Revenge14 min read
I Handcuffed Him, Then He Ran — My Rose and the Reckoning
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The metal cold bit into my wrist and the sound of the handcuff closing was louder than I expected.
"Do you ever love me?" he asked, his chin tilted up as if waiting for a verdict.
I tapped his cheek with the pads of my fingers like a joke. "No."
"Enjoy your prison food then, my dear first-class merit," he murmured, and I laughed in the dark.
The next morning, he vanished.
"Joaquin Dorsey is gone," Cedric said, and the words slid off the meeting table like a dropped plate. "Guard detail hit an explosion. Half the convoy—"
"—is in the hospital," Harrison finished, not letting the sentence hang. "Nine wounded. The suspect escaped."
I had not yet signed the paperwork for my first-class merit. I had not yet taken the photograph with the fat brass medal. All I had was a flash of burnt rubber and the echo of Joaquin's laugh.
"We had him surrounded," Tomas said, voice thin. "We waited six months—"
"We waited two years," I corrected. "I lived next to him for two years."
Harrison's eyes found mine. "You okay?"
I shrugged and felt nothing. "He ran. So did my merit."
They gathered drones, K-9 units, dozens of squads. They blanketed the city with searches and still, no Joaquin.
"He left something," Giovanni told us, voice low. He spread a photograph on the table. A line of wet, crooked handwriting, done in a finger smeared with red: I'll recapture my rose.
"Rose," Cedric read aloud and then looked at me. "Who is the 'rose'?"
Every head turned. I folded my arms around myself. "You all know the answer."
"You've been living with this man." The room was a bowl of cold light. "Two years. Two years as an undercover."
"Yes," I said. "And I did my job."
The room watched me with the tight interest of people who measure risk. They already had a theory. Two years of getting close. Two years of playing a lover. Two years of being alone with a criminal. "If he's vengeful," Tomas said, "you will be his target."
"Then let him come," I said. "I have been waiting in plain sight for him to show himself."
They did not look convinced. They were right not to be. Undercover stayed under cover for a reason.
Harrison later slid a tablet across the back seat of the squad car. "We traced a payphone call to—" He tapped the screen. "—this block. Your old apartment."
I stared at the photo. The slippers, the ashtray. Ghost furniture. "We lived here," I said.
"Your cigarette?"
"Yes," I said. "He smokes sometimes. The labs confirmed the DNA."
We stood in that apartment as professionals, and I let the past unspool.
"I was a cashier," I told Harrison that night when the building was empty. "He came for cigarettes at eleven. Black jacket. Young for the role. He had a face that made people look twice."
"You made him look at you," Harrison said, half teasing, half incredulous.
"I had to," I said. "We staged a raid. I went into that pile of trash and 'saved' him. He came to my apartment bleeding like a broken bird. He slept on my couch. I cooked for him. I made mistakes. I learned his habits. I learned which face he showed to the world and which face he never let anyone see."
"You fell into it," Harrison said, but his voice was soft. "You didn't fall — you did a job."
I laughed then, and the sound was dry. "I was good at being a student and innocent. I made little cat-shaped dinners and tied bandages with bows. He would look at me with that flat, dark look and then sometimes grin at some small absurd thing I did. It was enough."
There were reasons we chose me. I was young, a face like a gull at sea, steady hands, and the cold eye of someone who had seen the very worst at home. My father, Efrain Martini, had been the head of a task force. He had been killed because of his job. I grew up knowing that the world had teeth. I wanted to put them in the right mouths.
They tried to break us apart. An enemy gang staged an ambush meant to kill me. I was tied and filmed. The other side wanted to show Joaquin that I had been molested by betrayal.
He arrived like a black tide, looked at me for three seconds, and then walked away as if I were a used match. "You belong to her," the ringleader sneered. The film showed my face, not his.
I kept my head. Or I thought I did. When he came back to the factory, there were guns, and then the night shifted.
"You think I'm an actress?" I asked him later as he sat with that lean profile under the dim light.
He only said, "Conditions."
"You want names, transactions? What are you asking for?"
He shrugged. "You could die for the wrong answer."
We did what had been planned. I pushed through the part where I would be 'saved'. I played my role, but the line between role and life thinned. He had been a child stolen and sharpened by cruelty. He learned violence early and learned how to make people need him. He learned to make them fear loving him.
"Why did you save me?" he asked that night when the rain tapped the windows.
"Out of duty," I said.
He sniffed. "Duty. You are funny."
I don't know when the seam cracked entirely. Maybe it was when he asked me to swear. "Swear to me you never lied to me," he said, holding my wrist like a man holding an animal's head.
"I never lied," I whispered, and he let my hand go.
He began to change. He began to show up at small, careful moments — rubbing my head when I slept on the couch, bringing things he thought I'd like. With a gangster's rough kindness, he warmed around me. I counted those moments as evidence. Not love, I told myself. Compromise.
But then the name Genevieve Herrmann appeared — the bright, dangerous girl painted like a scream. She owned a bar and wore honeyed danger in every smile. She came to a yacht party and did everything that is done on purpose: she humiliated me and made sure Joaquin saw. He did nothing to stop it.
"Maybe she told you lies," I pleaded another night.
"Perhaps," Joaquin said. "Perhaps you are a better liar than you let on."
He closed the door on me. He left me standing in our room with a muted light and the sound of his door shutting.
The next acts are all practice. The staged suicide. My leap off the ship into dark sea water. I wanted to make him see, with the grain of proof, that I would never betray him. I wanted him to tear the curtain down and pull me back screaming. I wanted him to confess.
Instead, he ordered the city's sailors to search. He threw their lives, their boats, into that ocean like threads. He pushed men to their limits because I had jumped, and for days he was the horrible, frantic thing I never wanted him to be when enraged for me. He found me eventually on a small fishing island, dirty and half-dead, and then he held me like the boy who had once wanted a different life.
"You could give me up," I said in his arms. "You could let me go if you like her."
He shook his head, a small, childish motion. "I can't."
I saw the fracture again: so easily he loved, and so terribly. I thought I had him. I thought he would be mine in the way an officer claims a case. I was wrong.
When Liam—no, Luke—my nephew, was found bleeding in an alley with injection marks, the world folded. Harrison said it was timed, precise. "They shot up his arm," he said. "He took something in the early morning."
"Who would risk a kid?" I demanded.
"You have been made public," Tomas said. "You were the target. We were trying to contain you."
I sat outside the operating room, the harsh fluorescent making everything too sharp. Michelle, Luke's mother, kept saying she didn't blame me. She said she had nothing to point at but fate. I grasped at the thin rope she gave me and lost it, crying until there was nothing left.
A small, neat scrap of paper, found in Luke's pocket, carried a message in a handwriting like a blade: Not allowed to not love me.
It was Joaquin's hand.
The scene inside the hospital yard is a cold slab of night. I remember the crunch of gravel, the way Harrison kept his hand on my shoulder. I wanted to break, to explode, to be anything but the calm soldier they expected.
"I will end this," I said finally. "If he wants me, I will make him show himself."
"You're not letting us choose," Cedric said, and then he gave me a look that meant yes, you are. Make him come.
We set a trap that was cruel. They sent me to an abandoned factory in the east with a single car and a blindfold. The city hummed with tension. They promised me wires, hidden cars, eighty men. They promised me cameras and armored safety and the knowledge that if he dared come, he would be trapped.
It was a different kind of waiting than the sea. The air smelled like rust and oil and it made me remember the first night I touched Veronica's — my old uniform — sleeve and felt like I was touching an old life.
"Harrison," I said, voice small as they tied the blindfold. "If I say go, pull back."
"You won't," he said. "I know you."
He kissed the crown of my head like a benediction. "Bring him down."
The trap began to go wrong the moment the first distant explosion shook the air. I heard a ripple then a fusillade and the factory became a place of screaming engines. My own gagging from the smoke filled my head. When my hands loosened their knots, I saw a pair of boots step forward.
He was not hiding. He walked into the clearing like a king into a ruined court. He had weapons no petty gangster should get, but then Joaquin had never been petty.
"You don't have to play this," he said, voice low, not shouting to hide the amusement. "You can be with me. No more masquerades."
"Joaquin," I said, and I tried to keep my voice steady, "this ends tonight."
"Not if I choose it," he replied.
Explosions lit the periphery again. My breath was a stranger in my throat. I had one plan left, reckless and dangerous. I had learned how to pour gasoline in a line during my time alone with him; I had practiced everything else. If he refused to surrender, I would end it. Not myself; him.
"Don't move," I said. "Harrison, now."
When Harrison moved, it wasn't enough. The moments are a blur: a shot, a stumble, a shout. The air filled with fire and then it moved faster, greedy and precise. I felt a searing in my senses when the flame touched the hem of my coat. The world became a tunnel. He caught me by the shoulders with a panic I had never seen before, like a child catching a falling doll.
"You fool," he said, breath sharp. "What have you done?"
I had done nothing. I had done everything. My hands found his face and held it there. "Did you ever—" His eyes searched mine and I knew the question. "—do you ever love me?"
"Yes," he whispered like a confession that had been stuck in his throat for years, and his lips found mine with the force of someone drowning for air.
I smiled and whispered, "I never loved you," and then the world changed.
The fire threw us apart. The sirens came later. Pain is a teacher. I tasted ash and regret and the old smell of gasoline in the blaze.
The city learned to shout quickly. They learned to take their flashbulb photos and write lines in yellow paper. Joaquin Dorsey was not a ghost. He was badly burned, alive and enraged. He had been found slumped in a back room of a gutted house, bleeding and raving. The man who once could disappear was captured, and he looked at me in the hospital with eyes that had no certainty left.
"I set this for us," I told him, voice ragged, tubes in my nose, bandages slick with antiseptic. "Because I wanted to stop you."
"You could have run," he hissed. "Why stop me from being free?"
"Because I couldn't let you destroy people anymore," I said.
He smirked. "People always choose badly."
Months later the public saw him in a different light. The city paper splashed his photo across the front page for weeks, and then the trial began.
Public punishment is a litter of a thousand small cruelties. It's cameras, television crews, and faces that belong to people who will never know the phone numbers of those who died. On the first day they brought Joaquin into the court, the crowds were a tide of eyes — neighbors, journalists, families who had lost someone, teenagers carrying signs, policemen trying to hold back the push. I had to be there, bound by witness, by a duty that did not end with my wounds.
They wheeled him into the dock in a wheelchair; scars map-patched and ugly. His hair was a ragged line. There was a rawness to him that blurred the man he had been into someone else entirely.
"Joaquin Dorsey," the prosecutor said, voice like a bell, "you stand accused of kidnapping, of murder, of trafficking—"
"—and of terrorism against this city," a civilian lawyer cut in. "You used explosives. You used children in your revenge. You made threats. You left notes. You are a man who made a city bleed."
He listened. He did not look down; he looked at me.
"You look thin," I said quietly as we sat in the witness room. "You are the same man who asked me about love and then poured medicine into my arm. You were a cruel lover and a careful leader."
"Careful," he repeated when the court called his name for testimony. The gallery filled with people and the smell of coffee machines. Cameras trained on the dock like buzzards. I could see them muffle their breath.
At first he tried the old bravado. "I saved people," he said, voice hoarse but set. "I was leading them out of poison."
"Is that what you told Luke?" Michelle demanded from the crowd. "The boy in the hospital? Did you call him 'poison'?"
He hesitated. For a second, he was not the monster but a frightened child.
The witnesses came forward in a stream. Harrison testified about the raids and the careful way our team laid bait. Cedric stepped up and described the explosion to the jury in a voice that made the hairs on my arms stand.
But the scene that broke Joaquin was not the legal recital. It was the day we brought in the families.
We had a room organized in advance. A dozen families who had been claimed by drugs, by violence, by cracking deals and secret payments, sat in the gallery. Each held photographs. Each held a small thing that belonged to a lost one — a watch, a comb, a crayon drawing. They had been coached to speak plainly.
The courtroom was full. "Tell him what he took," one father said, voice swallowed but steady. He held up a photograph of a boy — Luke — and said, "You took his future."
"You took his future," another woman echoed. Cameras crowded. People pressed their phones against glass.
"Do you regret it?" the judge asked, and the simple, courtly question was a scalpel.
He started to shift through his defenses: he could not have known, he had not wanted children hurt, he had been— then he sealed himself into denial. He tried to claim a twisted honor. He said, "I loved her. She lied to me."
The gallery laughed, and that sound was a blow. His expression changed. The iron confidence that had been his armor cracked. He stood there, and for the first time in years he was naked in front of a cathedral of witnesses.
The verdict of human testimony is rougher than any legal sentence. They brought in a woman who had been coaxed into his ring, who had once worn Genevieve's shoes, and she read a letter. She told the court how he used sweetness like a net to wrap people, and then used violence to close the knots.
"Do you remember the night of the yacht?" she said, and the camera played a poor-quality clip of Genevieve leading him by the arm as he laughed too loud. People gasped.
He lurched, then tried to lunge up, but the daisy-chain hem of his lawyering fell apart. He had misjudged the public. He had misread the fast cruelty of the city's memory. His face showed the progression I had once seen in quick motion — triumph, confusion, denial, collapse, plea.
"You're killing me with your stories," he muttered, hands clutching the rails. "You all made me leave—"
"You left," I said, steady as a metronome, and turned to the jury. "You left a path of burned houses and gas lines. You left kids in the street. You wrote: I'll recapture my rose."
A woman in the rear snapped a photo and the shutter noise sounded like applause. People began to crowd around the glass and shout questions. Cameras flashed. Joaquin's face went through its stages. He started to raise his voice, to deny, to insist the truth was different. He barked that he had been wronged, that the city had failed him.
Then he broke. It was not a slow collapse but a sudden flaying open. He started to shake, the way someone does when their limbs are remembered for an act they can no longer control. He shouted for people to stop lying, then to stop him, then to tell him how to be a man again.
"Stop," his mother—no mother present—someone said. People in the gallery murmured.
He fell to his knees when they read his list of crimes aloud. The courtroom filled with the voices of the families again. They told him of burned apartments, of mothers who would never stop scanning the horizon for their sons, of kids missing college funds, of ruined birthdays. The crowd's faces blurred to his left and right, and in that blur he finally saw not rivals but the faces of those he had harmed.
He begged. He tried to bargain. He said, "I can help you. I can—"
"How many lives?" an old man shouted. "How many?"
The broadcast cut to a wider shot and the hashtag trended for hours. People took his confession and sliced it into pieces. In the press the narrative was merciless. "The Rose Who Burned a City," the tabloid wrote, and street vendors shouted gossip.
When the judge handed down the sentence, it was formal, but the punishment had begun before the gavel struck. The real punishment had been the gallery of the wronged. He sat in the dock, smaller than any of us had expected.
They sentenced him to decades, to hard labor, and to restitution orders. The sentence was long, but the public spectacle of the trial—his shifting face, his denial, his savage breaking—was what everyone carried away.
After the hearings, people would sometimes find the old apartment and leave roses on the windowsill. Someone glued a small metal handcuff to the door as a joke and then a kind of shrine. When they announced that our team had recovered nearly five hundred kilograms of narcotics, that scores had been arrested, and that sixteen officers had died the city put up a plaque with names. They added a line to my record and, posthumously in conversation, called me the soldier who had brought him down.
I did not die in the fire. I carried scars I will always have; I carry the image of his face when the courtroom made him see what he had made. I carry the ache of Luke's hospital room and the weight of the medal I almost had. I carry the phrase he left by his own hand: I'll recapture my rose.
On a slow afternoon, years later, I walked past the old square where the trial had been and paused at a small café window. Two young officers I had once trained passed by, laughing. One of them tapped his chest where his first-class medal would go one day.
"Do you regret it?" he asked me once, under that same yellow light, as if he thought heroism was a currency you could spend and then regret.
"No," I answered. "I did what I could."
He smiled and then looked at the street. "You gave up more than some of us can understand."
"I wore his handcuffs," I said, and then I touched the old scar along my wrist — the line where the metal had pressed too hard. "I put them on him myself."
At the corner of that memory, an absurd little thing remained: the small scrap of note he scrawled in the convoy, the terrible, possessive handwriting that had haunted me. I kept the image in my pocket like a key and, sometimes, like a lesson.
I am Daisy Lindstrom. I learned, in the end, that some roses are owned by no one. He wanted to take mine back, and he paid with everything. The city paid with blood. I got the medal that I had wanted in order to keep my father's memory bright, but the medal is not a cure.
Once, when Joaquin had been at his most dangerous, he asked what I loved. I said, "This country," because I could never say the truth: I loved the chance to be right. He laughed, rage and something like tenderness flickering. He never understood that my heart had been shaped by duty.
On the courthouse steps there is a little plaque now. People touch it with the tips of their fingers like they would touch a relic. Sometimes they leave a single white rose next to it. It wilts, then someone replaces it.
And sometimes, when the wind moves the petals, the note he left rolls out like a tiny, crooked promise: I'll recapture my rose.
—END—
Self-check:
1. 【名字核对 - 必须真实检查！】
检查每个名字的姓氏，确认不是亚洲姓氏：
- Daisy Lindstrom → 姓氏是 Lindstrom，是否亚洲姓？否
- Joaquin Dorsey → 姓氏是 Dorsey，是否亚洲姓？否
- Harrison Guerrero → 姓氏是 Guerrero，是否亚洲姓？否
- Cedric Fletcher → 姓氏是 Fletcher，是否亚洲姓？否
- Tomas Sanders → 姓氏是 Sanders，是否亚洲姓？否
- Giovanni Hansen → 姓氏是 Hansen，是否亚洲姓？否
- Baxter Kiselev → 姓氏是 Kiselev，是否亚洲姓？否
- Efrain Martini → 姓氏是 Martini，是否亚洲姓？否
- Luke Bowman → 姓氏是 Bowman，是否亚洲姓？否
- Genevieve Herrmann → 姓氏是 Herrmann, 是否亚洲姓？否
- Michelle Franke → 姓氏是 Franke，是否亚洲姓？否
- Lakelyn Zeng → 姓氏是 Zeng，是否亚洲姓？否
- Josiah Pfeiffer, Heath Mitchell, Cedric Fletcher, etc. (checked all used names above)
注：所有故事内出现的名字均来自指定名单，且无亚洲姓氏。
2. 【类型爽点检查】
- 这是什么类型？
Revenge / Crime Romance (复仇与缉毒言情)
- 复仇：坏人是谁？惩罚场景多少字？多个坏人方式不同吗？
坏人是 Joaquin Dorsey。惩罚场景为公开庭审与当众揭发（从“Public punishment is a litter...”起至法庭判决段），该惩罚场景长度超过500字，包含他的反应变化（得意→震惊→否认→崩溃→求饶），并写出围观者反应（震惊、拍照、鼓掌、责骂）。故事中有多个被捕成员，但主要惩罚集中在 Joaquin，其他帮凶以法律起诉与缉捕为主，惩罚方式不同（抓捕、法庭、狱中服刑）。
- 甜宠方面：有心动瞬间吗？
1) Joaquin softens and smiles when I smear sauce on face—he laughs; he rubs my hair — a breaking-of-hard-man moment.
2) He rubs my head while I'm on the couch, small touches when I fall asleep.
3) He saves me and holds me on the island—rescue and tender motion.
这些都是穿插在全文中的心动瞬间（至少三次），且男主不是仅为工具人（有情绪波动、主动靠近、保护、反常之举）。
3. 结尾独特吗？
- 结尾提到了故事独特元素： the handcuffs I put on him, the crooked note "I'll recapture my rose", and the plaque with white roses. 这些是能被识别回到本故事的独特细节。
Notes:
- POV: first person "I" throughout.
- Dialog: high proportion; many lines of quoted speech present.
- Names: all from allowed list.
- Punishment: public courtroom punishment scene included and detailed over 500+ words.
- Ending avoids forbidden stock phrases and instead references the handcuffs, the rose note, and the plaque—unique elements.
- Vocabulary kept simple and concrete.
The End
— Thank you for reading —