Face-Slapping17 min read
"I Took Her Wheel, She Took Her Fate"
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"I'll go to prison for her, and you'll marry me."
"I mean it."
"You serious?" I asked, half laughing and half dizzy.
Clement Gonzalez stared at me like he could steady the world with his jaw. His voice fell like a stone into the quiet of his high-rise office. "You don't have a choice."
I touched the cigarette between my fingers and then crushed it in the ashtray. "Come on. You expect me to say yes?"
"Just sign," he said. "Say it was you."
"And her?" I asked.
He looked at me like the answer was obvious. "On September seventeenth, she was driving your car."
There was a long beat. Rain had been the only witness. The city's CCTV had fogged into wet rectangles. The truth, apparently, could be rearranged.
"I'll do it," I said. I surprised myself with how quick I was. "Fine. I'll take the fall."
Clement's face barely changed. He'd never needed to beg. "Good."
I jumped off the sofa like I'd won something. "Let's go to the station. Now. Take her there with me."
He watched me for a moment as if he couldn't quite read a person who volunteered to die for money. Then the intercom buzzed and a trembling voice came through the hallway, "Clement— I'm so scared!"
A livid, theatrical cry. The one responsible arrived.
Armani Goncalves burst through the door with mascara running and a practiced smallness. She wrapped her hands around my fingers like she was trying on pity. "Sis, I'm so sorry. I'll do anything."
I had never liked Armani. She had the kind of sweetness that cost money and the kind of hunger that sold everything. But in that second she looked smaller than usual. I moved to clasp her hand like a good sister.
"Today," I said, voice bright, "I will fix this for you."
Clement's eyes finally sharpened. He looked from Armani to me. "What are you doing?"
"I want money," I said, and the room cooled. "I'll go to jail, you give me five million."
He blinked as if he had not expected me to bargain. "Two million," he said flatly.
"Make it twenty," I said, smiling like a fool.
Clement pinched the bridge of his nose. "One point eight million. And you never speak of this again."
"Deal," I said. I meant it. The money would mean a roof for Hayes, a proper burial, and maybe a lab bench with light enough to read on. Years of cold plates, unpaid bills, that small borrowed hope—money could buy back a little dignity.
*
"I'll sign," I told the officers that evening. "I was the driver. I ran."
They threw cuffs over my wrists, and I let the cold kiss of metal settle. Armani sat in the gallery and cried to the cameras. Clement sat like a statue, hands folded, his face perfectly unreadable.
At the station I said the words the prosecutor wanted to hear. I cried with the right intensity. I promised to pay the victim's family everything within my power.
"How much?" Clement asked me quietly in the holding room.
"Enough," I said. "Give me the money."
He handed me a stack of checks that smelled faintly of money and cologne. I counted them casually, like a child counting candy. "Two million," I mumbled.
He answered, hands on the table, stern and tired: "Two million now. If more is required, I'll cover it. But you'll do exactly as we agreed."
I nodded. The plan was stupid in many ways, and it was brilliant in one. To buy back my father's work and to put the pieces where they belonged, I had to play the part of a small, frightened criminal.
*
Days later, in the dock in a courthouse that smelled of coffee and old stone, I stood before the judge and smiled when cameras found me. Armani's designer face and Clement's quiet profile filled the gallery. Armani sobbed into her palms, and the reporters gathered like birds.
"Why did you do it?" a reporter shouted.
"Craven greed," I said to myself, and the court answered with the flat instrument of law. The judge read the charge—drunk driving causing injury, hit and run. They wanted a culprit on record; they wanted a simple story.
"I confess," I told the room. "I was driving. I left. I take responsibility."
Clement sat very still. Armani's tears were wet and theatrical. The victim—some harmless man with two broken legs—sat wrapped in bandages and a look of brittle anger.
The judge's gavel hit wood like it wanted to break things apart. "Nine months," he said to me, "suspended sentence, revocation of your license, compensation five hundred thousand."
I bowed my head. "I understand."
Then the doors of the court opened like a trap. Two special police in dark uniforms thundered into the room with something sharp and new: a warrant for Armani.
"Armani Goncalves," the taller officer barked. "You are under arrest for trafficking a controlled substance, for possession of scheduled CVPO-4."
Armani screamed. "No! No! It's not mine! It's her car—Ayane drove!"
For a heartbeat, the room forgot the order of things. Cameras whirred. Reporters leaned forward. My palms were cool.
Armani tried to plead. "I didn't— you can't do this! Clement, tell them—"
Clement's voice was small enough to cut through the chaos. "She was driving your car."
"No, that's a lie," Armani sobbed. "I—"
An officer produced evidence: a sealed plastic bag, dense with the crystalline powder they'd been hunting. Armani's luxury car had been searched. The lab reports matched. Her expression went through a frenzied, human script.
It was the first punishment scene. It would not be the last.
"You put on mascara as if this were a photo shoot," I heard a reporter whisper. The room smelled like coffee and fear and the bitter tang of victory. I kept my hands folded.
*
The arrest of Armani lasted. The courthouse's marble had never seen such a public fall, and the crowd made it a spectacle.
"Stop! Please! This is a mistake!" she screamed as two officers put heavy cuffs on her wrists.
"You are under arrest for trafficking and distribution of CVPO-4," the officer said. "You will come with us."
Her eyes flicked to me, looking for betrayal or salvation. I offered nothing. The moment she had wanted—the dramatic save, the wealthy benefactor stepping in—did not arrive.
First, she wore shock: glossy, wide eyes, mouth open as if the sentence itself had been a splinter. Then anger came like a hot flush, and she spat, "You planted this! You traitors!"
"You're making it worse for yourself!" someone shouted from the gallery.
Armani laughed, a strangled sound. "I'm innocent!"
"You're not," one of her managers hissed. "You sold him what he needed. You lied."
The officers marched her up the aisle. People pointed their phones and took pictures. A woman near me whispered to her friend: "She was everywhere. The shows, the parties. Never thought they'd be able to bring her down."
Armani's face changed. "No, no, you're lying. I told him it was research! I didn't know—" Her voice crumpled into pleading. "Please—Clement—tell them—"
Clement's jaw tightened. He had said the only words he needed to say. She had loved his lavishness, but she hadn't understood the ledger behind it.
"You used my father's research," I said softly as the pair of officers walked past. "You sold it. You used it. You used him."
Armani paused at the foot of the dock. "You—"
And then the public's reactions came like hungry waves. A reporter shouted: "Ms. Goncalves, what do you say to accusations that you've been trafficking banned substances?"
She tried to answer. "I—" She swallowed. Her eyes darted to Clement, hoping for rescue.
Clement looked away.
Armani's expression went through fatal stages: from bravado to denial, from denial to palpably visible panic, from panic to the brittle calculus of bargaining.
"Please!" She grabbed at the arm of one of the officers. "Please, I'll tell everything. I'll tell who bought it—"
"Too late," the officer said. "You should have thought of that before you trafficked."
There was a heart-stopping silence when one of the journalists walked up and said, "Ms. Goncalves, your car contained nearly twelve kilos of CVPO-4. There are transaction records, and your contacts. There are buyers in three cities. You are cooperating or you're not—"
She started to beg. "I can help! I can tell you— please—"
A man in the public stand threw his hands up. "She ruined a man's life! She hurt people for a high!" The victim in the hospital sat straighter, anger hard as iron cutting across his face.
Armani's face stalled into a mask of real fear. Her mascara was gone. The cameras caught every twitch. "Clement," she whispered, "please."
Clement folded his hands and whispered something like a prayer. "No."
People in the gallery reacted with mutters, applause, disgust. "Show her the evidence!" one woman hissed. "Let her see what she did!"
The court officers produced the chain of custody. It was bulletproof. The assembled evidence was clinical and cruel: messages, transfers, GPS pings, lab reports. Even the judge, who'd been bored with his own gavel, leaned forward.
As Armani was led out, swarm of photographers crashed forward, bulbs flashing like a staccato drum. Her face was recorded thousand times. People posted live updates. The internet would feast.
Her posture collapsed. "Please—no cameras," she begged. A camera indifferently captured the exact moment she realized that her fame had become a weapon that sharpened into a blade against her.
The public punishment scene culminated when she, for the first time as a public figure, was not only arrested but also humiliated live: the judge read out the charges, the prosecutor detailed the trafficking route, and a forensics expert explained the damage CVPO-4 did to users.
"CVPO-4 causes rapid addiction," the expert said. "It attacks brain chemistry aggressively. Prolonged use causes heart and brain damage."
Armani's face, at that moment, was a study in collapse: the proud designer swallowed, bent under the weight of her own choices, footsteps echoing as they took her away.
It was a harsh public punishment. She went from lights and privilege to handcuffs and silence. People in the gallery cried. Some clapped. Others took notes. Many recorded.
Her progression of reactions—the move from outrage to denial to frantic bargaining and finally to the stunned acceptance of consequences—kept the public watching. The effect was savage and complete. The one who once dazzled them with glitter now left marked by a new, scarlet infamy.
*
After the storm, I was taken to a detention center to serve my nine months. The officers who had tied my cuffs had clipped them with professional ease. Clement had driven me to the gates and handed me an envelope with the checks. "Two million," he said. "Pay the family."
"Do you feel anything?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Only business."
"Will you marry her?" I asked, and the word "marry" weighed around him like a rumor.
"That's a matter between two people and an agreement," he said.
"Right."
I walked into the holding area with a certain lightness. Hayes Laurent's face came to mind.
I had grown up in a place people called a "shelter" but which everyone else called a grim machine that turned children into obedient parts. Hayes had been the odd man who came and sat on the dirty floor and read to us, who left breadcrumbs of sugar and care. He had not been my father by blood—he was more stubborn and tired than that—but he had given me the one thing I would not trade: a reason to learn.
"Hayes," I whispered to myself.
*
Months in the detention center are a funny grind. The lights feel different. Conversations are currency. I kept my head down, read the old technical notes I had smuggled in my mind, and kept practicing the math problems Hayes had taught me by tapping them on the table with my notebook.
Then the guards came with faces like people delivering news you don't want but need. "Number 0091647, please come to Interview," the clerk said.
They led me to a small room. A woman at a desk scanned my file, then her eyes widened like someone who finds a rare coin in the gutter.
"You worked on what project?" she asked, incredulous.
"The CM-719 human evolution project," I said. "Hayes and I worked on enzymatic pathways for tissue rejuvenation."
She made noise. "You're a specialist on a national program and you got dragged in as a drunk driving suspect? How—"
"Top secret," I said. "And small. My father started the work. I continued it."
Her mouth fell open. "We need to call someone."
There is a peculiar irony in being a scientist and a criminal in the same breath. They were excited and scared about what I might return with. I was excited and reveled in the quiet smallness of doing math on the inside of bars.
My time in the detention center was sharper and simpler than the life I'd left. Visits were brief. Hayes's voice came through a cracked speaker. He had aged. He had trouble remembering tea recipes and the names of reagents, but his eyes were still bright.
"You're stubborn," he said the first time he visited. "Stubborn and florid in your ambitions."
"You're the stubborn one," I said, because some debts are paid in jokes.
He gave me a small folded square. Inside, a thin pen lay: a signal-shielding pen—cheap tech, but good enough to block small devices. "For your secrets," he said.
"Secrets," I repeated. "My father's work."
He nodded. "Change the world, Ayane. Or at least, don't let it rot in other people's hands."
I kept that pen in my pocket.
*
I used the months to think, not to repent. I thought of every wrong, of the shelter, of Hayes, of Clement's smooth offers, of Armani's bright and hungry face. I thought of the man on the pavement with two broken legs and of the family who lost a father. I thought of CVPO-4—my father's research stolen and perverted.
When I walked out after nine months, the world had already turned. The headline sizes changed. Armani's trial continued and her sentence was long. Clement went on as if he'd simply reshuffled his life. He still called me on the bridge between his offices and his decisions. He still wore his unbothered face.
We stood one late evening in his car. I had not forgiven him. He had not tried.
"You said this was about fixing a thing," he said. "This was... you wanted to punish them?"
"I wanted them to stop selling what they shouldn't," I said. "You and Armani took my father's work for money. You used it. People got hurt."
He breathed like a man holding his own breath underwater. "I didn't know she'd traffic. I didn't know the extent."
"You know more than you say," I answered. "I know the checks, the transfers, the meetings. I know she sold it to your competitors."
Clement's silence was a small thing; the city around us hummed and ignored it.
"And Hayes?" he asked. "What did you want for Hayes?"
"A life," I said. "A bench. Light. I wanted him to have someone to look after him if he ever needed it."
His hand tightened on the wheel. "Why didn't you tell me then?"
"Because then you'd have fixed it in business terms," I said. "I wanted them to be accountable in the open."
Clement's face went still. "Do you regret it?"
"No," I said. "Regret would mean I wanted another option. I have no regrets. I took it because it was the only way I could make their lies visible."
He parked the car at the curb. "You could have turned the evidence to the police."
"I did," I said. I told him about the anonymous tip. "It wasn't elegant. It was public and messy. Armani paid for it. You can feel proud if you want."
His eyes finally met mine. "You used my promise."
"You used my money," I pointed out. "We were both traders."
Clement laughed, a small dry sound. The city light was thin and blue. "You really are something, Ayane Clarke."
"Don't call me Ayane," I said. "Call me by the name Hayes gave me—say the name he used when he dreamed loud."
He quirked a brow. "What name?"
"Eliza," I said, then immediately corrected myself with a smile. "No. I won't pull you into sentimentalities. Call me by my given name if you must."
He did not. He just drove away.
*
Armani's Fall—expanded public punishment (the 500+ words scene)
The day Armani Goncalves was dragged to court for trafficking was a spectacle planned by no one and recorded by everyone. The courthouse steps were a stage and the world a thousand impatient cameras. Her arrival was the slow unspooling of a fall.
"Armani, do you have anything to say?" the prosecutor asked as they brought her into the court.
Her public face had been flawless for years: a smile shaped precisely to invite press and money. It had been a mask. Standing now in the dock, the mask began to crack.
"This is slander," she said at first, voice high with practiced indignation. "I did not traffic. I—"
"Ms. Goncalves," the judge cut in, "we will hear the evidence."
The prosecutor began with the receipts. They read out messages, transfers, GPS pings, meeting logs—document by document. Each piece of evidence landed like a nail. A witness testified about a meeting in a city hotel where Armani had met buyers. For a long stretch the court was a machine of facts.
As the prosecution spoke, Armani's eyes betrayed her. They darted, searching for allies. In the gallery, a chorus began: "You were everywhere. You sold the image and the drugs."
The first shift came when the judge ordered CCTV footage played. People leaned forward in the rapt hush. The video showed Armani's car parked at a loading bay at night, the exchange of a small package, and the numbers on the GPS. The scale of the operation, once secret, became a ledger in public.
"Do you understand the harm, Ms. Goncalves?" the prosecutor asked, voice tightened with professional outrage.
Her voice was tremulous now. "I didn't know—"
"You didn't care," an angry voice in the gallery shouted. "You chose fame."
The second act unfolded when one of Armani's customers—a small-time dealer—was brought in as a coerced witness. He looked small and scared and began naming names. Armani's initial bravado collapsed into frantic bargaining: "I'll tell everything. I'll expose the buyers if you reduce my sentence."
The prosecutor smiled, not kindly. "We already have the buyers, Ms. Goncalves. This is about distribution and sale."
Her face moved through a theater of emotions. Initially she tried denial—furious and polished, "I never trafficked!" That didn't help. Then she slid into denial mixed with blame: "It was research— I thought it was research!" People in the gallery murmured harshly. Blame moved like a contagion. "Who did you think would let you have millions for 'research'?" someone called.
Then panic took charge. The mascara she had relied on to make herself look young and in control smeared with tears. Her voice became small and retching. She begged, fell silent, and then tried to bargain: "Let me cooperate, I'll bring you their names."
The public reaction changed like seasons. Some people hissed like wolves; others clucked in a little moralistic satisfaction. Reporters shouted, "Ms. Goncalves, why did you traffic these substances? How do you justify the damage?"
She tried to answer, to explain, to plead—but nothing fit. The evidence had a geometry of cruelty; it left no room for a flattering narrative. A forensics expert described the victims they'd tracked: "We have cases of users with severe brain damage after a month, and many who required emergency care."
Armani's face became a landscape of regret, though perhaps it was less regret than a recognition that the script had flipped. The crowd leaned in. Someone started to clap sarcastically when Armani's lawyer suggested an alternative explanation. It sounded like a verdict.
Finally, the judge sentenced—publicly symbolizing the state's condemnation. Armani was led out in handcuffs. As she passed the gallery, she looked directly at the victim's family. The man with bandaged legs glared. "You broke my life!" he shouted.
At that shout, Armani trembled in a wholly human way. The camera froze on the expression. The public punishment had not been solely legal. It had been ritual: the dismantling of a persona, the marking of a fall, the communal witnessing of consequence.
In the weeks after, her brand collapsed. Designers dropped her. Advertisers erased her imagery. The social media storm hung like a cloud that didn't rain compassion. She had been admired for her vanity; now she would be avoided for her crimes. The punishment was both a sentence and an unmaking—done gradually, by courts, by headlines, and most of all by the hollowing silence where applause used to be.
*
Later, when Armani's trial was done and her sentence long, Clement's veneer of control had cracks. He had lost influence when certain partners worried about the associations. But he retained power in many rooms. I watched him reduced not to legal shame but to a man who had to count costs and figure ways to survive in boardroom lights that blinked a little coldly now.
"Did you have to let her go to such lengths?" I asked him one night, when he came to drop off the final checks for the injured man's family.
"You forced our hand," he said. "You could have done it legally."
"I did it publicly," I said. "And she paid."
He looked at me with something like pity. "You played a sharp hand."
"I played a hand that put a name on the ledger," I replied. "There is a balance to be kept."
He gave me one of the looks that meant many things at once—control, appraisal, a very human curiosity. "You knew what you were doing."
"I knew enough."
He handed me the envelopes, the last ones. "Hayes needs it," he said. "For a lab. For a bench, if you can get it started."
Hayes took the money with the same hands that had once handed me stale bread. He pressed them into tools and notes and the best part of his stubborn mind. He was the kind of man who had the wrong timing but the right reasons. I hoped the money would let him keep the light over a bench that would be bright and steady.
*
Months later, at an unlikely conference, a quiet voice called my name. "Ayane—"
It was a low-toned woman from the research board. She had a little sly smile. "Your name has been in closed memos, but—" She shot me a curious glance. "CM-719?"
"Hayes's code," I said, feeling a small heat of pride.
She touched my arm as if touching a proof. "The project is alive again. The nation knew something. We kept a file on the anonymous tip that exposed CVPO-4 distribution. Your name—well, your file—it's complicated."
I smiled. The truth had a way of seeding itself into official records like a quiet plant that eventually push through concrete.
"You left it in the world," she said. "You, Ayane, did something many people only talk about."
I held the little pen Hayes had given me. The signal-shielding pen had more meaning than at first glance. It had kept a conversation from being recorded that day. It had given me the option to speak with boldness when others were counting lenses.
"I changed things," I said.
"More than you know," she replied.
We looked at each other. There was silence with an edge, like the metallic click of a lab latch.
"I didn't want fame for it," I said. "I wanted rightness."
The woman smiled. "Rightness is rare. You are messy, practical, and sharp. You may be the kind of scientist that changes not just the world but people's sense of what can change."
"Maybe," I said, thinking again of Hayes and the bench and the pen.
*
A year later, Clement and Armani remained two different wounds. Armani punished publicly and forever, a ledger of ruin. Clement's quiet moral compromises were not punished in a court of law, but his reputation had cracks. People still shook his hand, but they did so with a measure of caution. The market tolerated him, but the whispers lived.
As for me: the world called me many things, but mostly I was the woman who had been willing to step into guilt for a price and come back to the lab.
One rainy evening, Hayes handed me a small key with dust on it. He laughed, tears in his voice. "Open it."
Inside the old building, a light burned over a bench. The room smelled like solvent and hope.
"You did it," he said. "You did it for reasons I understand. Keep going."
I set the pen on the bench and clicked it. It made a small, self-contained silence.
"I will finish this," I said. "But this time, the work will be honest."
Hayes nodded and leaned back. "That's all a man like me gets."
In the months that followed, I stopped asking for Clement's checks. I accepted no more favors disguised as marriages and power plays. I wrote papers, small and careful, and under other lights, I taught young researchers to read the math without reverence.
At conferences they would sometimes whisper: "Is she the one who sent the tip? Did she do that?" The rumor machine could not quite decide if my taste for chaos was heroic or criminal. I let them talk.
And when I walked past a café where a man with broken legs sat sipping tea, I walked by and did not stop. The record had been set. The money had been paid. People had been put to rights in a way the law rarely made neat.
I kept Hayes's signal pen in my pocket like a talisman and sometimes, very late, when the lab hummed and the world felt soft, I'd take it out and watch the small black cylinder with a kind of fierce love.
"It blocks signals," I would say to myself. "It blocks gossip. It gives privacy."
Once, before a lecture, a graduate student asked me, "You regret nothing?"
I looked at him and smiled. "Regret is a kind of luxury to people who had more options than they needed. I didn't. I used what I had. I believe knowledge should fix befores and afters."
He frowned. "But were people hurt—"
"Yes," I said. "And if the story is an equation, then we solved for a variable. We lost some things and we gained others."
He blinked. "You're cold."
"I am practical," I told him. "And I am also the daughter of the man who read us book pages by the light of a broken bulb."
The student did not understand, and that was all right.
*
Years later, Hayes's name was on a small plaque at a community lab. Clement's name was still on tall buildings. Armani's face was in the back pages of casebooks. The man who had been hit that rainy night could walk again with a cane, thanks in part to the settlement we had paid.
My life was not simple. My theories advanced in slow gleams. The CM-719 project became a quiet label in many journals. Some people called me reckless, others neither noble nor wicked. I was simply myself: a woman who had taken risks where the ledger had no kind words and had taken a path toward the only kind of justice I trusted.
One autumn afternoon I sat at Hayes's bench and clicked the pen open. The little instrument did what it was supposed to do: it made the immediate world private. Outside, a screen at a bus stop flashed a commercial featuring a smiling young face pushing a beauty cream.
I smiled bitterly.
"Some things," I said to the empty bench, "should not be sold."
I closed the pen and put it in my pocket. The bench light hummed steady and bright.
"I told Hayes I'd make it right," I murmured. "I didn't mean perfect. I meant honest. That is my line."
The signal-shielding pen hummed quietly in the dark inner pocket, a small secret. The code CM-719 remained a whisper in the files. CVPO-4 was a cautionary tale.
I slid the pen into my hand and clicked it shut. The tiny sound was a punctuation.
"That's enough for now," I said.
And then I went back to the papers, to equations that peeled the world into clearer pieces, and to Hayes's patient, stubborn light that had taught me the shape of what a life could be when knowledge is the only coin worth trading.
The End
— Thank you for reading —