Face-Slapping12 min read
I Woke Up as the Wrong White Moonlight
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I woke up angry and in a mansion that smelled like perfume and expensive cleaning chemicals. My name is Itzel Clayton, and somebody else had been living my life so smoothly that alarms went off only when I surfaced and realized I was wearing someone else’s life.
"This is not my life," I told the ceiling light, because the ceiling light was the only one who'd answer late at night.
The life I stepped into belonged to a woman who had always been called a "white moonlight" in that novel everyone read and rolled their eyes at. She was the kind of woman who smiled while being stepped on, who forgave cruelty because she thought it came from some sad childhood. In the book, she was the reason everything went wrong. I, being sarcastic and lazy in my former life, had only flipped a few pages once and mocked the hero’s toxic acts. And now—apparently—I had moved into the part where I had to play the part no one liked: the devoted, misplaced moonlight.
I pushed myself up from the soft bed and checked the mirror. "You are not her," I said aloud. "You are me—Itzel."
The mirror did not answer, so I went downstairs. The dining room smelled of sea cucumber broth; the housekeeper flinched at my face.
"Good morning, Miss Itzel," she said, making the habitual dip of the head reserved for the household's favored child. "Miss Marjorie sent her regards."
"Marjorie?" I repeated.
"Marjorie Morrison. Sir Cruz is expected back from his business dinner."
Cruz Atkins. The man in the book. The one who loved like a storm, who followed the heroine in the rain, who forced "rescue" and then punished with a smile. Cruz Atkins—rich, ruthless, "sick" in the novel's vocabulary. I did not like the word "sick"; I preferred other words, none of them polite.
When Cruz walked in that evening, smelling of whiskey and a grin he thought subtle, I sat very still and watched him scan the room like a man claiming territory. He saw me and paused as if the world needed to rearrange itself to accommodate that small interruption.
"You should sit," I told Marjorie, who was hovering politely, spoon in hand. "Eat while it's hot."
"Itzel—" Marjorie said quietly. "I shouldn't sit when he is here."
"That's ridiculous," I said. "Since when do grown people eat like children waiting for a monarch's approval?"
Cruz’s eyes slid to me. "Who are you to speak like that?" he asked, all silk and threat.
"I'm the friend who refuses to bend," I said. "Call me Itzel."
Marjorie looked as if she would melt. "Itzel, please—"
"Sit down, Marjorie," I told her again. "We are all still human."
Cruz made a sound between a laugh and a snarl. "You know of respect," he said. "Your insolence will cost you."
"Try me," I said. "Try scaring someone who has nothing to lose."
He didn't hit me that night, because the book hadn't reached that scene for my body. Instead he used the night in the novel—imagined and rehearsed—to press his control a little further each day. He asked Marjorie private questions. He threatened small people with an even smaller man's cruelty. He told the house staff how punishments were necessary, "for order."
But I had learned one thing quickly: novels are full of holes, and once you're inside one, a few sensible facts can sink a hundred misunderstandings. The original white moonlight in the book believed all of Cruz's excuses. I would not.
"You're the one who drowns reason with drama," I told Marjorie one afternoon as we pushed a swing in the garden. "Tell him the truth. Tell him who actually saved him."
Marjorie stared at the flowers and said, "I would rather be honest if the truth didn't cost someone their life."
"Whose life?" I asked. "Yours? His? Ours? I don't bargain with death, Marjorie. I bargain with facts."
She put her hand on the swing ropes and sighed. "I owed him once. I thought—" Her fingers twined the rope and she looked small. "I thought if I repaid him, I could keep everyone safe."
"By living like a doormat?" I scoffed.
"Itzel," she whispered, "you don't know what it means to be told, for years, that someone saved you, that you must repay them until graves close."
"I grew up in a place where no one did anything twice for free," I said. "Repayment is fine. Anonymous repayment is better. Keep your life, not a debt."
That was the plan. Explain the truth. Let the love triangle collapse into simple human facts. Avoid the traps that led the white moonlight to drown. I told Marjorie I would arrange everything. She trusted me because she had nothing left to cling to.
I went home to the Clayton house, and my parents—Gideon Benjamin and Marina Schneider—acted like I'd grown another head. That was a blessing. I told them, plain and quick: "I'm done with Cruz. Don't help him."
"You're sure?" my father asked.
"Yes. He will only take and take. We have a company to manage. I am going to learn how to run it. No charity toward monsters."
My mother laughed, indulgent. "Our little queen will take the throne."
At the company the next week I stepped into a meeting and made a few choices that had been cursed in the original book. I spoke bluntly, handed out new directions, and worried about nothing but the stubborn sense of rightness. That's how I raised the tempers of the men who had been comfortable with my predecessor's soft voice.
One afternoon at cloud-heavy auction hall, another man decided to teach me a lesson. Cruz was there—always there when drama was possible—pushing for a parcel of land he wanted. When I raised a modest bid he doubled it with a theatrical flourish that said, "I own the world." The room waited for him to flex like a child.
I barely moved my pencil when I heard a small electronic voice: "Izel Clayton, your transfer confirmation is complete." Abel Archer—my unorthodox fiancé who had arrived like a rumor from an island—had quietly completed a transfer of investment capital to secure the land for us. Abel Archer was a figure straight out of the book’s weirdest places: a man who claimed "marking" traditions and whose island customs included absurdities the book laughed about. In our real life he was reliable, and in that moment he made the difference.
Cruz's smile froze. "You have money?" he demanded.
"We have plans," I said.
The shareholders, jawing for a spectacle, began to whisper. One of them—Ulrich Doyle, a man with fingers in many shady ledgers—smiled a predator smile. He'd been Cruz's favored facilitator.
Later, Ulrich's phone broke the room.
"Please—excuse me," I said, reaching to stop it. But the clip that leaked onto the loudspeaker was already in everyone's ears. Ulrich had kept one of Cruz's recordings—Cruz ordering him to sabotage my company, to "teach that woman a lesson." The words were there, unmistakable. "Make her pay," Cruz had said. "Break her back in the boardroom."
It was like a slow meteor, the moment that burrowed through people. Ulrich floundered, trying to silence the sound. The shareholders gaped. Cruz's expression slid from disdain to something near horror.
"You—" Ulrich stammered. "I—this is doctored."
"Doctored by whom?" Cruz demanded.
"By—by you, Cruz! I have their calls. I have the payments. I have—" Ulrich's voice trailed off as his phone went off again; new evidence patched onto the speakers: bank orders, emails, a video of Cruz waving cash at a man and instructing him to interfere with our auction.
"You're lying!" Cruz shouted, muscle in his jaw pulsing. He was so sure of his power that denial came like a reflex.
I stood up. "You always said law is just a costume you wear when convenient," I told him. "Tonight costume falls away."
Cruz took a breath and tried to circle to menace. "You will regret attacking me."
"Regret is for the guilty," I said. "Step down, Cruz."
He laughed too loud, the laugh of a man still trying to bargain with fate. "Do you know who I am? Do you know what I can do?"
"Yes. You bully," I said. "And bullies are petty. But tonight you will sober up."
The chairman—one of our older, sensible stockholders—cleared his throat. "We will call for a vote," he said. "If the evidence is as it sounds—"
"Judge me now!" Cruz barked. "Prove it's fake!"
A junior analyst tapped a laptop.
"Look," said Abel Archer gently into the microphone. "We traced a path. The funds, the messages, the people: all of them lead to one server. They go through shell companies Cruz controls. They are linked by timestamps."
"Impossible!" Cruz roared. Then, in a voice that suddenly had an element I'd never seen before—panic—he began to deny specifics. "You can't prove this. I can hire experts to show it's contrived."
Ulrich, who a minute before had been preening, went pale. "Cruz—" he said quietly. "We—this is bad."
"Call your lawyers," Cruz snapped. "Call anyone."
"Your lawyers will find what Abel's people found first," I said, watching him fray. Cameras in the hall had turned toward him; so had phones. A hundred people recorded the scene.
Then the real unraveling began. A young woman I recognized—one of the house staff, tears in her eyes—stepped forward and told the hall how Cruz had threatened her with blackmail if she didn't cooperate. Another man, one of Ulrich's middle managers, confessed in a thick voice that he had accepted money from Cruz to submit fake bids and that those payments had been carried out by accounts Cruz signed himself.
"You're lying!" Cruz kept shouting. He still tried to make the room spin the other way, to cast this as a conspiracy. But the room had become a tribunal. The sound feed replayed Cruz's voice ordering "break her," then his laughter. Each replay tightened the net.
"Stop!" Cruz sank into the leather chair, suddenly breathless. "You can't do this to me!"
"Do it? I already did it," I said. I wanted him to see every movement backward, the life he had tried to control. "You thought you could test people to their breaking point. You thought you could move us like chess pieces."
"And now?" Abel asked with a soft, ruthless calm. "What do you want to do, Cruz?"
He was small now: the man who ruled the empire of whispers reduced to a single pulse of fear. He looked at the crowd—then he looked down, as if expecting a hand to rise and strike him.
I could have said "arrest him," but public humiliation would do more. It had to be public. It had to be total.
"Stand," I said.
He was shaking. "You can't—"
"Stand," I repeated.
He stood. Then I took a slow step forward. My voice had to be a scalpel. "You followed me the night I first met him, didn't you? You thought to force a confession, a dependency." I pointed at him. "You told your cronies to film us. You told Ulrich to press papers. You told Marjorie she owed you. You told my company to crumble."
Cruz's face shifted from rage to disbelief to a sliver of clarity. "Why?" he asked, and the word spilled like a child’s question, not a conqueror's decree.
"Because you wanted everyone to need you," I answered. "You mistook control for love."
He laughed, then coughed, then shoved his hands through his hair. He tried another denial, the "I was within my rights" routine. "This is manipulation," he cried. "You edited, doctored—"
"Filmed by your employees, signed to your accounts," Abel supplied. "We didn't need to doctor anything."
The room watched the slow undoing. A few people who had supported Cruz before muttered and recorded. Phones lifted like flowers blossoming. Someone near the back called out, "This is broadcast live."
"Then—" Cruz's mascaraed composure cracked into rawness. "You can't take everything."
"Watch me," I said.
He fumbled for a pocket, for a lawyer's name, for a rescue that would not come. Then, with a terrible clarity that made the air fog in my eyes, Cruz's face drained. He had been the kind of man who believed consequences belonged to other people. Now consequences were here to stay.
"Cruz," Marjorie whispered, feet planted. "Please—"
He looked at her and his eyes pleaded with anger and need. Then, because dominant men sometimes make exactly the mistake I expected, he reached for the one plea he thought might work: a legal trick, a financial bribe, a half-true confession. His voice cracked.
"Don't—" he started, then tried to wrest some dignity back. "I didn't mean—"
The hubris of "I didn't mean" is always heavy. It sounds less like contrition and more like disappointment in being found out.
"Get down," Abel said quietly. "Kneel."
The room went still. "You cannot—" Cruz hissed. He was the kind of man who imagined himself above being asked to kneel. But the request was simple. Kneel.
He sank to his knees with a noise that I will remember: a sound like a machine losing power. The grand hall watched the ruler become supplicant. For a moment I forgot to breathe.
"Say it," Abel demanded.
Cruz's face contorted. "No."
"Say it," Abel said again, and there was no more irony; there was tired steel.
"I am wrong," Cruz spat. "I—"
"No," I interrupted. "Admit every piece. Admit the threats, the payoffs, the recordings. Admit you thought you were bigger than law."
He tried to evade. "This is—"
The hall filled with cameras and whispers: "Beg him to stop," someone murmured. "Kiss his feet," another joked bitterly. The crowd circled like gulls that smell easy meat.
Cruz's breathing changed. His face was a map of gasps. "Please," he said finally, broken. "Please forgive me."
Around us, people laughed and cried and lifted their phones. Some recorded the moment for history; some recorded it for the smear tapes Cruz had once used. Others simply watched. Hands clapped. Voices shouted their liberation. A woman in the front row, one of the low-ranking employees he had bullied for years, made a small sound that was equal parts laugh and a sob.
"You are forgiven by no law," I told Cruz. "You are going to repay what you took: the money, the reputation. You will not sit in a council seat again."
He crawled forward, hands scraping on the polished marble floor, palms out like a thief at a shrine. "Please," he begged, sounding less like the man who had once ordered violence and more like a frightened child. "Please."
"Look up," I said.
He looked up. The cameras flashed like judgment.
"Say their names," I commanded. "Say what you did. Say it in front of everyone."
He started, voice smaller and smaller: "I... paid Ulrich... I told them to—" He tried to name the lies but the words came slow, wrong, stuttering like someone learning the alphabet late in life.
Witnesses wept. People around him pressed their phones to his face, recording the confession, the plea, the complete collapse.
He went through the sequence the rules had for damaged kings: a look of triumph, doubt, instant denial, the physical crumbling, then the public plea. He spat out explanations, laughter, lies, and finally a stream of syllables that turned into a plea for mercy. He begged to be spared prison. He begged for jobs, for a way to be useful.
"No," Abel said. "You will be useful to what you hurt. You will write restitution checks. You will apologize to every person you instructed. You will speak at the shareholder meeting about integrity and sign every confession to be made public. You will hand over your shell companies and work on community projects until you are dismissed by time, not power."
He nodded, like a man who had suddenly understood arithmetic too late.
The crowd was a tide. Some applauded. Some hissed. Some filmed. A woman nearby tossed her handbag in the air and started clapping in a rhythm; others joined. Phones captured every eye-roll, every sob, every scorn. Some spectators uploaded the clips to the internet in real time.
Cruz cried; he whined; he finally slumped into the chair, hollow. The shareholders adjusted their suits. The chairman peered down at him with a now-firm expression. "You are relieved of your duties," he said. "Effective immediately."
The microphones snapped shut as board members started to sign emergency papers. The cameras kept rolling. Cruz's face was a tangle of bloodless pleas and new knowledge. People took photos. Someone shouted "scandal!" and someone else started a chant that sounded like a verdict: "No more."
When the police finally took a statement, it was not immediate arrest; sometimes the law moves with paperwork, but the social jail had already been built. The footage would not disappear. The cost of the man’s crimes would be paid in reputation, in company shares, and in a public humiliation he would carry like a brand.
"You will learn one thing," I said to Cruz as I passed. "Kneeling for forgiveness does nothing if you never repent."
He looked up at me with a pleading that asked for salvation. I left him on his knees to the crowd, to the cameras, to the slow turning of public opinion.
That night, I sat in my office with Abel and listened to him call the right people—investigators, auditors, and lawyers who were finally on our side. We patched together what Cruz had torn. We started to rebuild.
"Are you tired?" Abel asked.
"A little," I admitted. "But not of this."
"Then you will not be," he said, and for the first time the "marking" joke on his island seemed less ridiculous and more like a strange promise: a promise he would keep.
Days later, the fallout continued. Cruz's allies tried to rally; some were bought, some were frightened. Ulrich disappeared into his den. Documentation and press releases multiplied. Marjorie finally spoke the truth in an interview: "I was mistaken. Itzel is the one who told me the truth," she said, and people listened.
"I did what had to be done," I told Marjorie. "We exposed him. We stopped the cruelty."
"Thank you," she whispered. "I owe you everything."
"No, you owe yourself your life back," I said.
And then, because novels must have more than one theater of ruin, other plots crept forward: the secret fiancé from the island who had become my steady, the ridiculous "marking" ritual made into a joke between us, the production of a script I insisted on turning into a show that would pay for the damages. The world was messy and loud; I learned that in the book this messy loudness had been weaponized against the kind, the forgiving. I decided to weaponize it for truth.
"Will you stay?" Abel asked one dusk, as we watched a pale sun ease into the city skyline.
"For now," I said.
He reached for my hand. "Then let's run a small app," he suggested. "Step by step. Every step, some savings. Every day, some growth."
"Step-money? Seriously?" I laughed.
"It helps you move," he said.
I checked my phone, saw the icon he had made for me—'Itzel'—and started walking. Small steps turned into many. People recorded us on sidewalks, noticing the steady woman who had walked a scandal into daylight and into a new plan.
I had been a white moonlight in the wrong story. I had been the exit sign to a tragic arc. Now I would be a woman who said no. I would be the kind of heroine who taught revenge to be useful and who made public disgrace into a lesson in accountability.
When the scandal clips rose high on the internet, Cruz tried to clean reputation with lawyers and PR, but his public punishment was immortal. He had been arrogant enough to think he would always be the storm; he had not measured the small people who stood like a dam.
"One day," someone said near me, "they will write about what you did."
I smiled. "Then let them film the apology. I want the audio to be clear."
We had the footage, the witnesses, the legal threads. The next morning, the city hummed with newness. The orchid—my friend Lin's impossible flower that Cruz had tried to humiliate by buying and destroying—bloomed again under different hands. We replanted it in the courtyard of the new community center, where people who had been abused by power would come and learn how to protect themselves.
"That's our ending," Abel said.
"No," I said. "It's our beginning."
I locked my phone and placed it on the desk. The app "Itzel" pinged: 100 steps = 10,000 cents. I laughed, a sound that felt like start-up electricity. I was tired, but honest. I was Awake.
The End
— Thank you for reading —