Face-Slapping11 min read
I Woke Up to Him Kneeling — Then I Took Back My Life
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I remember the hospital like a kept photograph: stainless light, the thin scent of disinfectant, and him kneeling beside my bed, suit tailored to extreme, bowing as if the floor could redeem him.
"Davina," he whispered, voice cracked like ice, "don't— don't go."
"I smile," I tried to say. "You like my smile." My teeth tasted of blood and the words were small. My hand found his cheek. He was gorgeous even then—Knox Ali, my husband, like a dark statue come alive.
"Promise me one thing," I breathed. "Live. Live for both of us."
He laughed between sobs, as if laughter could hold back the world. "I will," he said. "I swear, Davina. This life, one wife only."
I closed my eyes. There was guilt, regret, memories like knives—my family, fire, the men I had betrayed. "If I die," I said, "you will cry. But not too long."
"We'll cry together," Knox said, and I let go of everything for a heartbeat that felt like home. Then I died.
Rain came next—cold, impatient. Time, in the other direction, is the cruellest joke.
I opened my eyes to Knox's shadow over a different bed, rain slapping the window. I was lighter and more afraid than before.
"Wake up." Knox's voice was a low command and a pleading at once. "You tried to—what did you take?"
"Just pills," I heard myself say. "The ones I thought would scare them."
He grabbed a lamp and flung it in the hallway like thunder, then came back with hands that weren't all restraint. River Silva, Knox's aide, stood in the doorway, sullen and practical. "You can't just—" he said, halfway between scolding and warning.
"Are you awake?" Knox demanded at the bed.
"Knox." I answered like a child saying the name I loved.
"Don't do it again," he ground out, though his fingers were gentle as he cleaned the mark on my wrist. "You are not a toy."
"I know." I wanted to laugh but the room spun, light and heavy.
"Again?" River said to Knox with a half-smile that was actually worry. "You have to lock the medicine up, sir."
Knox snarled and then, softer, "I'll do it. All of it. I won't let anything hurt you."
Later he ordered locks and took all the pills, the knives, every angle. Everyone in the house moved like they were part of one man's campaign to make the world safe for one woman. I watched and learned. I smiled and pretended I had no plan.
"You're behaving strange," River teased me later, but his eyes were curious. "Is this for show, m'lady?"
"No," I said. "This is real."
I asked him then what day it was. He said, "June twenty-first, 2019."
June twenty-first of a past I hadn't lived yet—so I was living backward into my own life. I had a second chance, a handful of years to set right what had come before: the fire that burned my home, the betrayals that killed my grandfather, my parents, my brother—Milo England—and the woman whose smile had been brighter than any altar's gods: Diana Brady.
"Diana?" I said the name like poison. She had been raised with us, then she became what she wanted: clever, pretty, hungry. She had designs on everything. She had designs that almost ate my life.
"You must be exhausted," Knox murmured, and tucked me into the bed.
I woke the next day with resolve—two lives' worth of memory and one chance to make them add up differently.
"You're making breakfast?" he asked when he found me in the kitchen.
"I wanted to," I said, pleased with the way the pans felt in my hands like instruments for something else—healing, perhaps, or revenge.
"Don't overdo it," Knox warned, though his shoulders eased. "Let the staff—"
"No," I said, "I want to do it for you."
He watched me as if watching the only comfortable thing left. "Fine."
When I walked into his office later with two food boxes and a smile, he had been in the middle of a meeting. Papers flew, men bent toward him like sailors to a mast. My presence was a quiet slap of color in the gray and I felt him look at me as if I were a small world he would guard.
"Who are you?" a young receptionist finally asked, uncertain.
"I'm Knox's wife," I said simply, and showed our wedding photo.
He stood, the briefest break from his cold steel. "Take them in," he said, voice like gravel and silk.
"How long are you staying?" he asked me later, alone in his conference room after the men filed out and the food had saved his teams from fainting over slides.
"Maybe forever," I said. "If you'll have me."
His mouth said nothing, but the way his hand found mine said everything that words failed to.
I wore my role for two reasons: to learn, and to hide. I needed to know who had hurt my family, and I needed to prepare. Bernardo Kim—I still call him Master Bernardo, though he is a bent old man—taught me a thing called the latent soul-scorch powder: a plague in a tiny bottle, invisible in a tea cup, deadly when left to its own devices.
"You are a reborn soul," he said, eyes bright despite age. "That is a rare seed. Tell no one. Learn the herbs, learn my hands."
"I will," I promised, and knelt before him properly because in this life I would be a student. I wanted his help to keep the poison inside me from waking, and to make a weapon world-ready. "Teach me everything."
He did, and he warned me: "Keep it secret. If you say you have lived before, you break the bargain of ghosts. Live like a wind and don't tell where you came from."
I took the remedies and the instructions and a second life like a map. I swallowed bitter things and practiced smiling. Knox was patient and, when my hands trembled, he steadied them. He invented reasons to be home. He crowed with a private pride when I fed him something and he cleaned the plate. He called me "Davina" and, once, "Alas, my vow," and I put my head on his chest and pretended his belonging was the whole world.
But I was not simply content or wife. I was a lit fuse. I struck hard.
"Do not go back to your home yet," Knox said gently one evening, holding my frail fingers in his. "Let me come with you."
"Not yet," I told him. "I want to check things. I need to be careful."
He stood, jaw tightening with a kind of private fury. "Then I come with you."
He did. I asked him to, and he obliged. He walked into my childhood house as if he were entering a courtroom where he intended to judge every traitor by the look on their face. I walked beside him, hands in his as if guided by a tether that might be cut but never would be.
We found Diana the moment we passed the gate. She stood there as if the house were a stage and she had been appointed the final act in a melodrama of her own making.
"How pretty of you to return," she cooed, all poison and perfume.
"Stay away from my family," I said quietly. "You are poison."
"Me?" she fluttered a silk hand. "Davina, darling, I'm a darling. Don't be melodramatic."
Enrique Wolf arrived then, smiling like a man who had bought himself a clear conscience and had no idea what else it cost. He was elegant, the smile of someone used to doors opening for him.
"You brought him," he said to Diana, as if we were an acquisition rather than a rebuke. "How quaint."
"Leave," Knox said.
"Oh, Knox," Diana whispered sweetly. "You always were theatrical."
Knox's fingers tightened on my hand. "I said leave."
They did not.
The arrest did not come by law because before I leaked anything there were other deeds waiting to be done. Instead I played a game that made those who watched decide the verdict for themselves. A plan that would cast light into their private room and make their crimes too loud to deny.
Weeks later the trustees' banquet was scheduled—half charity, half industry show. I walked in on Knox's arm, not as a bride but as a small sovereign with a very sharp plan. The hall was full: two hundred or more, glitter on their throats, phone screens up. This is where I would make my stand. This is where villains are always the most exposed.
"Good evening," I said, smiling as cameras bloomed into awareness like flowers. "I would like to say a few words."
"You?" murmured Diana to Enrique. "She is bold."
"You will regret this," Enrique replied, but he said it to the air because my microphone had already been switched live.
"Many of you know me as Knox Ali's wife," I began. "I am also Davina Drake from the house across the road. I lost my family not long ago."
A sympathetic murmur ran like a cold wind through the crowd.
"I was poisoned," I said, and then I turned to the giant screen the event had set up. "This is the chain of messages and orders that brought harm to my family."
The screen blinked and then threw itself across the wall. Photos, recordings, and documents spread like stained glass across the hall. There were receipts for special powders, messages instructing a doctor to "ensure a long, quiet illness," and then the clincher: bank transfers from Diana's name into the secret accounts tied to Enrique's private projects. Someone gasped. Phones rose.
"That's not true!" Diana cried, the first step of that ugly arc: from composure to panic.
"It's fraud," Enrique said more loudly, "and slander. Remove that!"
"No." I looked at the room and then back to the screen. "It is truth. Observe."
I had waited years to collect this proof, and Knox had been my firm anchor through all of it. He did not speak; he only watched, black and still as a cliff.
I watched the expression change on Diana's face: smug to shocked, quick as a flinch. She waved her hands as if to clear a fog. "You fabricated this," she said. "You are mad."
A woman in the crowd started to whisper, "Is this true?" A dozen phones began to film. A man at the back leaned forward. The climate in the room shifted from polite to electric.
"Turn it off," Enrique demanded. He strode forward with a hand like a judge and light like a threat.
"You will not silence proof with threat," I said. I had practiced calm and now steadied my voice. "There are witnesses and ledgers. I will have the rest delivered to the press."
The crowd leaned in as if drawn by the gravity of the exposed truth. Diana's face lost more color.
"That's libel!" she wailed, her costume of innocence shredding. "Get her out of here!"
"Sit down you liar!" a voice from the front called out—my brother's old friend. People murmured agreement, the social moats closing around Diana and Enrique.
They tried to deny, to call in favors, to flash documents that meant nothing, to distract. Enrique's smile snapped into a leaf of paper curling away in wind. I watched him cycle: arrogance, confusion, denial. Then fear. The audience stopped being polite. Phones were recording. Feet shuffled like a wave about to crest.
"No, no, you can't—" Enrique stammered. "This is—"
"What is this?" a woman demanded, loud enough that the whole room heard. She had tears in her eyes, a woman who had met my family in hard times. "You killed people."
"You can't say that," Diana said, clutching at Enrique's sleeve as if he were the last straw to keep her upright. "We did nothing wrong. It's a lie."
"Look at your own messages," I said. "You told your assistant the phrase to derail the legal audit. You ordered poison in grams. You wrote that you wanted 'a slow fall.'"
Enrique hit the table with both hands as if reality were a thing to be smashed. He sat down hard, trembling. "You're insane," he said, voice thin.
"I saw the messages," a junior trustee said, reading aloud the time-stamped transcript. "And I checked the accounts. It's all there."
Diana's face loosened in a way that made people take their phones from their faces to look. Her mouth opened. She swallowed.
A minute later she stepped forward and clasped hands together, the theatrical penitent. "Please," she cried out, small suddenly. "Please, I didn't— I didn't mean to hurt anyone. It got out of hand. Please—"
The crowd reacted like a beast startled awake. Phones went up, voices bridged into chorus, and the hall hummed with a new pulse. Someone started clapping, not with approval but with a savage satisfaction.
"Shut up!" Diana tried to shout, but her voice was lost.
I watched as her features unspooled: from cunning to bewilderment to a bright, terrible rage, and finally to submission. Her knees buckled and she sank onto the floor, knuckles white as she reached out to Enrique for support.
"Get up," Enrique demanded, but his arms were shaking. He had been king under satin and now he was a man without a throne.
"No." I stepped forward. "Stand and face the people you hurt."
"Don't!" Diana cried, eyes rimmed in red. "I didn't—"
"You lied and you murdered," I said, and in the sentence was every night I had sat alone with my grief. "You've hidden money and given poison. You made bargains with men who would sell life for a price."
"He—" Enrique grabbed for a bottle of mineral water like a small child, chest heaving.
"Please," he begged at last, bowing his head until his forehead hit the carpeted floor. "Please, don't—please spare me."
The room went perfectly silent then. I saw a line of faces: excitement, pity, revulsion. Cameras clicked like small, formal guns.
"Record it," someone said. "Record this."
People were filming, people were whispering. The security staff took Diana up by the arm when she would not move. She was still muttering denials and excuses: "I didn't mean— We were trying to protect the future," she said, a phrase she used like a talisman.
Enrique, who had once smiled at the back of the room in such a way that doors opened, was now weeping with both hands pressed to his face. He staggered toward the nearest exit and then stopped, turning, falling to his knees again in the center of the hall.
"Please," he gasped. "Please, Davina. Please." His voice had gone from smug iron to child's rag.
"No mercy," I said, and I did not feel triumphant. Only clean. "Make them answer for what they took."
There were shouts of "Arrest them!" and "Call the police!" Some people recorded with grim satisfaction; others just watched, eyes wide. A few of the older trustees stood silent, a scandal folding them into quiet. Someone started clapping—first one hand, then many, until the sound was a small thunder of consent. People were taking photos and uploading them. Within minutes the hall's small screen was full of new notifications. The world outside was waking.
Diana's face changed again: arrogance → disbelief → denial → panic → collapse → pleading. Enrique's trajectory matched hers. The audience gave them each a chorus of reactions: outrage, whispers, laughter, applause, the quick lenses of phones. One man turned and shouted, "Shame!" Others hissed. A woman sobbed openly.
They were led out, both shaken, both pleading. Their once-slick reputations splintered into pieces and fell like confetti across the polished floor. They left in disgrace, filmed, recorded, their every movement a drop in the world's new ledger.
Later, when officers came and took statements and the press swarmed Knox into a private corner to speak of truth and accountability, I stood with my hand in his. He squeezed, then pulled me close.
"You were merciless," he said softly. "Do you regret it?"
"No," I said. "I regret that it took this long."
Months unreeled after that night. Investigations peeled back accounts like fruit. Diana and Enrique had to face not just corporate boards but criminal inquiry. The scandal ran. It broke the people who had spent years hiding behind silk and smiles.
I learned, in the space after public ruin, how the guilty react inside the cage of exposure: first the grin of entitlement, then the pale confusion when the world does not bend, then their loud denials, followed by whispers, then collapse into begging. They did every step for me to witness, for the record.
Knox never left my side through any of it. He stood by me at meetings and funerals and at odd quiet Sunday mornings when nothing spectacular happened except that we were allowed to be safe together. We built a small life of plain things: breakfast, an argument about nothing, then forgiveness. It was enough.
I kept Bernardo's lessons secret. I kept the latent powder under lock not because I feared it would hurt me but because I knew what desperate people would do when their backs were to the wall.
We removed the trap that allowed them to harrow our family: bribes exposed, assets frozen, the lab that had mixed the slow powders closed. Diana's fall took three public stages: the banquet, the trustees' hearing, and the broadcast trial where, in front of cameras and an audience, she knelt and begged on a marble floor, "Please," she said, voice broken, and then she wept as the room hummed with witnesses and their phones. People recorded, cried, shouted. The city watched. The law took its turn.
There were small satisfactions: letters of apology from helpers who had been paid to throw suspicion, reparations mapped out in long tables of numbers, and—most quietly—the slow regrowth of the small things that mattered. I learned to plant tomatoes again in a garden that had been bone ash. I learned to keep a kettle for two.
One night, as rain hammered the window and the house settled into sleep, Knox bent to my mouth like a vow. "Tell me that you won't leave me," he said, almost pleading.
"I won't," I said and swallowed truth. "If I die, you will find a thousand stubborn ways to come with me."
He laughed then, and I let him. Outside, the world had rearranged itself into something less murderous and more human. The old bruises were not gone, but they had been turned into maps.
Before I close this chapter, I want to mark one thing in the small ledger of our life: the stone amber—the rare thing Bernardo said might exist—remained a myth. We searched; we collected rumors. We planted the seed of new defense: honesty. If Byzantium has built walls, we learned to keep each other safe in ways that do not cost anyone their freedom.
I touch Knox's wrist sometimes, and I know he is mine. He kneels sometimes still—only now he kneels to tie my shoe or to pick up a toy in the garden. Once, in a quiet hour, he said, "You saved my stubborn heart from being small."
"I did what I had to," I answered. "We saved each other."
The cameras still flash on sad anniversaries. The trial aesthetics fade. But if you ever wonder whether a reborn woman can make the world right, look at the kitchen table where two cups of tea steam and a simple watch on the shelf that ticks like life—steady, insistent.
We live in the tick now.
The End
— Thank you for reading —