Face-Slapping17 min read
I Wore His Scars and Stole His Sunrise
ButterPicks18 views
"System loaded," the voice said, metallic and calm.
"I don't wish to be a footnote," I whispered back to an empty, damp room that smelled of mildew and old metal. "I don't want him to win."
A small, folded light unfurled into a creature that looked like a tiny fan-winged serpent. It landed on my shoulder and tapped my collarbone with something like affection.
"My name is Belen Corey," it chirped in a tone too bright for the place, "and I'm—your interface."
I blinked. "Belen? You look like a coffee stain with wings."
"It is an expression of the system," Belen said. "Host, your mission: prevent the collapse. Male-supporting-character's blackness index is critical."
"Translate." I sat up, feeling the thin mattress complain.
"Your target is Cesar Schmitt," Belen said. "Blackness index ninety percent and climbing. If index reaches one hundred percent, host dies."
"Die," I repeated, the word like a stone in my mouth. "You mean me?"
"Yes," Belen answered. "And this timeline ends if you fail."
My hands tightened on the sheet. "Why are you so cheerful about it?"
Belen curled its fan-like tail. "Cheerful is efficient. Also, you forgot to accept payment of five hundred spiritual stones."
"I didn't want them."
"Too late," Belen whispered. "They've been invested."
I stared at the barred window. Moonlight cut the wall, everything outside bright and normal. Inside, a man in the next cell paced like a trapped comet.
"This room," I said, "is his."
Cesar Schmitt had a face designed to make people feel small. Even in a faded prison robe he carried an emperor's posture: long neck, a jaw that could slice arguments in half. His eyes were cliffs—if you stood too close you might fall into them. Belen nudged my shoulder.
"Blackness drops when he trusts. You can interrupt the script."
I had read the files. In the original script, Cesar became a scarred hero—then he became fuel. He was supposed to survive the cell, meet the heroine who warmed him like a rare sun, and die for love.
I was not playing to let him die. Not if I had a choice.
I learned fast in a place where silence is currency.
That night I decided the first step was simple: make him laugh enough to stop burning.
I found him alone, leaning on a table, thumb running absentmindedly over the edge of a photograph. The frame had been kicked, the glass cloudy from too many palms.
"Do I know you?" his voice asked before I could think of a lie.
"No," I said. "But I know what criminals do in movies. They always keep the best chair."
"You broke my lamp," he observed.
"I thought it would be poetic." I tried to move my arm like I didn't hate the guess that I was a cheap substitute for someone he had once loved.
His head tilted. He watched me as if I were a decimal he couldn't quite calculate. "Why would someone like you come to someone like me?"
"Because I'm bad at reading stage directions."
Cesar's lips curved. It was not a smile that promised warmth. It was an evaluation, a small, dangerous approval. "Then do me a favor and quit playing the fool."
"Then don't fall for any fool," I said. "Especially not the kind with a factory in his chest that makes villains."
He laughed once, and the sound was a low thing like a bell someone forgot to wind. Belen chimed on my shoulder.
"Blackness drops two points," it announced. "Continue."
Days grew into a choreography. I learned to steal towels, to be the first to bring oatmeal, to serve as a hand that didn't know how to flinch. Cesar allowed me in by inches; he liked tidy absurdities and things that made sense at odd hours.
"You are not the woman in the picture," he told me once, holding the frame up like a question.
"No," I said.
"Good." He set the frame down as if closing a book. "I don't collect them."
"Then what do you collect?"
"Silence," he said. "And scars. Both are informative."
"Which are you keeping?" I asked.
He didn't answer. Outside, a siren somewhere in the city carried on the wind like an insistence.
"Why do you let me live?" I asked once, kneeling on the stone as if prayer might have the right accent.
Cesar's face was a sculpture of restraint. He leaned close enough that I felt the cool rasp of his breath. "Because," he said, "you are not as simple as you pretend."
"That's my job." I smiled, which felt like a betrayal of every plan I had.
"You will hurt me," he said. "Do not make it a hobby."
"Do not make it a prophecy," I answered.
We traded small bets on trivialities and won little declines in his blackness. Belen counted reductions like a miser. Each percent felt like a lifeline pulled taut.
Then came the night when my old life—what I remembered of it and what I had been told about it—collapsed into a pattern I hadn't seen.
My phone vibrated through the paper-thin wall. Belen trembled.
"Host," it whispered. "Cade Davis is en route."
Cade Davis was a name in a file I had been assigned to fight against. He was the man who had promised forever and then traded a kidney like it was a down payment. He had money, a company, a divided heart. He had been kind and then brutal. He was the script's male lead, a man who loved the heroine and stole mine.
I curled my fingers around the bed, thinking of lights and auctions and how a photograph could be both a weapon and a relic. I had been told at the start that I must not make him happy. The female voice in past lives had wanted him to live alone, "love but never be loved." It had demanded cruelty.
I was not built to obey cruelty.
"Who are you?" I asked the photograph on Cesar's desk, the face in its frame long gone.
"You will find out," Belen said.
Cade's voice on the other side of the glass made the room tilt.
"Are you Jade Zhang?" he asked before anyone introduced him. The air in the corridor condensed.
I wrapped the sentence that had been tied to my throat into something sharper. "I am," I said.
Cade's face was a ledger of regret and money. He stepped into view, eyebrows like knives. "You're awake."
"You're always late," I said. "You hoard apologies like they're antiques."
"Don't," he said. He folded his hands the way a man prepped a knife. "Why did you leave for so long?"
I looked at him and saw the machine that had made the decision to trade organs for love. I thought of all the times I had said yes to hush and not to honesty because every 'yes' was exchangeable for a breath. I wanted to tell him everything, to spill the ledger and let the pages fly, to watch him die under the truth.
Instead, I said, "You dug a hole with someone else's shovel."
He laughed, a dry thing with no humor. "You mean I dug my own? Fine."
"You dug my kidney out of my chest," I said.
"Because I—" he stopped. He had no right to finish. "Because I couldn't find a donor in time for Annabelle Gerard," he said at last. "She saved me."
Annabelle Gerard. The name scraped across my ribs.
"Why then," I whispered, "did you not find me first?"
"Because you weren't there," he said. "Because a different woman was. Because I believed in what she said of herself."
"You believed a story that fit your instruments," I answered. "You chose narrative over me."
We stared. I recognized the thin things that made people like him. He thought of truth as a currency and decided to bankrupt people.
"Jade," he said softly, "I made mistakes."
"That's not a sentence," I said. "That's an obituary for a moral."
He looked like a man who had excavated too long and found nothing but debt.
"Look," he said. "I want to fix things."
"How?" I asked.
"Start by letting me pay back."
"You can't pay back what you can never buy: trust."
He sank like a man learning to apologize for oxygen.
In the days that followed, my duties multiplied. I split myself into two: the Jade who tendered towels to Cesar and the Jade who plotted by the glow of a laptop. Belen watched both with the patience of an accountant.
"Blackness rate decreasing," it would sing. "Eighty-five. Eighty-two."
"You sound delighted," I said.
"I am," it replied. "Your strategies are operational."
I learned things: the company's ledger could be a knife; a public video could be an eraser. I collected small, quiet proofs: a parking toll that did not match a timeline, a receipt for a service that shouldn't have been performed.
Annabelle Gerard's name hung like a challenge. It was the silver thread of every betrayal. She had the kind of face designed to be palmed across magazine covers and a laugh that could spend money. She was a woman who knew how to be loved in other people's rooms.
I decided to press where she was soft.
At a gala that glittered like a manipulated constellation, the world of money and applause gathered like moths.
"Cade," Annabelle said in a voice designed to split silk. She slid beside him in a dress that was an ultimatum.
"You look luminous," Cade said, a man who had once buried a kidney and now looked stunned by the light.
"Thank you." Annabelle's smile did a precise work. "You didn't have to come."
"It's my event," he said. "I had to."
I was in the audience because I had said yes to being where she would be. Belen perched on my shoulder like a small conscience.
"I think tonight will be interesting," I whispered.
"Host," Belen purred. "Do not fail."
I rose when the signal came. The room's chandelier swallowed the space in diamond teeth. Cameras flicked like insect eyes. They would remember the moments we made.
I pressed the laptop into someone from PR's hand. "Play the footage," I said, my voice like a coin.
On the big screen: a car. Snow. A woman—masked—leaning into a window. A quick cut. A serrated hand moving. The camera angle was patient and exact. A saw blade scratching the steering column. Another cut. The frame in which a woman—my face, not in the photograph but as motion—drilled at a line like trying to remove an anchor.
The room softened. Cameras stopped.
Annabelle's color did not change. Her smile calcified.
Cade's eyes moved from the screen to me like a live thing. They became hard, very hard.
"Is that..." he started.
"Watch it," I said.
The video continued. It did not need to speak to be clearer. It showed the crashed car minutes later; it showed two bodies; it showed a woman throwing herself at them and trying to save them. It showed hands hitting her from behind; a darkness swallowing her.
A million tiny splinters of the room's air began to flash.
"That's—" Annabelle breathed. The exact word was small and insufficient.
On the screen, a hand—my hand—clenched the steering wheel, my palms reddened. The footage ended with a woman being dragged away.
The room exhaled a chorus of disbelief. Cameras started to capture everything.
Annabelle stood. For a moment she looked like a goddess who had misread the script.
"This is fabricated," she said, voice like a violin string being plucked until it snapped. "It's a setup."
"Is it?" I asked. "Do you want me to walk you through the frame by frame?"
She laughed once, brittle. "Who benefits from this?"
"The truth," said a man at the front, his voice steady as concrete. It was Cesar. He had come, as if a magnet had been turned. "You have been the beneficiary."
Annabelle's eyes narrowed. "Cesar," she said. "You're out."
"I am not," he said. "I'm right here."
She shifted, like an animal aware of a fence. The cameras found her face and did not blink. She made the first wrong move: she turned to the press with her palms up as if she were surprised at the light.
"You're making an accusation without proof," she said. "This is slander."
"Then explain the footage," I said. "Explain the saw blade."
"Explain?" she echoed. "You offer edited videos. You want spectacle, Ms. Zhang? Fine. But this doesn't change anything."
"It changes everything." Cesar's voice was colder than ice in a freezer. "It changes whether you go home tonight as Annabelle Gerard, or whether you go home as a guest of the police."
She tilted her head, still arrogant.
"We have testimony," I said aloud. "We have receipts. We have the car log and the night-time GPS and the voice in the video. We have people who will say you were there."
Annabelle's mouth made a small O. The press smelled the blood of a good story.
"What you have is gossip," she said. "You have no arrest. You have no evidence."
Cameras streamed the room's silence like oil.
"Evidence?" Cesar's voice dropped to a place that swallowed applause. "You break a file into pieces and think you still hold authority? You have a history of making men comfortable with their lies."
"For god's sake, Cesar," Annabelle hissed. She had been priming the air for a counterattack, for someone to shield her. Her eyes flicked for a handhold.
"Annabelle Gerard," I said. "Tell the room what you paid for."
She laughed, a high thin noise. "You are mad."
"Tell them," Cesar ordered, quiet as a guillotine. "Tell them about the payments. Tell them about the men."
Her smile began to tremble.
"You dare—" she started, and the crowd leaned in as if gravity had been replaced with curiosity.
"We have wire transfers," I said. "We have testimonies. We have a phone call. The men who were hired to make someone vanish—"
"Stop," Annabelle said. She had been composed so far. A hairline fissure appeared. "You have no right—"
"Do you remember the phone call?" Cesar asked. "The exact line you used? The exact time stamp?"
She swallowed. The audience's chatter faltered.
"Stop lying," she muttered.
Now the theater of our lives became a courtroom without a judge. Someone at the back clicked record as an instinct.
"I paid them to scare her," she admitted at last, her voice leaking. "I told them to make her disappearance look like an accident."
The room caught fire.
Annabelle's expression crashed from arrogance to shock.
"What? No—" she said. Her mouth opened like a vent. "I didn't mean—"
"You meant for her to die," Cesar said, and the syllables were patient as rainfall. "You meant to make room. For myself, perhaps. For money. For a comfortable life."
She laughed then, a brittle, frightened thing. She shook her head violently as if to somehow disprove her own words.
"No—no! You can't do this!" she cried. "They told me they'd only scare her. I'd never—"
"You paid for the thrill of being above law," I said. "You believed your money was a shield."
Suddenly, she snapped into denial. "This is terrorism of reputation! I will sue! I will—"
Faces in the crowd blurred into a single living organism of curiosity and malice. Phones rose like little lighthouses.
"Please," Annabelle begged, now sounding like someone who had misread the scale of the world. "Please, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"
The phonelines that had been her armor became knives. The room recorded every angle, every micro-expression. There was a slow, delicious cruelty to the reversal: the woman who had been safe in rooms that smelled of cash was now under the lights. She was becoming spectacle.
"Get out," Cesar said at last. His hand reached with an authority I had not seen before. He commanded the world of the wealthy like someone flipping a switch.
Annabelle fell from arrogance into frantic bargaining. "Please—" she choked. "Cade, help me!"
Cade's face was a map of a man who had traded a kidney and the right to judge for comfort. He flinched like a man who had been called to a battlefield he had armored himself to avoid. But the room watched him. He looked as if he had been shucked out of certainty.
"Why did you do it?" he asked, not as a lawyer but as a man learning the silhouette of betrayal.
"For your sake!" she cried. "For our sake! You don't understand what the world is—"
"No," he said. "I understand people who burn down lives to avoid looking at their own."
She started to lose control. Her annotations of the past minutes unraveled and a different pattern emerged: smugness that collapsed to disbelief; then denial; then pleading.
"Please!" She dropped to her knees on that satin floor under the chandelier and pressed her palms together like a woman who had learned piety as a last resort. The crowd gasped, not in pity but in anticipation.
"Please—" she sobbed. "I didn't—"
Cameras trained on her like a jury who had come to watch a public crucifixion. People whispered. Someone took a photo. Another started a live stream.
"Get up," Cesar told her.
"I will," she cried. "I'll do anything."
"Then tell them," I said. "Tell them every name. Tell them every payment. Tell them who pushed and who profited."
She shook her head so violently I thought her neck might give. A laugh came out of her like a hiccup. "I can't," she said. "I won't—"
There was a hush and then a sharp sound like a dropped fork.
"My wallet," announced a voice from the back. "Evidence."
A woman produced a paper envelope. It had been slipped in by a nervous assistant who had watched a different morality for too long. Inside, wire transfer receipts cut together like a garland.
Annabelle's hands found the floor again. She was not steady enough to hide.
"You're done," Cesar said. "You wanted a life with no consequences. This is consequence."
Her face drained of color, collapsing through the stages: first the arrogant curl gone, then the slack shock, then the denial, then the pleading. "I didn't mean—please, please."
People were filming. Phones captured her heaving chest. A cluster of gallery journalists leaned forward.
"Look at her," someone said. "Who is still clapping for her?"
"No one," a cameraman answered. He zoomed in as if the moment were a rare insect.
She slid onto her knees and then onto her hands, as if the ground would swallow her. Tears rubbed tracks down her face that could not be claimed as dignity.
Cameras clicked. Hands covered mouths. A few people laughed. Others purred their approval of the fall. Someone who had once done time for a headline now tasted the cruelty of an exposed life.
"This is what we do when people think they can buy absolution," Cesar said. He had the granite voice of someone who had watched riverbeds change. "You made a decision that cost lives."
Annabelle's face was crumpled. She tried to crawl, as if flight were still a possibility. "Please!" she wailed. "Please—"
A thousand small verdicts issued in the room. Some were quiet, some harsh, all electric. The press fed on it. Somebody took a photograph of her shoes, which had always been polished like flags of intent.
"I will let the law decide," I said, the words tasting of something like ash and less like triumph. "But your public life is over."
She looked at me with the horror of a person who had thought herself safe in all rooms. She looked tiny, like a child who had been told the sun would set tonight.
"Please don't—" she begged. She was a study in the uncomfortable contortions of someone who had believed herself invincible.
"Get up," Cesar said. "Kneel and apologize. Say the names. Beg. Let everyone hear the looped script." He did not sound vengeful; he sounded procedural.
"I will not," she said in a voice that tried to be brittle. "I won't—"
"They will remember," I said. "If you want mercy, give them facts. If you want anonymity, choose prison. It will be honest."
The cameras hummed. A woman recorded every syllable. Annabelle put her hands together and said the names with the flatness of someone reading a grocery list that had become a testimony.
"Please," she said again. She begged, a private sound with public ears. The room made her begging into a loop on its tongues.
She cried in the way people do when their illusions are stripped thin. Her mouth made the familiar curves of regret. People clapped, a few pitifully, but mostly because applause is the cleanest currency.
She collapsed then, like someone who had been spending on credit and found the bank had closed.
"Don't look," she sobbed. "Don't let them watch."
But they watched.
Phones recorded. Someone laughed; someone called for order; someone whispered, "She always thought money could hide blood."
A volunteer nurse pressed a handkerchief into her shaking hands. She pressed it to her face and wept into it like a penitent.
"Cade," she said, like a reflexive last word. "Please help me."
His jaw clenched. He had the look of a man finally understanding the shape of what he'd participated in. He did not move. He could not. The cameras moved in like vultures.
Her public fall lasted minutes that would be rolled into commentary for years. Her pleading dwindled like a candle. At last she slumped, and the room's attention wobbed and shifted on to the next appetitive thing.
When it was over, she had been stripped not of clothes but of everywhere she had been permitted to be a person. People walked away with their desire sated. The press fed. Cesar remained standing like a mountain that had not needed to roar to be heard.
Belen whispered on my shoulder, thrilled. "Blackness dropped thirty points during confession."
"You're a monster of metrics," I said.
"Efficient," Belen corrected.
After the night the world pivoted. Annabelle had asked for mercy and found only the slow, heavy hand of public justice. She tried to bargain, to plead, to buy the silence of men she'd once hired. The law would come later; the crowd's verdict was immediate.
I watched her go from smug to broken to pleading to collapse. I watched the phones feed the world. I watched her beg and wept a little because public ruin is a kind of violence.
"That's justice," Cesar said quietly when the flush of camera flashes faded. "Not because we want them small—for mercy—but because consequences are a language the powerful rarely speak."
Cade's face was a beaten ledger. He turned to leave as if the night had given him a ledger stamped and closed. I did not chase him.
Weeks after her public unmaking, other pieces of the plan fell into place. Legal cases opened. Transfers were traced. Men who had been paid to frighten confessed under pressure we had created. The world knows how to judge when it has been handed spectacle. It was ugly and necessary.
Cesar visited me in the hospital when my head had been like glass and my body like a sorrowful ledger that could not balance. He sat by the bedside and spoke without making promises.
"You look like you were built to survive things," he said.
"I am built on grudges and band-aids," I answered.
He reached and took my hand. The touch was careful. "Do you forgive him?" he asked.
"Who?" I said.
"Cade."
"I forgive him the way one forgives a falling tree for crushing a child," I said. "Forgiveness doesn't mean the wound unthreads. It means the story continues for those left to write it."
He gave a small laugh. "Poetic."
"Do you hate him?" I asked then.
Cesar didn't answer at once. He watched the window where light came like a promise.
"No," he finally said. "I recognized his kind. I simply left the choice."
We sat with a simple comfortable silence, not the kind that needs to be patched but the kind that gathers like a net.
The system pulsed. Belen ticked. "Blackness index stable," it said. "Completion in progress."
"Complete," I said, more to the air than to anything.
There would be trials. Annabelle would be carried into rooms where men would call her names and lights would be hard. She would beg for any softness. People would make art of her fall. The internet would spin it until her name was a cautionary tale.
Cade came to me one evening with his eyes full of a man who had been dismantled and found in his hands only contrition.
"I deserve it," he said. He sounded like a man who had learned how to count his debts. "I deserve all of it."
"Deserving isn't the same as being forgiven," I told him. "But you're allowed an arc. Not everyone is cruel enough to be incinerated for their worst choices."
"What do you want?" he asked.
"What every person wants," I answered. "Not revenge, but realignment. A life where you do not keep buying silence with other people's organs."
"Will you be with me?" he asked, which was the strangest currency.
"Will you stop pretending money can love?" I asked.
He swallowed. "I'll try."
"I want truth and boundaries," I said. "I want you to stay awake for me, not for a photograph of me in your chest."
He nodded. "I will take the medicine, Jade."
We were not fine. We were hobbled and honest, which is a better start than illusory love.
Cesar visited less and then more. He brought no flowers. He practiced silence like a craft. One evening, he said to me, "You were better than the woman's costume you were given to wear."
"That's your way of saying 'thank you'," I said.
He almost smiled. "Thank me," he said. "Or don't. Some things don't require gratitude."
I thought of the little fan-serpent, Belen, and of the way blackness slipped when someone is seen and held accountable. I thought of the hospital lights burning down my face and of the smell of antiseptic and cedar that a hospital carries like a secret.
At the end, we had done something neither of us could have expected: we turned a confession into a rescue operation.
Annabelle was no longer a social butterfly; she was a cautionary tale. Cage after cage was closed. Men who had been paid to frighten were now talking as if they'd swallowed knives.
The system pinged, an indifferent celestial bell.
"Mission update," Belen said. "Host life extended. Blackness index returned to baseline."
I let out a breath that I did not know I had been holding.
There were small debts I kept. A ruined book of memories that smelled like smoke. A photograph of a mother in a yellow dress I burned on a night a winter stopped pretending to be lovely.
"What will you do with your heart?" Cesar asked me once, half-joking, as if hearts were in drawers.
"I will try not to lend it like a currency," I said. "And you?"
"I will not be someone who burns people to keep warm," he said.
We both laughed, which was a fragile, human sound.
In the years that followed, the world rearranged itself. Annabelle learnt to live inside courts and the shadow of cameras. Cade learned to pay in truth, which was harder and more expensive. Cesar found a rhythm that did not include burning essential things at the altar.
As for me, I kept a small, mechanical memory in my pocket: an old wristwatch Henrique the prison guard had given me as a joke. I wound it sometimes and listened to the tick as an honest metronome. It did not promise more than time. It promised that we moved; that mistakes are to be lived with, not made into altars.
Belen curled in the pocket of my jacket, warm as a secret.
"Host?" Belen murmured. "Your next assignment waits."
I closed the watch and slipped it into the drawer with the remaining evidence—files that had once been weapons, now locked.
"No," I said. "Not yet."
I closed my eyes and felt the tiny fan-snake tap my shoulder once, like a small apology or a small blessing.
"One more night," I whispered, and the watch ticked on.
The End
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