Revenge14 min read
"I Woke Up Dead — Then Took Back My Life"
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"I want you dead," I spat, and the room smelled of perfume and champagne.
"Evie, girl, calm down," Ludmila said, smooth smile dripping like sugar. "You always overreact."
I sat in my bridal gown in a mirrored makeup room and watched my hands tremble. Lace, cheap crystals, a crown they'd put on me because they loved a pretty picture. Outside, the ballroom was full of people who'd be glad to applaud me into a life I didn't want.
"Who told you Sawyer is no longer your groom?" my father, Gene Rinaldi, said from the doorway, voice flat and practiced.
"I heard him," Ludmila crowed. "My friends heard him. Daddy told me. Isn't it exciting? Evie, you're finally off the hook. I'm so relieved."
"You're a liar." I pushed away from the mirror and stood. My voice broke. "You're a liar and a thief. Who told you to do this, Ludmila? Who paid you to take my life away?"
Ludmila laughed. "Take your life? Honey, we gave you something better. A deal with Daxton Makarov. He pays, we climb. What's wrong with a little upgrade?"
"Daxton is sixty," I said. "You want me married to a monster."
"Monster," Charlotte Hoffmann—my mother—said in that low voice she used when she wanted to sound kind and dangerous. "He's a businessman. He has money. That's practical."
"Practical," I repeated. The word tasted like bile. "You used my name to get money, to fix your debts. You planned my death. You put me in a cold room and...
"I did nothing," Gene cut in, standing straighter. "You were... you were reckless. You ran. It nearly cost us everything."
"Do not pretend you weep for me," I said. "You were ready to burn me."
Ludmila clapped slowly. "Drama queen. Look, Evie—"
I slammed the crown down until it cracked. "I am done being a prize. I'm done being an object for your deals."
"Security!" Gene snapped.
Two men in black moved in.
"Don't touch her," a voice said, and then a fist hit one man in the back of the head so hard he hit the floor.
Aurelius Felix stood in the doorway, face storm-smooth, every inch the sort of man men mentioned like a force of nature. He moved like someone used to getting what he wanted by opening doors and taking rooms.
"You," Ludmila breathed, and her smile slipped.
"You brought people to kill her," Aurelius said. "You arranged a cold room and a cremation slot. You bought ashes. You are contemptible."
Aurelius's calm made the security men freeze. He strode forward and knocked the hands off me like a wave. He did not smile when he bent to meet my eyes.
"Get out," he told them. "Leave her be."
I had never tasted gratitude that clean before. "Why?" I asked when I could breathe.
"Because I don't like murderers," he said. "And because I'm not stupid."
He unbuckled a watch, slid off a ring. "Evie, get out through the staff door. I run this hotel. My cars will take you."
I left. I thought I had escaped. I was young and foolish and believed mercy was an anchor.
They closed the staff door. They had planned everything—fake ash, a cremation arrangement, a switch. My parents signed the death certificate before they even bothered with a funeral. I learned later how the posts were prepared, smiling photos, "our beloved found dead"—everything set so neatly the world would look on and nod.
They put me in a cold room. I woke with fingers numb, my hand trapped in the door. I remember the cold burning like knives. I remember thinking that if I survived I wanted them to pay.
I escaped because Arjun Fernandez—the assistant who sold himself for cash—fumbled. I hit him with a wooden block until he lay still. I ran, barefoot across a parking lot that smelled of grease and hot rubber, but the back door I thought Aurelius had directed me to led into storage rooms and then into an alley of dead-ends.
"Get her! She must be cremated!" Ludmila's voice came sharp in the night. She had a circle of small-time hired men who loved threats more than pay.
Someone grabbed me and shoved me into a walk-in freezer. The door slammed. My hand was in the seam. The wood splintered. Pain exploded. I lost track of time.
I woke to a voice asking, "Is she breathing?"
I opened my eyes to a man at the doorway, shadowed, severe. He looked like both a threat and a shelter. He wore a tailored dark coat and moved with slow purpose.
"What did you hear?" he demanded, fingers like iron at my throat.
"I heard...blood type AB negative," I managed. "They wanted a girl for—"
"Shh," he cut me off. His assistant, Pax Jonsson, hurried over. "She needs a doctor," Pax said. "Get a blanket."
The man shoved Pax. "I know." He bent and ripped off my bindings. "You have eight broken fingers," he said. "You're frozen. You're stupid brave."
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Aurelius Felix," he said. "You're Evie, aren't you?"
I blinked at him. He knew my name.
"How?" I asked.
"You shouldn't have run into a furnace of liars," Aurelius said. "Get in my car. Don't speak until we reach the hospital."
He took me to the hospital. He stayed while they cleaned me, wrapped my hands, noticed the frostbite, and wrote me off as something of a miracle. The world had already seen me as ash. Gene Rinaldi had put my death certificate online.
"She's been declared dead," Pax told Aurelius. "Your people said they cremated her."
"You were declared dead," Aurelius said, almost to me. "If they had actually cremated you, I'd be very busy looking for a new hobby."
He let me go through tests, dressing me in bandages and giving me an identity: a temporary passport, a new record, a thin lifeline. "You'll owe me," Aurelius said once to the sterile ceiling. "But you'll live."
I crawled home to my old life and found it waiting: Ludmila preening in public like a prize, my parents pretending to grieve at a funeral that had no me in it. There was a single day when my mother Charlotte and father Gene stood together like a portrait of respectability and pointed fingers at their loss. Ludmila walked the hall like a queen, and Sawyer Lombardi—my fiancé—sat pale and distant watching her.
I was without papers, without voice; my name erased. They had sent photos of ashes, a printed death certificate, an empty grave. They had been so clever.
I went to Aurelius and begged for help—some of it desperation, some of it war. I wanted revenge, but I needed him first.
"You must be honest," Aurelius told me. "I need a child of AB negative. My son, City—"
He said the child's name like a weight. "My boy needs cord blood. Cord blood. Your blood. If you want to stay alive here, you agree to give me one thing in return."
"In return?" I echoed.
"For now, your safety," he said. "When you are ready to run, we will talk. For now, we help your foster parents leave the mess your birth family made."
I almost laughed. "You're asking me to be your secret? Your—"
"A lover," he said flatly. "A quiet arrangement. You live here. You recover. You try to get pregnant. We help the boy. You get an identity we control. You get safety."
"Make it quick," I said. "Save my foster mother. Save my foster father. Help me find proof. Then—"
"Then what?" he asked.
"Then I want them to fall," I said. "I want to see them in the dirt. I want Ludmila to beg."
He thought about it like one would consider a chess move. "We have a deal."
He kept his word. He arranged a new ID, paid to send my foster parents out of the country to a safe house, and got me into the hospital program. He watched while I woke, while I lost teeth in sleep, while I cried without sound. He stayed in the room sometimes like a shadow and sometimes like a late teacher. He gave me food and told me to gain weight. He taught me to eat. He gave me a cellphone with a number only Aurelius Felix could call.
Then he gave me rules. "You are an asset," he said. "Your obedience keeps you alive. Your freedom comes after purpose."
I signed papers that were thin as flint. "I won't sign until you promise—"
"You signed once with your life," Aurelius said. "Sign again. You know what you owe."
I signed.
"One thing," I said after. "When the time comes, when I ask—help me bring them down."
He looked at me as if tasting the thought. "Bring them down how?"
"Public," I said. "A scene. Truth. Filmed. Make them kneel."
He smiled then, very small. "You are not someone who asks without a plan."
I began living as his secret. The rules were iron.
"Do not see him in daylight," his assistant warned. "Do not be seen in public unless told. Do not interfere with business. Do not ask about the boy's treatments."
Those were not promises I loved, but they were shelter.
Weeks passed. I had surgery on my hands; eight of ten fingers were bad and the recovery was slow, but the hospital was kind to me in the guarded way big men pay for kindness. I learned how to walk again firm. I learned to eat meat. I learned to sleep without turning each nightmare into a new wound.
Aurelius's world was not the soft life I had imagined. It was steel and numbers and the things men like him traded in: favors, influence, secrets. He showed me pictures of his boy and didn't smile without permission. He told me about bone marrow, about cord blood, about medical terms like talismans. He showed me how to be useful. "If we don't, City dies," he said. "If City dies, I become a ruin."
"You are ruthless," I told him once.
"I am not sentimental," he said. "But I'm not a monster."
He left for a meeting and I went to the phone to plan. I had to find proof.
"Who is watching the crematorium records?" I asked Pax when I banged on his office door.
He looked up. "You want me to hack municipal records? That is both illegal and unwise."
"I need to expose them. Publicly. I need them on a stage, to humiliate them in front of everyone who once applauded them."
Pax smiled like someone who enjoyed danger. "I can make a small noise in the right ears. But once we start, there's no turning back."
"We turn back together," I said.
Pax brought me something. "Gene Rinaldi used to trust Arjun. Arjun kept copies of everything. The funerary swap—they cut corners. Arjun kept photos."
"Where?" I asked.
"Inside a cloud folder. I will get them."
"Get them," I whispered.
We planned. Aurelius would be there when it mattered. He said he would not forgive small things. He loved his son and that love made him human in a way that was both terrifying and comforting.
The day of the public reckoning was the engagement ceremony for Ludmila and Sawyer Lombardi at the city's grand hotel—the same place where they'd tried to make my death a clean thing. News vans were invited. The elite would clink glasses and breathe their sighs of approval. Ludmila would glide in with the air of someone who had replaced her sister's life as cleanly as a new dress.
Pax slipped the files to a tech at Aurelius's company and arranged a signal. I put on a plain dress. "Are you sure?" I asked Aurelius as we walked beneath chandeliers.
"I'm sure," he said. "You will stand, tell them the truth. I will release the rest."
We entered the hall. Ludmila smiled from a carriage of flowers. My father and Charlotte were radiant in the way charlatans are radiant when their scheme is near fruition. Sawyer looked dizzy happy, wholly unaware of the webs he had become.
"Evie?" Ludmila feigned surprise when I stepped to the microphone. "What are you—"
"Shh," Aurelius said into his earpiece. Then the lights went down.
The giant screen above the head table came alive.
"What's that?" Gene demanded.
"Turn it off!" Charlotte cried.
They couldn't.
The screen played footage collected by Arjun—voices, text messages, images of the freezer door, receipts showing payments to the crematorium, the mock ashes, a recording of Ludmila telling Arjun to "hurry" because "we need the slot." I had a recording of my father's voice: "Make the death certificate. There's no room for mistakes."
The footage was laid bare, frame by frame.
"That's fake," Ludmila hissed. She took a step forward. "You can't show this—"
"Turn it off!" Gene roared so loud people turned.
Then Aurelius stood at the microphone. His presence steadied the room the way a thunderclap steadies rain.
"A few truths," he said slowly, and everyone noticed the exact coldness in his voice. "Evie Montgomery was declared dead by people who forged papers, hired a crematorium staff, and pivoted a grieving public into a cover. We have all the evidence."
Phones hovered. Cameras sought the screen. "Why?" someone shouted.
"Because they needed a body," Aurelius said. "Because they needed insurance. Because they needed money. Because a young woman didn't suit whatever their plan was."
Ludmila's face drained. "You have no right—"
"We have the right to present facts," Pax said from the back. He released the screenshots to live feeds. The footage hit streams. The sound of murmurs became a roar.
"You lied," I said, voice hard, standing in front of them. "You argued I was a problem. You sold my death for your profit. You demanded I be cremated. You thought a town would accept their girl turned to ash so you could sleep well at night."
Gene's mouth worked. Charlotte swallowed.
"Is this true?" sawyer stammered, looking from Ludmila to his mother to the screen.
"It is true," Ludmila said at first. Then, "I—I didn't—" Her voice cracked. "I said things...we were cornered. Evie threatened us. She wanted to ruin everything."
"You threatened me with the truth," I said. "So you tried to erase me."
The guests were a sea of shocked faces. Phones were raised. People filmed. A woman directly behind me said, "Oh my God."
"It was Arjun's idea to hire low-level men," Ludmila pleaded. "He said he would handle the rest. He promised it would look clean."
"Arjun is in the back," Pax said, voice like the click of a metronome. Two uniformed men went through the lobby doors and came with a man in dirty shirt—Arjun—his jaw clenched. Arjun was no longer playing worldly; he looked terrified and small.
Someone in the audience—one of Gene's clients—had the decency to yell, "Shame!"
The crowd's murmurs ratcheted into anger.
"Do you see?" I asked the room. "They called me home only to trade me. They tried to kill me. I came back because they left me no right to. I came back for everyone who thinks family is love."
Ludmila's hands trembled. "You monster!" she screamed at me, and then, "No—no—"
She ran toward a table, her heel caught on the hem of her dress, and she stumbled and fell down the few steps to the guest level. The cameras captured the fall. The guests rose. A dozen people rushed to her hand as if they were saving a fallen goddess.
Gene's face had gone a ghastly pale. He covered his mouth as if the words might escape and make an aerosol of his guilt.
"Call security," Charlotte whimpered. "This is slander!"
"Security?" someone laughed. "You asked them to burn her."
When a cluster of older women pulled out their phones to record, it was not to defend Ludmila. It was to add to the chorus.
Ludmila scrambled to her feet, hair loose, mascara running. Her performance had become raw. "You—You trapped me," she gasped. "I was doing what was best for the family. You—"
"You wanted what was best for the ledger," Aurelius said. "Not your child."
"How could you!" Gene pleaded somewhere between excuses and sobs. "I—"
"No," I said. "You cannot ask now for pity. You made a market of me."
Then it happened: a young woman in the crowd—a neighbor who had once been at my table as a volunteer—stood up and spat, "You pretended to mourn her and schemed to sell her!"
More voices joined. People who'd been polite now shouted accusations. Reporters set mics to faces.
Ludmila went from denial to shaking. She turned on Arjun, "You promised—"
Arjun slammed his palms against his thighs. "They told me to clear the crematorium schedule. They paid me. I thought it would be a fake, just a switch. I didn't—"
"You didn't kill her," someone yelled.
Arjun's head shook. "I didn't think—" He stuttered. "I was drunk with money. I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
"Do you deny the payments?" a reporter asked Gene.
Gene's voice was a broken thing now. "I...I signed. I authorized it. I—"
The room chilled. Paperwork shown on the screen indicated payments, signatures—Gene's signature, Charlotte's notarized letter. Names, dates.
"Do you see the proof?" I asked. "Do you see how you sold me?"
"Shut up!" Ludmila screamed, and then, in a way I had imagined since the cold, she snapped. The mask fell, and she looked terrified.
Gene dropped to his knees. "Please," he whispered, hands out like a beggar. "Please, Evie—please—"
"Get up," Charlotte sobbed, body broken. "Stand up."
"No." He did not stand. He crawled toward me on the floor. The hum of the crowd was a living thing. People stepped back. Some filmed with their phones. Someone shouted, "Kneel!"
Gene sobbed. "I'll pay. I'll pay. Everything. Forgive me."
I had wanted spectacle. This was worse—real. I had wanted their humiliation. Here it was: my father begging on the marble, his suit rumpled, his face red and ruined. Ludmila crumpled on a nearby chair. Charlotte pressed her hands to her mouth and wept with a sound like someone losing a small human thing.
"I—" Ludmila tried to say something to the crowd. "We were scared. We thought Evie would ruin us. She threatened—"
"Silence," Aurelius said.
Then something like release came over me. Seeing him broken carried a power I hadn't expected. He had his hands folded, shoulders rigid like steel wires. He had given them the worst thing—truth.
Security came forward and detained Arjun on the spot. People leaned in. A woman screamed, "Justice!"
Ludmila slumped, staring at the ornate ceiling. The cameras caught it all: the foolishness, the plotting, the face of greed. Within an hour the story had spread. The internet fed like a beast. People were trading the footage. The hotel staff took sides. The groom-to-be—Sawyer—stood dazed, his name half strangled in headlines.
"Please," Gene begged against my shoe, voice cracked. "Don't take my money, Evie. Take whatever."
I looked at him. He had betrayed the life we'd had. He had tried to sell my days like a ledger.
"You're going to pay," I said, but more than money. "You will explain this to everyone you've ever lied to. You will live under the shame you built. You will be in the press. You will be left without the safety you sold me for."
He wailed and the crowd shrank like a tide pulling back. Ludmila tried to stand and run past security. Two officers took her arms and cuffed her with searchlight eyes. She looked up at me with a face so small and raw I had pity for a blip—then she spat in a general direction and begged for forgiveness.
They could not leave on that day. The city wanted blood, and they had served it up. The police interviewed them in the hotel conference room while reporters waited by the press entrance. People took pictures as they were led to cars. A thousand small lamps of rage flickered on individual phones.
I walked out of the hotel in the late light. Aurelius's hand closed briefly around my arm, not to stop me, but to anchor me. "You did a good thing," he said.
"Did I?" I asked. "I wanted them ruined. I wanted public humiliation."
"You wanted accountability," he corrected. "There's a difference."
"It feels the same," I said.
Over the next weeks, the aftermath soaked everything. Ludmila's endorsements vanished. Corporate partners froze the family's accounts pending investigations. The socialites who once smiled at my father's table pointed and considered damages. Townspeople who had once praised my parents now waited to see the court documents.
But the law is slow. The worst revenge, I had realized, was to make them live in the reality they'd created. My father slept with guilt like a pill. Ludmila screamed to the press inside the bounds of legal counsel. Sawyer's mother refused to meet his eyes.
There was the other thing: Aurelius's son, City. The boy's illness had tightened around our arrangement like a rope. City needed cord blood that matched AB negative. The science was precise, cold, and has no mercy.
"I will not use children as currency," I told Aurelius once, sitting in the quiet of his office, the city like a map beneath us.
"I will not ask you to harm your child," he said. "I will ask you to be the mother of a child who may save my son. If that sounds monstrous, say no. If that's the price of our arrangement, then I accept the slaughter of my ego."
"You speak like a ledger," I said. "Like someone who counts life in columns."
"I'm a man who will do anything to save his child," he answered. "That shifts the math."
I was still only me: a woman who had been attempted on, erased, catalogued, and boxed. Now I sat and chose what to do with this life. I thought of my foster parents, of the woman with the blood from her heart—every moment they had sheltered me, the scraps they'd given me, and how I owed them everything.
"I will do it," I said.
"You understand you're choosing a life with me," Aurelius warned. "You're choosing months of being under my roof. You're choosing public invisibility."
"I understand," I said. "And I choose my own terms."
He smiled, small and rare. "Good. Then we set a schedule. We prepare. You heal. You gain weight. You get well enough for pregnancy."
"Do you ever not bargain?" I asked.
"Only in the hospital when a child is asleep," he said softly. "Only then."
The months were hard. There were doctors and pills and late-night visits to the neonatal lab where cord units were stored like relics. There were ultrasounds and quiet hours filled with things neither of us spoke. Aurelius trained me to be patient; I taught him how to laugh when a sandwich found the right balance between taste and necessity.
I had a mission now: save City. Save myself. Save my foster parents' peace.
And somewhere in the back of the plan, I wrote revenge into tiny letters. I would not be a footnote anymore.
The End
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