Revenge17 min read
I Woke Up Two Days Before He Died
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"I can't breathe," I say, and the snow bites my cheeks.
They're shouting. Someone throws an egg. Someone else spits a smear of vegetable on my sleeve.
"Shame her! Shame her!" a woman screams.
I try to tear the cloth from my mouth. "I'm not—" I can't say the words. My mouth is full of rags.
"She wanted my husband!" the woman next to me roars. "She wanted my man!"
"Stop!" a man's polished shoe lands at my head. "We won't have such shame here."
A dozen hands. A dozen slaps.
They cut my hair first. The blade is patient, quick, cruel. My braids fall like black rain.
"Long Ge," the man with the suit says softly, like he's offering me a last kindness. "If you change your mind, I can help."
I spit blood in his face.
"Werner Campbell," I mouth through the cloth. "You liar."
He blanches when he hears a name I used once like a prayer. He tries to smile and fails.
"You remember someone named Gabriel Blair?" I try with my eyes. I fight to breathe, to move my lips, to make sound. "Where is he?"
Werner's lips curl into a thin line. He mouths two words like a dull blade.
"Dead."
My heart—no, the emptiness inside where my heart should be—stops. My legs go numb. The world tilts.
"You're lying," I say to the wind. "No."
Then a hand clamps my hair. The woman who led the crowd—Elise Armstrong—leans close, nails like claws.
"She still wants him," Elise hisses. "Let's see the price of her shame."
They shove me down. The snow drinks my blood. My head fills with red light and a name: Gabriel.
I scream. I try to lunge for Werner, but ropes bind my wrists. People laugh.
"She's trying to bite him!" someone shouts.
I bite. I bite until my jaw hurts.
A blade slips, a red thread of hair falls, and I taste iron.
"She's dead! She killed herself!" someone cries, seeing my neck slick with a thin red line that wasn't there a second before.
Werner takes Elise's hand. He breathes as if he has been handed a prize.
"I didn't want to soil your hands," he says, and they dance away like two thieves who found a coin.
I stare at them until my eyes won't move.
"I will find you in the next life," I whisper. The words hang useless and futile.
*
"Long Ge! Wake up! Wake up now!" a young woman's voice yells in my ear.
My lashes flutter. I cough. My mother? Her smell—sour bread and warm wool—wraps me.
"Mom?" I say, and my voice is soft and thin.
She slaps my shoulder with an angry affection. "Get up! If you don't hurry, the cart will leave without you!"
I sit up too fast. My tongue sticks to my teeth. I blink at the cheap calendar on the wall.
December 9978.
My chest catches. I remember everything: the square, the crowd, the rope, the blade, Werner's smirk, Elise's bright eye, Gabriel's face as he held me once like I was a child. I remember the red thread that bound me to a skull in some empty grass and a child's small voice chanting across a space I did not understand.
I had died.
And now I breathe again on the day Gabriel went missing.
Two years before. Two years before he vanished into a cold that swallowed him.
"Mom, I have to go to market," I blurt. "I'll go with the carts."
My mother's face gathers worry. "It's cold. You'll freeze. You can tell Gabriel to buy it—"
"I want to go," I cut her off. I feel something else in me besides fear. A cold bright focus like steel.
I run.
The village boundary is thin with frost. The cart is gone. My breath puffs and I hunt the hoofprints.
"There!" I shout. A blurred shape carries a child on a bicycle. A cart idles ten breaths ahead.
"Wait for me!" I scream and run until my thighs burn.
Someone on the cart leans down. "Iris? Why are you here?"
Werner Campbell smiles with a practiced ease. He still smells like soap and machine oil. He is still dangerous in a way I can feel like hunger.
"Where's Gabriel?" I ask.
A woman on the cart points. "He left with a boy who had a bloody nose. He said he'd take him to the clinic."
My face goes pale but not with cold. "He went to the clinic?"
I jump onto the cart and search. The cart is full of sleepy farmers and gossip.
"Where did they go?" I press, but no one seems to care enough to remember.
Then I see him.
Gabriel Blair stands with the careless balance of a man who knows a thousand ways to fix a roof and one way to keep his hands clean. He is alive. His face turns when he hears my name.
"Iris!" he says, and I fall into him like water runs into empty vessels.
"Gabriel—" The world does not split this time. He is real. He is here.
I clutch his waist so hard my fingers hurt.
"You're back," he says, breathless.
"I'm not letting you disappear," I tell him. I taste truth in the words.
He stiffens like someone struck.
"What did you hear?" he asks.
"Someone dropped a letter," I say between breaths. "Someone tried to frame—"
Werner looks away. Sweat is visible under his collar.
Gabriel's jaw hardens. "Stay close."
*
We watch the cart pull. I want to shout that I have been somewhere else, that I died with a blade through my throat and woke in a wet dark field tied to a skeleton's hand by a red string, but the words look ridiculous coming out of me, so I keep my mouth shut.
Later, in the clinic, the doctor shakes his head. "He had a cut and a concussion. A child fell on him and he went with the child to keep him from bleeding. He's fine. He left early."
"Fine?" I say. "Fine? He vanished before—"
Gabriel squeezes my hand. "I won't let anyone hurt you. Not you. Not him."
"How did he get stabbed in the last life?" I ask. My voice is small, a child pulling at a rope.
Gabriel looks away. "I don't know."
That answer makes something in me shift into place like a key.
Someone tried to use him as bait. Someone wanted him gone.
I think of Werner's hands, of Elise's nails, of the way the crowd hated me. I remember the red string connecting me to something that should have stayed buried.
"Werner lied," I tell Gabriel that night, under a sky of cold stars. "He set a trap."
Gabriel's eyes go raw. "We will prove it."
"How?" I whisper.
He laughs, a low, horrible laugh.
"Like thieves," he says. "We'll borrow a trick."
He is a moon of steel. He thinks in slow clever strains. He has friends who think in action.
We plan, and the planning is a kind of worship.
*
Two days later, at the center of the town, there is a rumor in a child’s hand and a thick envelope on a bench.
"Drop it," a voice hisses. A small boy sprints away.
The envelope is found by five men from the city program who live in our town. They read the pages, and color drains from their faces.
"Who wrote this?" one says.
The letters accuse each of them of private things they did not do. The names and details are wrong and true at once.
Werner is standing nearby, his smile as casual as a blade hidden in a sleeve.
"Those letters were for you," Werner says in a voice of oily silk. "They were to show they will return to the city, if—if they are good. You must take care."
They gather the pages. Their anger is like tinder.
"What a liar," one spits. "He made us look like trash."
The men surround Werner. The first blow is a fist, the second a push. The sack of his pretense opens.
I hide behind a boulder with Gabriel. "He manipulated them," I whisper. "He made them hate Gabriel."
Gabriel's jaw tightens. "Let them be angry. Let them wake up."
They beat Werner like men beating a rotten tree to get fruit to fall. He laughs at first, then shouts, then panics. "I didn't do anything!" he cries. He admits, choked and raw, that he wrote the letters to make the others hate Gabriel, to isolate him.
"You're lying," he says at the end, but it's a child's lie, thin and useless.
They leave him bruised in the snow like a dog. They plan to take him to the village leader, to make a proper complaint.
"Good," I whisper. The memory of last life flashes—this is the start of something that used to end in a cold bed and a quiet grave.
But Gabriel is not content with the same ending.
"You did good," he murmurs. "But this is only a beginning."
He looks at me with an idea like iron in his head. "We need proof. We need him to confess to everyone. Publicly."
I nod. Revenge is not a blade. It's a trap that opens at the right time.
*
We go to work.
Gabriel and I seed a rumor like a fisherman drops bait. We speak to women who had given Werner their hearts and found only empty rooms. We learn which daughters in the village still burn with love for him. We teach them what to doubt, how to ask the right small questions that unravel a man's lies.
"Long ago, he promised me the city," an ugly woman named Guadalupe Compton tells me when I corner her near the well. "He said he would make me his forever."
"Did he ever admit other women?" I ask.
She pauses, and we watch the pause bloom into light. She tells. One woman tells another. The story gathers like rain.
We let the town's curiosity do the rest. People start to come to the knowledge with the right pills of doubt. They knock on doors and ask small leading things. They read the letters we had burned and re-copied with Werner's handwriting traced onto them.
"Who would do that?" someone cries. "Who would write ugly things about us and make our men fight?"
They look, and again the hunt begins.
Werner still moves like a man who expects fortune to pull him free, like a cat that always finds a ladder. He does not suspect the net gathering on his heel.
We set the stage for the day that will change everything. Gabriel's plan is simple and cruelly effective: let those girls see the truth with their eyes. A trap. A reveal. A public place. A microphone.
I make sure the girls who love Werner are there. I make sure Guadalupe is there.
I sit down like a queen about to be served a bowl and wait.
*
"Today," Gabriel says softly when we arrive at the meeting in the village hall, "the truth goes out."
The village hall is full. Farmers, their wives, those who hate gossip and those who thrive on it. Elise Armstrong arrives with Werner, a porcelain smile. She sits beside him as if she owns the world.
I walk out like a girl in a new dress. "Everyone," I call. My voice is simple and bright. "I have something to tell you."
They all turn.
"Werner Campbell lied to you."
The hall coughs. Werner's face darkens. Elise's hand finds his knee like a spar.
"Everyone listen," I say. "He wrote those letters. He forged them. He tells lies to break people. He staged a plot to make Gabriel look guilty—"
"Stop!" Werner snaps. He stands up quick as a man who fears being unmasked. He looks at Elise. "She is mad. She is a liar."
"Tell them," I say.
"So what if I did?" Werner answers. "What's that to you? Why drag my name in the dirt?"
"Because he killed Gabriel." The room hushes like a cover being lifted.
Werner goes so white his teeth stand out. He grips his chair.
"You can't say that," Elise hisses.
"I can," I say. My throat hurts but I keep speaking. "You used them to make Gabriel weak. You used people's gullibility to guide blades. You set men to do the dirty and kept clean hands."
"You're mad," Werner says. He is laughing now. "You ruined your life. You're grieving. You think this is the way to go."
I press my fingers in my palms and remember the snow, the rope, the mirror with my swollen face, the last words I mouthed in the dirt.
"Why did you send those letters?" one of the men shouts.
"Because I wanted to go back to the city," Werner says. "Because I wanted to be freed. Those letters would cause confusion. It was a plan." His voice is small. "I didn't kill anyone! I didn't—"
"Who else has the letters, Werner?" Gabriel asks calmly.
Werner swallows. "My pen. My hand. I wrote them."
We bring out the evidence: scraps of paper, letters, pieces where Werner's handwriting matches the letters the men found. We show photographs of him meeting women secretly. We show the small gifts he gave that were evidence of other broken promises.
The first sound is a trickle—then a river. Women begin to cry. Their voices are low and salt. They call the names they had held in their chests and ask if they had been fooled.
"I thought he loved me," one says. "I gave him my hair ribbon."
"Who else?" Elise claws at Werner. "Who else did you ruin?"
Werner's composure erodes. He waves his hands. He tries to make it a game: "They're jealous. They're all mad."
It doesn't work.
"Confess," Gabriel says. His hand is steady on the evidence. "Tell them what you did."
Werner's eyes go to Elise. She is cold as iron now, because the town's eyes are on her as well. She realizes she is part of the stage.
"Was it for the city?" Gabriel presses.
Werner's lips tremble. "I wanted to go. I thought—"
"Thought to set the stage," I say. "Thought to make others fall. You thought to get Gabriel out of the way. You thought Gabriel would vanish and you would get the prize."
It is not just unpleasant. It is ugly and perfect. Werner bows and then rises and his voice cracks.
"You have to understand—"
"Do you have witnesses?" Gabriel asks.
"I have men who would deny everything," Werner says. "I have friends who will take my word."
"You have our proof," I say, and we hand the proof to the village council. There are villagers with blackened faces who remember past wrongs. The evidence is heavy. Werner starts to sweat.
He tries to bargain. "I can fix this. I can pay. I'll leave. I—"
"There's no paying for what you did," Gabriel says. "You destroyed lives. You nearly killed him."
Werner collapses. He sobs. He begs. He tries to blame us. He cries out: "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"
And then the worst thing happens for him, the village does exactly what the rules promised they'd do for him.
Women stand near the doors with buckets. Someone films with a small box that sings—people's new toys—phones, and a child holds it up like a torch.
"Make him explain in the square," a man says.
"Yes," someone whispers, and then it's decided.
"Werner Campbell," the village leader says, "tell everyone what you did."
Werner's face, once smooth, is a map of panic.
"I told the village the letters were to push you to return," he says. "I wanted the five men to be outraged. I wanted to make Gabriel a target so the rest would leave him, so I'd have—"
He stops. His voice is raw now. No one believes him.
We make him swear to everything, and he does.
Then Elise stands up.
"You made me do things I didn't believe!" she screams. "He promised me—"
"Promise?" I ask. My voice is small but it cuts.
She cannot speak. Her own peers would not let her.
The humiliation is surgical. They take his work. They take the money he "gifted" to women and show it to everyone. They read the list of other things he'd done.
He tries to win pity. The camera clicks. People nod. I watch Elise's skin go chalk-white. She sees someone she thought she owned walk naked in front of a thousand eyes.
"How could you?" she whispers. Then, because truth is a whip, a voice from the back says, "You didn't stop him either."
A wave of disgust rolls through the crowd. Phones record, old men open their mouths in disgust, mothers stare with the kind of hate only parents have when someone ruins their daughters.
"How can you look anyone in the face again?" someone asks Werner.
He shakes. "I didn't mean—"
"That excuse is deadlier than your knife," Gabriel says.
The village does not let him off.
They expel him from the market. They tell the council to strip him of his small privileges. They tell his employers what he did. Elise's brother stands up and throws down a letter of divorce—the word itself is a crack of thunder.
The media those small boxes bring spreads the scene. By nightfall, the story is not a whisper but a scream. The city picks it up. People who remember his face in the markets spit when they see him.
That night Werner sits in a corner of his uncle's barn and is humiliated in a way the dead never felt. People come at him to get closure. In one final scene that will not be forgotten, a woman—one he cheated—slaps him so hard his cheek blooms red. He falls to his knees. He begs. He cries.
"Please," he says, "I will fix it. I will give you money. I will—"
"Leave," they tell him. "Go where no one will ever find you."
And for the first time, he has nothing. He loses his work contract. He loses Elise's favor. He loses the respect he bought with borrowed smiles.
Later, a few men come with a piece of rope. They drag him out in front of everyone and make him kneel. My hands don't tremble as I watch.
Elise weeps. "Forgive me," she tells me, but I don't know what she's asking for. The woman who once beat me in a square now looks hollow.
The penalties continue: the farm where Werner worked finds his cover blown and fires him. His phone fills with messages of people who once liked him but now hate him. The city charges him for fraud with documents; the landlord starts eviction in the spring. By morning the internet has his name coupled with the word pervert. His family begins to distance themselves. Business partners suddenly "have no memory of him."
It is not a pleasant triumph. It is a thorough one.
I feel my hands shake. I look at Gabriel. He stands with me like a promise.
"Is this enough?" I whisper.
"This is the beginning," he says. He puts a hand at the small of my back. My heart catches.
*
The rest moves quickly.
The women who had been fooled by Werner arrive at the hostel. They stand in his room like witnesses at a crime scene. Gerard is in the corner biting his knuckles.
"Lies," he says at first, but the words fail like thin paper.
One girl comes forward with her ribbon. Another with a small coin he had promised in a kiss. They gather, and they tell their stories in a chorus until the truth is loud enough to break things.
Elise leaves with her head low. The town has eaten her illusions. She will not be spared. Yet she is not the chief criminal; Werner is.
I have thought of the red string that bound me to a skeleton. I have thought of the child who bound me back to breath. I do not yet know what it means, but I know this: the thread is not for vengeance alone. It is for life.
We go home like two people who have stolen a sunrise. Gabriel gives me the smallest thing he had made: a simple red cord, braided with care. "For your wrist," he says. "Happy birthday."
My chest hits like a bell. "You made this?"
"Yes," he says. His face eases into something bright. "I figured if things go dark, you'll tie it on and remember."
I tie it on. It sits like a quiet pulse against my skin. I can feel warmth where there should be numbness.
"Thank you," I say.
He looks at me like a man seeing me for the first time. "Iris," he says, and I hear my name become a thing he keeps.
"I'm not your sister," I say, and the words are a little reckless, like a sparrow fluttering away.
He laughs. "I thought you were."
"No." I touch his cheek. "I'm not."
The world stops for a second. He steps closer. The air tastes like bread and iron.
"Iris," he says, and the word is a confession. He presses a kiss to my forehead. It's small, gentle, and I feel the whole of my chest break into something like light.
He does not pull away.
"Are you happy?" he asks, half afraid.
"I am," I say. The red cord bites my skin pleasantly. "For now. But not just happy. Dangerous. I want him to fall harder."
"Then we'll make him," he says. He takes my hand. "Together."
*
Days later, Werner's punishment becomes a story. The city strips him from the list that allowed him to find work elsewhere. He loses contracts, funds dry up. The women who had been fooled begin to heal with the truth like a clean cut. Their eyes are clearer.
Elise leaves to live with a sister in the city where her name is another face in a crowd. She writes letters that she will later burn.
Werner goes to courts and tries to bargain. The judge reads the file. The prosecutor smiles in a way like a wolf.
"You incited harassment," the prosecutor says. "You forged documents. You manipulated vulnerable people. You created a scheme to set a man against a man. You will pay."
The verdict is not the cage I had wanted—no one goes to prison for a long time—but the penalties are crushing: loss of public standing, heavy fines, legal injunctions, and a civil suit from those who were slandered. The news becomes a chorus that visits his face in every home.
He loses his job; his small factory refuses to be associated with him. His rent, his reputation, his friends all evaporate. When he pleads, people crowd outside the hall and film him telling his children he had meant to do no harm. His children—who had been clean of his selfishness—turn away.
I watch him in court with a calm I did not have before. He sees me and tries to spit accusations. He sees Gabriel standing nearer to me like a wall, like a promise. He sees the red cord around my wrist and he seizes the memory of me in the snow.
He collapses in the last hearing. He screams that he didn't mean for anybody to die. He screams, "Not Gabriel!" as if that would fix the past.
It doesn't.
Public opinion becomes a weight heavier than any chain. His name is on lists that people use to warn others. Bars refuse him. The local church asks him to leave its council.
He is left with a life smaller than his lies.
"Is he dead?" a teenage boy asks me when I pass the town market.
"No," I say. "He is alive, and that is the punishment."
They do worse things than put him in a cell. They make him watch his empire dissolve. They make him lose everything he thought he could buy.
I don't sit on a throne. I don't dance a victory. I sit with Gabriel and red strings on our wrists and feel the world tilt.
"We did it," he says.
"No," I answer. "We did right."
He squeezes my hand. "Then it's enough."
We live with that for a while. Life moves in the strange small things: we repair roofs, we mend fences, we make bread. I bake buns and sell them at market. Gabriel helps with the stove and calls me "Iris" in the quiet places.
People watch us and nod. Some women who once would not have spoken to me now bring me eggs. The world, fragile as it is, becomes softer in parts.
But the red string in my pocket twitches.
One night a small figure appears beside my bed. He is a child who smells of hay and coal and nothing else, with a face like a secret. He calls himself Tuan.
"You woke him," Tuan says, pointing to Gabriel's sleeping frame.
"I don't understand," I whisper.
Tuan smiles. "You pulled a thread. The world let you try. You touched a cord left in bones. You dragged life back for a breath. We did good work."
"You were with that—skeleton?" I ask.
"Not the skeleton," Tuan says. "The thread. It was the only tie between the world of the living and the place a thing goes. You used it."
"Why me?" I ask. "Why would it bring me back?"
Tuan sits on my windowsill and begins to hum. It is a sound that makes the curtains move though no wind is outside.
"It pulled because you had a knot," he says. "Anger and fairness. Not pure hate. That keeps the line warm. The string doesn't like to be wasted."
He tips his head. "You have to know—if you unmake a future, you risk something else. But you fixed this not for yourself alone."
I think of Gabriel. Of the red cord on my wrist. Of my family list. Of the ruin I must avoid. I want to keep the gift, not the hazard.
"What do you want?" I ask Tuan.
"To help," he says. "But in exchange? Promise to use it wisely. Don't wrap it around vengeance alone. Wrap it around living."
I take his little hand. I feel the pulse of something ancient and ridiculous and tender.
"Promise," I whisper.
"And name me if you must," he says. "When the world breaks again, call me. I'll come. I owe it to the thread."
I tell nothing of Tuan to anyone. One can be dangerous with such friends. Only Gabriel learns of the child's visit, because he catches me smiling into darkness.
"You saw him," he says.
"Yes," I say.
He grins like a boy. "So we have a guardian spirit and a red cord? We are very well off."
We tie matching small cords on our wrists—his red, mine with a thin blue thread woven into it. A private pact.
We are not naïve. We tidy the map of threats. Some of the worst men leave. Some of the small-time cheats find no market for their dishonesty.
Months go by. The village is kinder. My family does not suffer the chain of tragedies I had remembered. My uncle's well is not flooded. My father continues to build furniture. My grandmother sits in the yard and picks at her knitting. The list I had written is shrinking.
One night, under winter stars, Gabriel comes to me with a letter. "They found proof of another crime," he says.
"Which?" I ask.
He unfolds the paper. It's an old ledger. It's the sort of small thing that can erase a man by public patience alone: a record of bribes Werner paid to a local factory to receive pulpy favors. People had turned away because the evidence was like a shadow. Now it's a fact.
"This will end him," I say.
"It will end the part of him that thrives on lies," Gabriel answers. "We will not dance on his bones. We will let truth take its place."
The next day, they come with a van and cameras, and the men from two towns take Werner away under civil orders. He has to face a trial not of vengeance but of facts. The world builds a small justice.
I do not cheer. I tie my red cord tighter.
"Do you regret killing him?" a woman asks me years later, smiling like a cat with a full belly.
"I didn't kill him," I say simply. "I kept him from killing again."
Gabriel takes my hand. "We kept him from doing more harm."
We live. We work. I bake, and the little shop becomes a small place where people stop for warmth. Gabriel tells stories to the village children about how the sky can be kinder to those who are brave. I teach the girls to read maps and to tie knots on ropes for safety.
We marry in a small kitchen, the red cords tied into a small braid over our hands. My grandmother attends, my parents—alive in this new timeline—smile and pass plates. Elise writes a note of apology that she later tears up; she receives no answer.
At the wedding, Gabriel stands with his hand at the small of my back. He leans in and says, "I promised I'd keep you safe. Will you keep me company?"
I smile like a person released from a long winter. "I promise," I say. "But also, Gabriel—"
"Yes?"
"Don't ever tell me you don't want me like a man might say guilded things. Say it straight."
He kisses me, simple and true. He says, "I want you."
"I want you too," I answer, and the word is a small revolution.
Years unfold like linen. Werner is a warning. He becomes a memory of a time when people were careless with love and lies. The red thread that once tied me to a skeleton stays tucked in the back of a drawer. It is a relic of something that gave me one more chance. I do not touch it often.
When my daughter is born, Gabriel wraps a small cord around her tiny wrist. "We will give her rope and bread and truth," he says.
I watch his hands, the same hands that held me the day the village lifted a man into shame. I look at the child's small fist and trace a promise with my thumb.
In the evening, when the light is low and small warm things crowd the windowsill, I hold Gabriel's hand.
"Do you ever think about the other world?" I ask.
"Sometimes," he says. "But mostly, I look at what's in front of me."
I smile. My life was remade by a red string and a child named Tuan and a man who would not die quietly. We turned a death into a lesson.
Outside, the village sleeps. A phone buzzes in another town with a story about a man who ruined people and paid a price. A small camera light dies.
I lay my head on Gabriel's shoulder and say him the promise I'd made two years before.
"I will not forget what I saw," I whisper.
"Nor will I," he answers.
We are two people who kept a promise to live.
The End
— Thank you for reading —