Face-Slapping10 min read
I Woke in a Coffin — The System, The Wedding Dress, and the Man Who Hated Me
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I open my eyes to cold wood above my face and the scent of incense. My whole body is cramped, as if the space itself is folding in on me. My breathing rasps. For a long moment I cannot remember why I am here.
"Who—" I whisper, but my voice is swallowed by the coffin's lid.
A voice answers in my head, smooth and impossibly patient. "Good morning, Keira Patterson. Welcome back."
"Who said that?" I want to say it's impossible, but the name Gatlin Bonnet fills my skull like a light. "Gatlin? System?"
"My designation is Gatlin Moreno-009. You can call me Gatlin," the voice says. "You are reborn."
"Reborn?" I laugh, ugly and raw. "I was a soldier. I died in an aircraft strike. I was—"
"Correct. You were a soldier in a foreign life. Now you are in a parallel world. Your current host is Keira Patterson, a fragile scion of a wealthy family who died on her wedding night. You have tasks to complete in order to keep living."
I press my palm to the wood and feel splinters at my fingertips. "A coffin. I woke up in a coffin."
"Do not panic. Your oxygen is limited. Gatlin will guide you. You have a gauge: thinly measured favor from Kingston Delgado is your life bar. Reach zero and you die again."
"Kingston Delgado?" The name tastes wrong. "What connection do I have with him?"
Gatlin's answer is quick, factual, and infuriating. "You were married to Kingston Delgado by family arrangement. He hates the original Keira Patterson. Your first task is to win favor points."
I laugh, a short, incredulous sound. "Win his favor? He hates her. He probably helped bury her."
"That will not help you," Gatlin says. "Tasks will arrive. Begin by opening the lid."
I shove. The wood grinds. Air stabs my lungs like needles. When I finally roll out and sit, the funeral hall—dim light, white cloth, wailing—turns toward me like an accusation.
Footsteps thunder. A butler runs in, eyes wild. "Tomas Bridges! Come—someone call—"
"It isn't a ghost," I say, standing on legs that wobble like a recruit's first day. "I'm real."
"She rose from her coffin," the butler says to the corridor. "She is alive!"
The servants scream. Someone faints. I make a show of calmness because I have trained myself to survive worse.
Footsteps on the stairs. A tall man in a blue robe and paper-thin patience pushes open the study door. He looks at the commotion, then up at me. His face is almost painfully handsome. "Is this amusing?" he asks, and his voice cools the room.
"Are you Kingston Delgado?" Gatlin murmurs in my head. "He is tall, composed, dangerous."
He speaks once to the stunned room. "Let's go to the ancestral hall."
I step down into the hush and the outside crowd parts like a sea for the thing that frightened them: me. "Keira?" the man calls with the smallest tilt of curiosity.
"Yes," I say, because this body answers its name.
He looks at me in a way that is studied and clinical. "Why are you wearing the red wedding dress?"
"It was my grandfather's wish," I say. I do not tell him the spring-medicine details Gatlin already fed me—how the original used tricks the night she died. I will not begin with excuses. I will not beg. For now I am breathing. That will be enough.
Kingston Delgado lets out a soft, humorless sound. "Do not play at me. That night—"
"It was an accident," I interrupt. "I am not your enemy." I try to make my voice small and steady so it cannot be used against me.
He studies me like a field surgeon examining a stranger. "You should leave."
A low laugh bubbles in my chest. "Oh? Leave my own funeral?"
"You are an embarrassment," his mouth shapes the words with care. "You will humiliate my family."
"Fine," I say. "I'm done humiliating myself. If you want me gone, we can divorce immediately."
The room shivers. My words drop like a stone in a pond, then cause ripples—shock, interest, doubt.
"Keira," Tomas Bridges says, hands folded as if this is merely part of a long-suffering job. "Please do not escalate."
Kingston Delgado snorts. "Go then. Or stay. You're like a stray who cannot decide."
I am not a stray. I am a soldier, once. "I will stay," I say. "I have tasks."
Gatlin chimed in loud enough for me. "Task one completed—apply for a job inside Delgado Enterprises."
I do it. I will do anything to live. I put on plain clothes borrowed from a servant—Frankie Farley, a small and trembling girl who believes servants should look invisible. I wear canvas shoes and a plain top.
The corporate building is cold glass and metal. Names sit on the top floor like jewels: Delgado Enterprises, four shining letters. I hand my name to the receptionist, walk into a room of a hundred and some hopeful faces, and sit for a test meant to be ridiculous for cleaning staff—etiquette, English questions, and cleanliness. I finish first. My hands shake. Gatlin's dry humor in my thoughts keeps me grounded.
Minutes, then hours, go by. Later, when the files come to the top of someone's desk, Kingston stumbles on my name.
"Bring her file," he says.
"She scored top in tests," the HR manager—Colton Oliver—says carefully. "She insisted she needed wages."
"She'll work until she dies," Kingston says, and something cold brushes his face.
They give me the job.
Gatlin chirps. "Ten points. Health increased. Task two drops."
"Task two is to cook him dinner," I mutter and nearly drop the paper.
"And have him praise your food," Gatlin says, cheerfully cruel.
For a woman who can shoot a moving target from a hundred meters and survive fire and shrapnel, I have never been a cook. I can sleep with ear-splitting noise and wake calm. I cannot sauté, but I can learn. I go into the kitchen with the chef who smells like garlic and years of work—Gatlin Bonnet, who is a living, breathing man in the kitchen and a different Gatlin inside my head. Gatlin in my head apologizes for the confusion. We both make allowances.
"I will teach you the basics," Chef Gatlin says, blunt as a cleaver. "But under no circumstances mess with the salt."
"Understood," I say. "I can follow orders."
I burn, over-season, undercook, and laugh at my own mistakes. The staff's polite smiles cut into me. "It's... good," some murmur, but the taste lingers like truth—it's not enough. I make a thousand tiny errors and taste every one.
Kingston Delgado smells the room before he appears. One night he returns angry because he believes I've lied about seeing a driver or about being late. He barges into the kitchen and finds me standing with a spoon in my hand. His hand is heavy when he grabs my wrist.
"Say something," he hisses, fierce and ugly. "Say anything."
"It was the driver from the old lady's house," I tell him. "I wasn't—"
He lets go and laughs, sharp and incredulous. "You do nothing but surprise me."
I want to say I do not need his approval. I need to live. Gatlin gives me a pep talk in my head. "One compliment will unlock ten points," he says.
I try again. I cook. I burn less. I get better. The kitchen is my new battlefield and I fight for tiny victories—an even sear, a sauce that does not taste like regret.
But there are other battles. The house itself is a field of small cruelties.
Virginia Bryant is Kingston's stepmother by the stranger's law but queen by force. She is loud and sharp and takes pleasure in small torments. She has a tongue that cuts and a smile like a trap door. She speaks of me as if I were a blemish.
"She demands respect that she never earned," Virginia tells the room one evening when my plate empties. "She was dead and now she wants our pity as payment."
I answer politely and she spits like a cat. "You do not belong here. You should be grateful we allow you under the roof."
I smile past the venom. Gatlin in my head whispers: "If this house has a spine, we find it."
We do. The old patriarch, Bear Copeland—who calls himself the grandfather in public—arrives like a torn silence and sits by me once. He touches my hand with a shaking kindness and says, "Stay if you wish, Keira. I will protect you, quietly."
For all his protection, he cannot protect me from public spectacle. Virginia believes she rules everything, and one of the rules in this universe is that the arrogant get to expose, to crush. But the world is a mirror if you know where to hold it.
Two months after I return from the coffin, the shareholders gather for a gala. The city's press is invited. Kingston sits at the head like a black mountain. Virginia sits beside him like a pale storm. A hundred business faces, a hundred mobile cameras, the glitter of chandeliers—everything is ready.
I wear a dress chosen to be invisible—white, modest, but clean. My chest still tightens when I walk into the hall, because I know what a public room can do. Gatlin in my head says nothing because he knows what I mean.
"Tonight," Kingston announces with his voice polished as steel, "we will address certain internal issues before the board."
A projector hums to life. People clink glasses. Cameras lean forward.
"First," Kingston says, "we will examine recent allegations about misuse of company assets and personal harassment." His eyes slide across the crowd and stop on Georgia Bryant—no, Virginia Bryant—whose smile thins.
The screen lights up with an assembled quartet of evidence: ledgers with annotated entries, hotel bills linked to luxury purchases, and voice recordings of a woman whispering instructions—orders to fire loyal employees, to threaten suppliers, texts that speak of "making a point" and "getting rid of competition" all under Virginia's voice.
The room is a living thing that inhales. "Play these," Kingston says, and the recording starts.
Virginia's earlier posture—composed, amused—changes. She watches the screen where her own voice orders humiliation for a loyal employee, where she brags about blackmail, where she tells an aide, "Make sure she never sits at the table again." Her eyebrows twitch.
The first reaction is disbelief: "No—no!" She speaks too loudly, and in that loudness she savors a cruel instinct. "This is a conspiracy," she says. "Someone is set against me."
The crowd shuffles, phones click. "Who recorded that?" someone murmurs.
"Do you deny your handwriting?" Kingston asks, and he draws a ledger to the podium. "Is this your signature, Virginia Bryant?"
She sways between smirks and slippery denials. "You forged this." Her voice rises, then drops. "You would—" She points at Kingston with the slightest tremor. "You always wanted this. It's a set-up."
"Then explain," Kingston says. "Explain the bank transfers that went to your accounts. Explain the secret invoices titled 'Gifts for discretion.'"
She falters. The laughter of some thin people cuts off because something else takes over—curiosity like a blade. A well-known investor, Hedda Briggs, calls out, "Where did these funds go?" Phone cameras tilt in and record.
Virginia's face, once smooth as porcelain, begins to crack. Her mouth opens in defense. "I—those were—" She flails. "You signed it as approvals. You told me the accounts were discretionary."
A lawyer at the table stands up. "We have evidence beyond question." He lists dates and phone metadata like a scalpel.
The public—shareholders, journalists, the board—reacts with a chorus that moves from silence to murmurs to pleas. Cameras flash. People take videos with their phones, some whisper, "This is it. This is the fall."
The emotion on Virginia's face changes through seven weathered steps in real time. First smugness at having always thought herself untouchable. Then confusion. The gadgets and screens show her own voice and signature. Her eyes go wide; then she spits out a denial: "It's doctored! It's not mine!"
"Call the auditors," Kingston says quietly. "Call the police if you must."
She lashes out with anger, but the anger dissolves into fear. "You can't do this to me," she says, and the room leans in. "I am the matriarch of this family."
One director leans forward. "Are you the matriarch who siphoned funds? Are you the one who ordered intimidation? Is that how a matriarch behaves?"
Her throat tightens. The denial becomes an unsteady plea. She kneels on the polished marble as a photographer's flash catches the moment, and the hall is loud with gasps. "No—please—" she croaks. "I didn't do—"
A woman in a blue dress begins to clap sarcastically. "This is poetic justice," she says, and the clap takes like fire. It grows into a sound that is complicated: disbelief, glee, justice.
Virginia's face crumples. She collapses into her chair, hands to her mouth, eyes wild. She begins to beg, to whisper names, to blame others. "It wasn't me. It was him. It was his aides. I was following orders." The sound of cameras clicking keeps pace like a heartbeat.
The crowd is no longer passive. Phones rise like hands in prayer. People record the fall, the denial, the next stage—the collapse and the begging. Some people cry. Some shout for the board to take action. Someone uploads the clip; another second later, a trending notification flashes across screens: "Virginia Bryant exposed."
For more than half an hour the room spins around that one image: a woman who had ruled by fear now bleeds shame in public. Her arc is complete: smugness, shock, denial, collapse, begging. The cameras catch the lie and magnify it until there is nowhere to hide.
After the meeting, the board convenes. The legal team presents charges. The company freezes accounts. The press writes headlines that do not soften with time. Virginia Bryant makes statements that sound thin and brittle. She calls the charges "a conspiracy" in interviews, but the footage follows her everywhere.
I watch it all and I do not clap. I am not glad to see anyone destroyed. I am cautious. Gatlin's voice is steady. "You needed a clear field," he says. "You have it."
"Did I do that?" I ask.
"You did nothing," Gatlin says. "You only showed up. The board liked what you did—work and dignity. They do not like thieves."
The world shifts. People who once glanced at me with pity glance at me now with a new measure: usefulness. Kingston Delgado's expression hardens when he thinks of the empty chair of matriarch power, then flickers as if learning new weather patterns. He does not smile at me, but the angle of his head changes—an adjustment like the way a soldier adjusts to wind.
I finish task two that night: I cook a simple stew and a crisp sesame fish that he eats without fanfare. When he puts down his fork, his praise is small as a coin. "This is acceptable," he says.
Acceptable counts.
Gatlin in my head chimes with a bright score: "Ten points. Health increased. Favor 25%."
I sleep with small victories warmed inside my chest and a new problem on my mind: there are many enemies in a house that once worshiped cruelty. I will need allies. Some will come from unexpected doors.
"Who will be my ally?" I ask Gatlin before I drift under the blanket, thinking of the thousand faces that had been watching tonight.
"Make them," Gatlin answers. "And when the next villain stands, we will make them fall."
I close my eyes and imagine the red dress waiting in the old wardrobe. I am no longer the woman who fell asleep in a flying machine or died in a battlefield. I am Keira Patterson now, and I have a system named Gatlin and two more tasks to survive. The house is full of hunger, but so am I—for life, for retribution, for the small pleasures of a stove that does not burn and a man who says "acceptable" as if it were a compliment.
The End
— Thank you for reading —