked.
“Tell the truth. Show the evidence. But not just that. Show how he used his power to destroy other people. Make it clean. Make it sharp.”
I agreed. I did not want revenge for the taste of it. I wanted quiet. But I also wanted to stop him from ever raising a hand at anyone again.
We waited for a board meeting. Matias’s company had a shareholder gala. The same place where he liked to breed allies with wine and smiles. Canaan booked the room.
“We go live,” he said. “Matias loves a crowd. We’ll give him one.”
I practiced my lines in the mirror at night. I practiced how not to choke when I spoke his name. I practiced how to let my voice be small but sharp. My heart hammered like a drum. I was disciplined.
The day arrived.
I stood at the podium. I felt every eye in the room like hot nails. Matias stood off to the side, his face the same mask he wore for headlines. He would not smile. He would not show the tremble I wanted to see.
Canaan’s lawyer slid a flash drive into the conference computer. The screens lit.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Canaan said smoothly. “We thought it fitting to let the facts speak.”
The video began. It showed a night at Matias’s villa. It showed Vittoria leaving. It showed Matias’s hand on her waist. It showed him escorting her out. The footage was time stamped, raw and undeniable. Someone in the back muttered.
The second clip played. It was the post Vittoria wrote. It showed her rehearsing lines, practicing tears, staging the shove inside the dressing room.
“Vittoria Bolton manufactured the attack to trap Ms. Adams,” the lawyer said.
Gasps moved through the hall like wind. Matias’s jaw tightened.
“What you will see next,” Canaan continued, “is how Mr. Duffy used company resources to buy silence.”
A third clip filled the screens. It was an email chain, invoices, text messages. It showed transfers. It showed an internal message from a Duffy assistant: “Hold the footage. Delete the drives.” It showed phone records of payments to a blogger.
“Matias Duffy directed a smear campaign,” Canaan said. “He used his influence to blackmail, to buy press, to ruin a woman’s life.”
I felt faint. I felt the room spin in the slow way of storms before rain.
Matias stood as if struck. For the first time in a public place in years, his face lost control. His eyes flicked to the exits. He looked as if he had seen an animal cornered.
“No,” he said quietly. “This is false.”
Canaan smiled like a man offering mercy. “We have copies. We have witness statements. We have bank records. We have his assistant’s testimony.”
A man in the front row, a shareholder I recognized, stood. “My lawyers will have questions,” he said. “If this is true—if Mr. Duffy used company funds—this company can lose billions. I vote we call an emergency audit.”
Phones were out. People were posting live. The room filled with the small high, hot sound of breaking things.
Matias turned pale. He tried to speak, but the microphones swallowed him. He accused us of forgery. He demanded a private meeting. He left the stage with his face a mask of control, but everyone saw the shaking in his hands.
Then he came back.
He pointed at me. “You set this up,” he spat. “You were in on this with Canaan. You will see what I can do.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked, but it came out small.
He did the worst thing a man like him could do in public: he begged. He knelt on one knee in front of the shareholder podium like a supplicant. “Please,” he said. “I need time. I will fix this.”
Phones rose. A hundred small cameras circled him. His face crumpled in a way that made something in my chest cough.
“You’re a disgrace,” a woman hissed. “Get him out.”
Matias’s assistant rushed in. “Sir!” she cried, “sir, please—”
He was dragged. He crawled back to the table, grabbed his briefcase, and stumbled into the crowded hall. People surrounded him. Security escorted him out, and a man in a suit took a video of his bruised knuckles and sold it to the feed.
Within hours the stock fell. Partners called. Investors withdrew. The board fired the CFO who had been closest to Matias. He had lost the aura that let men buy favors.
Matias tried to call his wife. The wife had left him that morning. She had watched one clip, then another, and walked away. The press called, the phone lines lit.
I stayed for the aftermath. I answered questions. I watched Matias’s empire shrink in headlines. The man who had once used power like a toy watched his world crumble while women clapped in the corridor.
When he was brought—yes, brought—back into the room to face a camera, his expression had changed into something raw.
“You think you won,” he said. His voice had a rasp I had never heard. “You think I can be destroyed that easily?”
People threw names at him. “You paid bloggers.” “You forced evidence.” “You lied to your grandfather.”
Someone posted a video of him the next day. He was at home, pacing. A woman—his cousin? his sister?—walked out the door with a suitcase. His investors called for a crisis council. His bank froze accounts flagged for questionable transfers.
One of the most telling moments came on live TV when a former partner named Elroy Crane stood up at a press conference and said, “We can’t be associated with someone who uses intimidation. I sever ties effective immediately.”
Matias’s phone calls went unanswered. His board replaced him as interim CEO the next morning. The market reacted. The rumor mill churned. His name trended, not in the way he liked. The news anchors did not tape his sobs; they aired his text messages with a red bar saying “BREAKING: CLIENTS EXIT.”
And then he came to me.
“Forgive me,” he said on the doorstep where I now lived alone. His voice had the raw edges of someone who had lost a country.
I unlocked the door and let him in. He sat down like a man who had been taught that all problems can be fixed with an explanation.
“Why?” he asked after a long silence. “Why did you do this to me? I loved you. I wanted a family.”
“You loved your pride more,” I said.
He started to shout. “You’ll rot. I will make you rot.”
He tried to reach for me. I pushed his hand away. He fell to his knees and wept.
“That’s not enough,” I said. “You took so much. I want acknowledgement. I want this to stop.”
He looked at me as if seeing for the first time the person he had broken.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but the apology was thin as tissue.
He begged, then pleaded, then ranted. People that morning were calling his phone. The attorneys came. The cameras were waiting in the bushes. Someone he had trusted posted an overhead video of him on his knees, weeping on a doorstep.
His fall was not pretty. People recorded him. They uploaded. They shared. The comments were cruel and loud. But that was not enough for me. I did not care for cruelty. I wanted justice, clean and visible. I wanted everyone who had been abused by the Duffy name to know he could be hurt.
The next days were a chain reaction. The Duffy estate announced a review. Funding was pulled from a new project. Matias’s reputation was ruined. The woman he had used as a plaything—I had let her go, but the world had not.
Vittoria’s posts were deleted. She posted an apology and was later dropped by two brands. She cried on camera; viewers turned off the feed. Her manager got a message: no more projects.
Matias’s closest ally, a man named Francis Garza, resigned under pressure. The law firm that had been in his pocket closed accounts connected to suspicious transactions. A long list of small humiliations built into a tower. He lost influence, his board, his friends. His ex-wife took half his social sphere and moved away. His mother rewrote a will.
One afternoon, the world watched as Matias stood in front of a shareholder panel that would decide his fate. He was asked to explain himself. He could not. He collapsed, not theatrically, but in the terrible private way of someone who had nothing left to bargain with.
People filmed. People watched. People backed away.
I sat in the audience. My hands did not shake. I listened to questions and answers and a kind of shame that does not come from an honest heart. I saw him crumble. I felt a small gray satisfaction: he received his punishment in the open, witnessed by those who had followed him for years.
When he was finally escorted away, he looked at me one last time. His face had a pleading I did not want to meet.
“Stay away from my grandmother,” he murmured.
“She is safe,” I said. “She sleeps. She eats. I’m the one who works.”
He slumped into himself. He lost everything that was mine to lose and much more that belonged to him. People around whispered. Some clapped. Many recorded.
The aftermath did not erase the nights. But it did make space. Canaan did not want fanfare. He wanted a company that would not be afraid to reveal truth. He wanted a woman to be able to walk in daylight.
I went back to my small apartment. I cooked soup for my grandmother. I visited the clinic where William Davies worked and thanked him. He smiled in a careful way and said, “You did right.”
Hadley asked me back on set. “You’ve got a new look,” she said. “People like you. You have a second life.”
When I saw Vittoria later, in a small café reduced and raw, she looked at me with real hunger for pity. I sat down and said, “Apologize to the people you hurt. Not to me. To them.”
She cried. It was not pleasant to watch.
Canaan and I were not lovers in the tale you might want. We were allies. He would call and ask if I needed help. He would appear at rehearsals with a stern smile. He would hand me a cup of tea without fuss. Once, in his car, he reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. It felt like a promise of better weather.
One day, William Davies brought my grandmother a new medicine. “We’ll set her on the right track,” he said. He was a man of quiet competence.
And Matias? He lost the board, the partners, the face. He lost votes, friends, money, and the house he had shown off. He was dragged into litigation, publicly badgered and watched. He became a cautionary tale on news panels.
People asked if I felt triumph. I said, “Relief.”
The truth changed my life. I had lost a name and the thing that went with it. I had gained a life that was mine. I learned to use my voice.
Months later I stood in a hospital room with my grandmother and a small silver locket in my hand. It had belonged to my mother. I opened it and pressed it to my grandmother’s chest.
“You rested?” I asked.
She smiled and nodded, thin hands taking the locket. “You did good,” she whispered.
Outside the window the city moved. People sent messages. They asked how I was. I smiled.
“I’m making dinner,” I told the nurse. “And tomorrow I work.”
Later that night, I opened my phone and found a message from Canaan: “Dinner tonight?”
I looked at his name and then at the locket. I replied, “Yes. I’ll bring the soup.”
He sent back a two-word reply: “See you.”
I locked my phone and put it on the table. I sat beside my grandmother and held her hand. The house smelled like soup and salt and steam. The world had shifted. I had been broken and rebuilt.
I did not want revenge for its own sake. I wanted to stop the cycle. I wanted my grandmother to sleep without fear. I wanted to go out and work and not be measured by a man’s mood. The rest was a side effect: a man who had hurt me had lost more than status. He had to face himself. He had to be less.
At night, sometimes, I still dream of the villa door and of Vittoria’s staged tears. I wake and I breathe. I go downstairs and stir the pot for the hospital lunch and I know, in a quiet small way, that the life I live now is my own.
The End
— Thank you for reading —