Face-Slapping15 min read
I Was Born the Villain — and I Made Them Watch
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"I told you not to cry."
"Who said I was crying?" I answered, voice small when I was sixteen and hungry.
"You'll get warm food now," Mrs. Janelle Williamson said, wiping my hair back.
"Thank you," I said, and I meant it more than any word I had for anyone.
"They found you," she whispered. "They'll come for you."
They did come. They came in polished shoes and careful faces. They called me "daugh—" then stopped. They looked at me, then at the chart the doctor handed them.
"Isabella?" the man asked. He was kind but careful like a man who reads contracts for warmth.
"Yes," I answered.
They brought me home. The house was a glass thing of light. It smelled of perfume and wood polish. Their daughter—Julissa—walked forward with a bright dress and a brighter smile.
"That's our Julissa," their mother told the man as if the name was a promise. "She's always been the one."
I looked down at my bandaged arms. I had one present: a pen from Mrs. Janelle, and a bag whose straps bit into my shoulder. The bag held the only thing that had ever felt like mine: a small steel fountain pen with a thin crack on its cap. Mrs. Janelle pressed it into my palm like it was an offering.
"Study," she said. "You'll do fine."
"Fine," I lied.
That night, as the house sighed and the servants moved like a quiet tide, I listened to the family laugh in the next room. I was careful. I learned fast that night how to sew a smile into my face. I learned even faster that being small made people underestimate me.
Months later I learned why they had come: my blood matched the Ford line. They called me "Isabella Dunlap" and planned to change the papers. They called me "returned" and "luck." I watched Julissa brush her hair and laugh the way a favored child laughs, and I kept my smile like a blade folded in silk.
"You will be called a daughter again," Landry Morgan whispered once at dawn, eyes wet. "We found you."
"Then you should have brought me sooner," I said.
She blinked. "We searched—"
"For what? To fix your shame? To make a picture-perfect family again?" My voice went small then sharp. "You left me for years. You let them hurt me. You let me think I was nothing."
Silence answered. That was the first of many days I would stand in rooms like this and let silence have its say.
1. The System and the Memory
"System 1207 reporting," said the small voice in my head the night I stood by the crematorium, watching the ashes go to a grey river. "Your origin world body remains in a coma. Complete the original's obsession, return home."
"What is her obsession?" I asked the mechanical voice and felt no fear when it told me.
"She wanted to be loved by her parents. She wanted them to feel guilty. She wanted to live happily. She failed and died twenty-six."
I held the smoke between what used to be my fingers and the cold cut of understanding fell into me like rain.
"You want her pain fixed," 1207 said.
"I want more than that," I said.
I remembered pieces: three lives before this shell, three endings where I—where she—lost every thing that mattered. I remembered bandaged ribs, needles, the taste of salt in tears. I remembered being the label the story fed them: villain. I inherited her mind like a map of every bruise.
"Then do it," I told the ashes, and the streetlight blinked like a judge.
2. The Return and the Test
They came to the school in suits. My homeroom door opened and Mrs. Janelle Williamson took my hand and led me through the corridor.
"Isabella?" she said, and her voice trembled, like a woman who had been a safe place.
I entered the tiny office. The pair waited there—Ramon Ford, steady-faced, and Landry Morgan, palms together as if in prayer.
"Isabella," Landry said, voice thick. "We're your parents."
"Mom?" I repeated and let the tears fall because that is what the original did in this scene—almost. I let it be real enough for them and brittle enough for me.
They hugged me. The scent of perfume and the sound of being wanted wrapped me, but I kept one hand lightly on my pen. I learned to laugh then to fit in like a borrowed dress.
"Will you change your name back?" Ramon asked.
"I want to be called Isabella Dunlap," I said.
They decided to call me "Isabella" and "Nian" in private. I smiled, and the smile sat on me like a shadow.
3. The First Sweetness and the Seed of Plan
Julissa Fontaine was light. She wore white dresses and smelled of flowers. She poured me tea and said, "Sister, you must be tired."
"Call me Isabella." I said. "Call me Nian if you must."
"Okay, Nian," she chimed, delighted. She was the kind of person who had been practiced in being adored. It was effortless for her.
At first I played the part: two girls who shared the same cake, the same birthday song, the same room for the world to applaud. I learned to sit by Julissa's side and let her take center stage. I learned to make my face small when others shone bright. I learned how to be "the good daughter."
But memory remembers. I could not let it go.
"Why do you smile so much at her?" one night Alexander Otto—my brother—asked. He had been sick; his body had grown thin like a winter tree. "Why do you let her..."
"Because she is them," I said, and watched him through the light.
He looked at me like a man who had held a promise too tightly and felt it slipping. "Don't let them use you."
"I won't."
4. The Garden, the Cat, and a Smile He Could Not Hide
I started feeding a street cat. A fat orange thing came and sat on the path like a small sun. He purred and refused to run.
One afternoon, on my way to the little garden I had claimed, a boy on a skateboard slowed. He had a sharp, clear look—Bryce Fontaine. He sneered at first. Then the cat walked to him and mewed. He crouched and looked at me.
"You're always here," he said.
"You're always moving," I answered. "Looks like we balance each other."
"Maybe." He smiled once, small, and it reached his eyes in a way that made all the other smiles look lazy. That was the first of quiet moments, a hand hovering where it might rest. I kept my distance but treasured the space.
"Don't let your cat steal my heart," Bryce teased.
"I steal it from time to time," I said, and turned away before the air grew too hot.
5. The Quiet Power
I studied the company's public documents at nights. Ramon had a world that shone, but ripples run deep. I learned finance like a child learns to read: hungrily and without mercy.
Alexander began to ask me questions about the firm. "How would you fix the cash flow?" he would ask. He listened like a man hearing music he had forgotten he loved.
"By tracing every paper, every promise," I would say, and he would nod. I let him believe I was still the harmless child.
6. The First Throw
A small argument at home, and I dislike small deceptions. Julissa teased me about scars.
"You look strange," she said one night.
"These are what kept me alive," I answered. "Do you like them?"
She laughed and tripped on the laugh. "You're ugly," she said.
It took half a second. I slapped her.
The slap echoed more in my head than the room. She stumbled; her face bloomed red with surprise and pain. Her eyes went huge, like a deer caught in light.
"Why did you hit me?" she cried.
"Because you said I was ugly," I said, and my voice was flat like a blade. "You speak of ugliness while you wear a crown."
Her mother came running. "Isabella? What did you do?"
"It was self-defense," I lied to the gentlest mother I had ever met. I pretended to sob.
"Don't hit my Julissa!" Landry cried.
Her hands trembled over Julissa's shoulder. The family rallied to Julissa like a small army. She was fed, consoled, hugged. I watched the favor wrap around her like gold and felt something hot and bitter in my chest.
This is where I began to change the tide: I would not let mercy rule me.
7. The Operative Moves
I made quiet moves. I fed a fat cat and it led to outings where Bryce and I would pass each other. I told the wrong things to the wrong people with a grin, and I told the right things to the right ears with a sharper smile.
"Isabella," Alexander said once in the hospital, "don't be cruel."
"I am not cruel," I answered. "I am careful."
He nodded and lied to himself and me, because he wanted to believe the world could be kinder.
When Alexander's condition worsened—he needed marrow—Ramon and Landry looked for donors. The family danced through the theater of panic and duty.
"Isabella, will you?" Landry asked in a low voice.
"I will do whatever it takes," I answered, and my chest burned.
I watched them bristle at the thought that perhaps neither Julissa nor Alexander was the only blood that mattered. The secret of a lost girl had been found, but that only warmed their faces; it did not always warm their hearts.
8. The Quiet Poison
I'm not proud of every move. I told a lie to a girl named Summer—they called her Summer in school—about a contract and used her to brush Bryce toward me. She left the country angry. I told Alexander I was sorry for the ways I'd hurt him, and I meant it in my own way.
I paid someone to slip a sleeping medicine into Landry's tea now and then. She would wake up less angry and ask fewer questions. It is a truth that long games need small violences. I do not excuse them; I record them for the shape they make.
9. The Hospital Night
The night before Alexander's operation, Julissa's hunger of attention turned into fire. I fed an actor's part: I sat beside Alexander's bed and let a camera see me cry like a daughter. He slept. I cleaned his face, and my fingers trembled.
"I want you to live," I told him. "Live for yourself."
"Why do you say that?" he whispered.
"Because I will always..." I stopped; the word "love" tasted wrong then. "Because I will always want you safe."
He smiled slightly and fell asleep. That smile would be a thing I collected and kept. It also anchored me.
10. The Plan Unfolds
The operation worked. The donor matched—because I had matched them. Alexander recovered and with him came a brief period of gratitude. The clinic cheered, and Landry cried and told anyone who would listen that I had saved their son.
I saved him because I wanted him alive to see the world fall on the ones who had built the hurt. I wanted them to learn inside their bones what it felt to be small and unwanted.
11. The First Big Cut
I found a ledger, small and thin, hidden in a safe no one thought me smart enough to open. It showed tricks—tax dodges, shell companies, a trail of hiding that made the family's fortune mostly illusion. It had names—numbers that tallied to a ruinous one hundred eighty million.
I took the ledger to Leonardo Goto.
"Leonardo," I said, and I closed the door behind us. He looked up from his papers with a face that belonged on covers.
"You want something?" he asked.
"I want the ledger used," I said. "I want the shame to be public."
He read it and did not look surprised. "You're careful," he said. "You're cold."
"Cold can be warm if it burns the right thing." I smiled.
He smiled back, but it did not reach his eyes. "I'll help." Then he placed a hand over mine. "Why are you doing this?"
"Because she had three lives of pain," I said. "Because a story made me a villain and they lived off that lie. Because I want their names to rot in people's mouths. Because I want them to see every year they took from me as a debt they cannot repay."
He pressed his thumb over mine once. "Then we will make it public."
12. The Night of the Wedding—The First Public Explosion
The venue glowed. Guests in jewels tasted champagne. Julissa moved like a small moon. The night they promised her to Bryce—no, not Bryce; he belonged to himself, a coal of light with his own hunger—they stood under lights and cameras.
I had a cake beside me and a smile, as always. I watched Landry sit in her chair and say soft things into other people's ears. The band played a slow song. People filmed the romance like an offering.
On the big screen, instead of the family's "love reel," the footage we had prepared began to flash: hidden hospital shots, private whispers, the things a family keeps for itself. The sound on the speakers filled the hall and then the room collapsed.
"What's this?" someone shouted.
"Turn it off!" others cried.
The screen showed Julissa beside Alexander in the hospital, the recorded evidence of the night I had manipulated with a sleeping drug to make him speak. The quiet, desperate sound of longing was captured like a stolen note. The crowd froze.
Julissa's smile melted. Her face bleached. She collapsed.
Bryce's hand tightened. He watched the screen and realized his bride had a darkness he hadn't seen.
People gasped. Phones rose. Cameras zoomed. The scene became a storm: whispers, shouts, and the hot buzz of gossip live.
"Isabella!" Landry screamed.
"Why?" Ramon bellowed. "Why would you do this?"
I stood. "Because they need to learn how it hurts," I said.
At that moment, the first public crack appeared: the outside world wept and watched. The video went viral in minutes. The family that had sold me a fairytale was now a headline.
13. The Punishment — Public, Detailed, Irreversible (500+ words)
The punishment had to be more than headlines. It had to be a spectacle—the kind that stung in a language of faces. I wanted them not merely to lose, but to be unmasked, judged, watched, and shown what their choices had cost.
"Tonight's press conference is canceled," someone in the crowd said when the video screamed through the net. "No. Make them speak."
The city council steps were full the next week. I arranged it so. Leonardo arranged cameras and lawyers. We did not file news for the press for a day; we invited them on purpose to a public clearing. The night was bright with lights and flashes. Landry and Ramon were escorted in a car with tremulous hands. They had no script. They had only reputation and the instinct to fix things.
I stood at the edge of the steps. Alexander sat somewhere nearby, pale but steady in a jacket that was not stitched for pain. He had asked me not to humiliate them physically, and I had promised that my retribution would be public, legal, and personal in the way all clean wounds are.
The mayor came forward with a solemn face.
"The accounts will be laid out," he said. "We will present the findings." He gestured. Lawyers opened the ledgers, and a projector decided to be our witness.
"Here," my lawyer said, voice crisp and clean, "are the invoices, the shell companies, the vanishing sums. It is tax evasion by design. It is pride turned into theft."
Ramon's face changed color. "This is untrue!" he cried. "We—this must be a mistake."
"Is it a mistake?" a reporter shouted. "The auditor here has traced one hundred eighty million in unrecorded transfers. Where did the money go?"
Faces around the square leaned forward. Phones rose like a second sun. A crowd gathered—neighbors, reporters, old clients, investors. The internet streamed them live. Comments rolled in like a proxy storm. People who had attended the wedding days ago now watched the couple who had smiled under lights become a criminal object.
"Do you have anything to say?" the mayor asked.
"We made mistakes," Landry stammered. "We—we were careless."
"That is not answer," someone from the crowd shouted. "You hid money and then pretended to be good parents."
"Untrue!" Ramon tried to stand, but his voice broke.
At that point, we released the documents that proved contracts had been falsified to shield assets and send funds to foreign accounts. The registrar read, "False reporting, tax evasion, shell-company transfers—evidence for criminal prosecution." The pockets of whispers in the crowd grew loud.
Then, the worst public moment for them: I read a letter, a letter I had made public only after ensuring its chain of custody. It was not mine; it was the account of the woman they adopted and then buried behind flowers. "You told me to be small," the reading began. "You told me to heal from your performances. You chose the stage and left the child in the wings."
Landry's hands folded into fists. "No—no," she choked.
"Aren't you ashamed?" a woman in the front row called. An older man nodded and spat, "You caused a child to die."
Ramon's face went blank. His clauses of power, the tiny acts that once made him a man to be respected, crumpled like paper. He tried to reason, to talk of how business mistakes could happen. But the crowd had already decided.
Someone in the crowd—one of the families who had lost savings—stepped forward. "My father's pension was tied to your company's bonds," she said. "We trusted you."
She held up a bank statement and placed it on the table. Cameras moved in. The crowd now had faces and names to point at. The reporters said nothing. The police had come as a formality. The tax office, which had been making quiet calls for months, had decided to move.
"I want charges," the auditor announced. "The case is closed on our side. We will press charges."
Ramon, who had always smiled easily in boardrooms, now had to answer to the press. His face twitched: anger, then disbelief, then collapse into a thin whisper. Landry collapsed into a chair and covered her face.
"What do you want from us?" she cried. "Isabella, please. We brought you home."
"You brought me an image," I answered. "Not a mother."
At that they launched into begging. "Please," Ramon said. "We… we didn't know—"
"You chose not to know," someone spat. A woman in the crowd took out her phone and posted their pleas live. The comments cascaded with scorn. Cameras recorded it. Strangers who had once sent invitations now sent pointed messages. Friends called lawyers.
Julissa stood at a distance with glassy eyes. Her face had been broken by the scandal. A group of fashion editors whispered into microphones. Investors began to call to withdraw funds. A hedge fund manager on a video telecast said, "This company is toxic."
By the time the police officers concluded they would file a report, Landry had been photographed crying, hands in the faces she had once touched. They had been placed on notice with immediate temporary restriction orders. The stock plummeted intraday. Within hours, message boards brimmed with the story of the "rich family who had to pay for their secrets."
They tried to bargain. They swayed like felled trees. They promised to cooperate. They promised to sell property. They offered apologies and statements like scrap paper.
The crowd shifted into something resembling judgment. People filmed, photographed, and shouted. "Shame!" someone cried, and others took up the call. There was a grotesque pleasure in watching people who had loved illusions become small.
Ramon's voice cracked, "Don't make a scandal of our family."
The camera moved closer. The live feed picked it up. A hundred thousand viewers saw his panic. The comments poured in: "You got what you deserved," "How can you sleep at night?" The public that had once clapped for their dinners now cheered—quietly and cruelly—for retribution.
Julissa tried to speak. "It's not—it's my fault," she said. "I am sorry."
And the crowning moment of their humiliation: a retired servant from their own house walked forward with a box of photographs. "She was always small," he said, and handed them to the cameras: pictures of a bruised girl, hair unwashed, eyes hollowed. The narrative slipped from their controlled hands to a crowd's angry palms.
The scene ended not with a courthouse sentence but with the first, most brutal draft of judgment. Social ruin arrived before the law finished its work. Their friends stopped answering phones. The club memberships paused. The donors who once promoted their name now distanced themselves with an icy grace.
I left the steps with Alexander beside me. He looked tired and a little like a man who had seen the future. "Was that—too much?" he whispered.
"No," I said. "It was enough to make them feel a scratch. They will swim in it for a long time."
13.5 The Aftershock
Their fall continued. Regulators moved, and as legal weight pressed, the house of cards collapsed. Landry was found to be implicated by signatures that matched. The board of directors removed Ramon from face duties. Investors pulled back. The family title of "most generous" turned into "most shamed" overnight.
Julissa lost sponsors and fans. The world that once applauded her now turned its cameras away. People gossiped about broken beauty and privileged cruelty. Her smile faltered and then broke.
Yet the law does not always move as quickly as people. I did not wish them to rot in cellars; I wished them to know the slow burn of being watched and judged for a life made of neglect. They received it.
14. The Break: Julissa's Fate
Julissa's fall was a shape of its own. With her face damaged in a different cruel move—one that history recorded separately—she vanished from the social scenes that once cheered for her. Her life became medical recovery and shadow. She tried reconciliation; the door closed.
The foster father who once sold and hurt me was found, exposed, shamed, then beaten in prison by men who thought cash was pain; I had arranged a few things myself. Public punishment had spilled beyond their house. The man had no one now who answered his name without nails in their teeth; he got a crash of retribution he had long deserved.
15. The Last Act — The Quiet Return
I had written the arc carefully. People asked how I could do it. "What did you want," Leonardo asked kindly once when we watched a small sun set over the water.
"Justice," I said. "Not mercy."
"But you were cruel," he said.
"Cruelty is a cost," I answered. "So is survival. You asked to help me, Leonardo. You did. Thank you."
We had one private night in which I told him of 1207—how a system told me to fix the original girl's obsession and send me home. He listened.
"Then what now?" he asked.
"Now I go home," I said.
He braced his hand over mine. "If you do, be careful. They will not let you go well."
"I know."
16. The End of One Story, the Start of Another
I took a boat one dawn, and leaned my head against the wood. I felt both small and monstrously complete. The waters gave and took. I had made a world where their faces changed like weather.
"You will be happier?" Leonardo asked once, in a voice more like a man who is afraid of silence than a man who does not try.
"I will be free," I said. "Free to be ordinary, to be hungry and to eat. To be me, not the villain on a page."
He nodded and pressed the papers with the legal seals into my palm: settlements, confessions, a chain of actions so long it led to their doors. "There will be consequences," he said.
"There always are," I whispered.
And when I stepped behind doors not my own and saw two small hands that once fed a cat and brushed my hair, I finally let myself rest. People would write about this, they'd cry about the cruelty and the price. Some would call me a monster; some would call me a savior.
But in the low light after everything, when the world had shorn off its masks, I learned to stand in the small things: a pen I had kept, a letter I had written to myself, the last smile Alexander ever gave me in the hospital. The world had been a stage and I had rewritten the act.
I never forgave them for what they did. Forgiveness was not my work. My work was to make sure the debt of their neglect would be paid in the currency they understood: watching, shame, loss. They had known how to make me small. I had learned how to make them small back—publicly and slowly, with law and evidence and the steadiness of a woman who would not be quiet.
17. Final Scene — A Unique Ending
I kept my pen. It was the last thing Mrs. Janelle had given me. I put it into a small box. The box had a card.
"To Isabella," it read. "For writing your own pages."
I smiled, and in a soft voice said to no one in particular, "I am Isabella Dunlap now, and this is my life."
I closed the box and walked out into the morning where a few street cats chased sunbeams. The sky was ordinary. The world had been wild and mean. I had survived.
The End
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