Revenge17 min read
Look What You Made Me Do
ButterPicks16 views
1
The first time Franco Yang hit me, it was on our bed.
His hand closed around my jaw. "What were you thinking about just now?" he asked, low and hard.
I stammered. He tightened his grip.
"Say it," he ordered.
I couldn't. He pinched my neck, pulled my head back until my throat shouted. When he let go the bruise bloomed into a dark, angry moon.
"I thought you said something about that chandelier," I said later, voice small.
"In my bed, thinking of another man?" he whispered in my ear as if tenderness and cruelty were the same thing.
I remember the look: the false soft of his deer eyes. "You made me do this," he murmured, like a benediction and a verdict both.
2
Three months later, he knelt before me in the living room with a cup of warm milk, face all apology. "Kaylee, I'm sorry. Let me see."
He reached for the bruise on my neck. I flinched; my back hit the couch. He looked up, and in his gaze there was that impossible, trusting softness—the thing that had once convinced me to meet him again and again.
"Does it still hurt?" he asked.
"A little," I lied.
He promised, "I won't do that again."
"Really?" I asked.
"Really," he said, and the word landed like a soft stone. I believed him. I couldn't know then that six months from that breath he'd use that same hand to break me and that in less than a year I'd make him pay.
3
I fell in love with Franco's eyes, the same way you fall for a detail and then lose the map. He wore exhaustion like a coat. He had a small chain of boutiques and the nerve to look like he disdained the world and still owned it. I matched him to a shop assistant the first time, and he smiled one of those lazy, ruined smiles.
"Tomorrow?" he said, when I'd asked if I could come back with questions about his designs.
"Tomorrow won't work," I said, and then I looked at him. The look stopped being mine. "Fine. Tomorrow."
He was the man who had once stood at the warehouse door with a rope in his hands. When I walked up, pretending the store was only my destination, he looked as if someone had taken the rope away and suddenly offered me everything he'd hoarded.
"Can I ask you a few questions about your brand?" I said professionally.
"Tomorrow," he said soft. He said so much with that lazy tilt of his mouth that I thought I was walking into daylight, not into a pit.
4
On our first proper date, he left a Rolls Royce at my campus gate. He knew my snacks, my songs, my favorite restaurant. When he named my parents' hometown across the table, I froze.
"What's wrong?" Franco asked.
"I have to go," I said.
"Let me walk you," he offered and looped his scarf around my neck. He leaned down close. I didn't catch the words. I only saw Benjamin across the street, and in a flash of panic I tried to move away. Franco grabbed me.
"If we'd met earlier," he said in my ear, "it would have been different."
A minute later Benjamin's bike launched himself into the crosswalk, and a car that shouldn't have been there hit us. I remember being thrown; I remember hands and red and the sound of someone yelling.
A Rolls Royce idled like a ghost by the curb. Franco watched with the soft, dependent look he'd given me in the shop. I begged him, "Please, help him."
5
Benjamin survived. He walked away broken—paralyzed from the thigh down—but his arms were still warm when I held him. We drifted apart after graduation. He needed Shanghai; I was offered a job in Beijing. "Don't throw away the offer," Benjamin said. "I'll understand."
"I'll come back," I said like a promise I wanted to keep. The world was small then; everything seemed negotiable.
Franco moved into the space between us like ivy. He bought me things, designed me a dress that looked beautiful and like rope at the waist, left me a puppy when I said I liked dogs.
He named the puppy Pappa. "Take care of him while I'm away," he said. "I'll be back in three days."
Pappa nearly died of infection on the second night. I called Franco in a panic. He returned immediately. I remember sleeping with my head on his shoulder in the pet clinic and waking with my hand in his.
"We can try this," he whispered. "Can we?" he asked, and the raw wanting made me say yes.
6
Living with Franco was like living inside a meticulously arranged storm. He rented me an apartment near my office, showed up at my meetings with bouquets and coffee, and learned the names of my colleagues. He controlled everything and wrapped his control in care.
"You're mine now," he murmured more than once, like a promise.
Then Ewan Schwarz appeared at the firm—tall, anointed by nepotism, and flattering in the way men who expect favors are. We were both assigned to a research project and Ewan began to invite me to lunch.
He didn't care that I was with someone. "Let's talk about the campaign's target demo," he said on our first one-on-one, voice syrupy.
I agreed to two lunches. The third, he left the table angry after his phone call and hurled a glass of lemon water into my face. Two days later I'd been accused of stealing company secrets. My badge revoked, my desk emptied, I walked out with boxes and nothing but the clothes on my back.
Franco stopped me with a driver at the curb. "Get in," he said.
7
"He ruined your career?" Franco asked, looking strangely pleased.
"This is not funny," I said.
"You still have me," he said, and that phrase became a threat later. He smiled like victory. "You'll see. They'll hire you again."
I curled in the passenger seat. "My friends are gone."
"You still have me," he repeated, as if the sentence could stitch everything that had been torn.
Then he braked sharply at a dark bend. The car was inches from a tree. I felt his hand twist my chin to face him. "What else do you want?" he asked.
"Pappa," I said, a contracted protest. "You and Pappa and me—we matter."
He softened, then kissed me, and my resistance collapsed into a reason to lock the door. That night I moved into his house. Two months later, the house held too much: the walls closed in, and every kindness became a leash.
8
The worst of the early months was not the bruises that healed. It was the way he weaponized tenderness during sex, making consent into currency. He used my compliance; he punished my defiance. He watched and learned every tremor and used it against me.
"Don't make this harder than it needs to be," he said, and the words were instructions and prophecy.
I tried to be clever. I tried to be small. But he always saw through the pretense. When I slipped up—coming home late, answering a text a second too slow—he would send a chilled photo of Pappa struggling with water, and my world flattened into a single fear: if I pushed him, he'd hurt Pappa.
So I didn't push. Until the day I saw Benjamin in a supermarket.
9
We both reached for the same last pack of salmon. He hobbled on his crutch, changed—older, a scarred tenderness in his face. He looked at my neck and the bruise there, then looked at me as if remembering a name.
"Is he hurting you?" he asked.
"Not the way you mean," I whispered.
"Leave him," Benjamin said. "I'll help. We'll get you away."
"I can't," I said. "It's not that easy."
"Leave tonight," he insisted. "I can drive. I can—"
We made plans in whispers, passing notes like contraband. He gave me a burner phone and monitored our meetings like a sentry. I thought I was brave. I thought I was clever.
I chose a hot southern city as an escape—Franco thought I hated the heat. Benjamin arranged the drive. It rained the night I left. I waited at the highway in the storm until Benjamin's car failed to come. I stood there and the rain melted off of me. I was soaked through and small and feeling like something waiting to be punished.
Then Franco's headlights broke through.
10
He dragged me back in the downpour. "You're not leaving," he snarled. That night he pinned me to the couch and choked me until I thought my chest would split. He showed me a video on a tablet: Benjamin, blindfolded, strapped to a chair with a chemical drum suspended above him. A switch sat in Franco's hand.
"Would you like to watch while I finish it?" he asked.
"I thought you said you loved me," I said. "You promised."
"Love requires sacrifice," Franco said. "You forced me to choose. Look what you made me do."
The words were a key. He had never needed much of an excuse. If I wished to leave, he would show me, by any means, why leaving was not an option.
He unknotted Benjamin hours later and forced me into the sickest of bargains: be mine, and Benjamin would live. The price was silence.
We lived inside that bargain, under the constant pressure of his watchful cruelty, until I found out I was pregnant. The news should have been a birth of hope. For me it became an exit strategy, and the first spark of a plan.
11
I learned to collect evidence like a miser collects coins. I photographed bruises, recorded glossy little videos of his temper flaring, saved every humiliating message. I let him rage and taped him. I let him break my arm once and saved the ambulance report. Every scar, every small indignity fed the arsenal I was building.
At the same time I began to poke holes in his public armor. Franco loved his image. He staged affectations, took interviews where he smiled like a saint, and attended fashion shows where cameras loved him. He was famous enough now that a single scandal could crack the pedestal and reveal the rot beneath.
I needed the pedestal.
So I provoked him. I wore indifference like armor. I teased the world with small provocations and then recorded his overreactions. Once, when I bought a stack of drinks for a fan ranking he'd disdainfully disregard, he smashed the boxes into me until my arm broke. I limped into the kitchen with a camera in my bra.
"You're dangerous," Benjamin said, watching me assemble my evidence. "This could end badly."
"Good," I said. "I don't want it gentle. I want it fatal."
12
The night of Franco Yang's big runway show arrived with the hungry buzz of cameras and elites. I went because he expected me in the front row; he had gifted me a necklace that sparkled like a noose and the driver dropped me in a dress tailor-made to be seen.
I sat directly in the middle of the first row. The lights went up. Franco took the stage, planted like a flawless statue, and delivered a soft opening about art and humanity. Cameras found us—me and him—and the crowd ooohed. He was charming, polished, and the entire industry was in his orbit.
Halfway through, an image flickered over the giant screen behind him. At first people thought it was another model; then the footage turned.
There I was, on my knees, hair in my face, asking, "Please, don't hurt the baby." The camera cut to a handheld clip—Franco pinching my throat, screaming. Cut to a notification of my termination letter. Cut to Benjamin tied blindfolded under a vat of acid.
The room didn't process it all at once. There were gasps like animals on a baying wind. Phones lifted to film. People opened their mouths and couldn't close them. The polite chatter of a fashion crowd turned to the sharp sound of a wound opening.
"What's that?" the host stammered.
Franco's face changed. It went from slate to confusion to a thin smile that tried to neuter the room.
"That's not—" he began.
"Is that you?" I said, voice steady in the microphone I had hidden. I had rehearsed every season of his cruelty into that five minutes. The screen kept rolling.
"Kaylee, stop," he hissed, stepping toward me.
"This is my life," I said, louder. "You told me to look at what I made you do. So I am showing everyone. You told me we were the same. Let's see how the world likes that mirror."
13
The footage played in public for a long time. I watched his expression break into panels: first disbelief, "This is edited," he mouthed. Then anger: "You are lying," barked with a false bluster and hands like a man who didn't know how to be anything but performative. Then denial: "This is fake—this is malicious—" he tried legal words that meant little in a thunderstorm of proof. Then panic when a dozen phones thrust toward us and reporters shouted, "Franco Yang, do you admit to domestic violence?"
"That's fabricated," he said. "These are private moments."
"They're on your company tablet," I answered. "They're on his phone. They are on my hidden camera."
A woman behind me, a stylist who had once smiled at his mentorship, whispered loudly, "I didn't know."
People turned. Cameras found faces of those who had once applauded him. They recorded him now like a scab being peeled.
He started to scream, and the scream was more animal than man. The power in the room shifted. People who had swallowed his charm for years now watched him unpeel into something raw and grotesque.
"You're a monster!" someone yelled.
"How could you—" another voice broke.
"I will sue you," Franco spat, every syllable a brittle threat.
"Why did you hit her?" one reporter called, and a cluster of photographers pressed forward. "Did you hurt your fiancée? Did you threaten a child?" Their phones flashed like a rain of tiny accusatory suns.
14
Franco's face folded. He watched as the world cataloged him. He tried to salvage it: "You can't put me on trial with staged clips," he hissed. "These people will see—" His sentence dissolved.
Someone from his PR team, a man who used to smooth over his scandals, turned away and didn't speak. A model he had once championed stood and walked toward the microphones. "I don't want to work with him," she said simply. "Not after this."
The room emptied into a mob of outraged insiders. I listened to the shifting sounds: the click of phones, the indignant murmurs, the disgusted chortles, the shocked silence that held like a held breath.
Franco tried to reach me, to grab my wrist, to demand a private word. I stepped back and let my hand remain free.
"You're finished," I said softly. "Look what you made me do."
People began to film him as he shifted from smugness to pleading. "You're lying," he begged at one point, voice ragged. "I love her. I love her." He sounded like a man unlearned in the grammar of mercy. "Kaylee, please—"
"Aren't you tired?" I asked. "Aren't you tired of me proving you love by turning life into a theater of pain?"
He staggered under the weight of the cameras and the words. He tried to deny, to smear me, to call lawyers, to soothe the crowd with rehearsed remorse. His PR man whispered urgent counsel, but the bargain had been broken. The cameras didn't forget.
15
"It was manipulation!" Franco snapped finally, and the room pulsed with a new electricity—people ready for either confession or spectacle. "You are lying! You are manipulating me."
"Show me you're not," I said. "Tell them why you choked me that night. Tell them why you threatened Benjamin."
Franco opened his mouth. He closed it. He laughed once, a thin dry thing. Then he looked at the stage, at the screen that held his own body recorded in cruelty.
"I will not let this ruin me," he hissed. "You will pay for this."
He had people who would try. But at that moment the whole of the industry turned away. Contracts were suspended, partnerships put on hold. A fashion magazine editor stood and walked out. "This is not acceptable," she said, simple as a verdict. A TV host declared on air that she couldn't keep him on her center stage.
I watched his empire falter under the weight of footage captured from the intimacy of our life like a blade.
16
Then the change came. I watched his expression move to something I recognized—desperation that could become a different kind of ruin. He stumbled through a string of denials until his knees buckled and he sat on the floor by the stage and began to yell into the phone.
"Is anyone with me?" he demanded, like a drowning man testing for a rope that might not exist.
"You're done," someone in the crowd said. It was the stylist who once called him a mentor. "We don't want you."
A murmur rippled, then a roar of "Good." They filmed as his face lost color and then became pale as paper. He tried to force laughter and failed. Someone shouted that the police should be called.
He looked at me as if he had finally found the truth he always denied.
"Do you hate me?" he asked, voice a thin thread.
"I do," I said calmly. "I hate what you taught me love meant."
17
Crowds pressed around the venue doors. Reporters called out as he left. Franco pushed through them like a man seeking shelter from his own storm. He reached the back stairwell and ran. He ran up, then down, then to a rooftop. I watched from the seats as his figure scaled the emergency exit.
"Don't," a security guard called.
"Cops on the way," someone shouted.
From the stage the lights painted a ladder of gold to the rooftop where he stood like a puppet cut from its strings.
I followed him out the service door and onto the rooftop. Metal and sky and the city's low hum filled the space between us. He stood at the edge, silhouetted, the crowd below now a cluster of devices and human faces.
"Kaylee," he said, finally human in panic. "Please—"
"Look what you made me do," I said. The words had been in my mouth too long.
He laughed, a low sound that had lost all charm. "We were the same," he whispered. "You said that."
"We were never the same," I said. "You wanted proof. I gave it."
He stepped forward.
"Franco—please," I said.
He jumped.
18
There was a second of nothing and then the sound began—phones snapping, people screaming, shoes slapping on concrete. I crouched down and vomited the adrenaline out of my chest. I watched the small black point fall and knew the city would make bulletins about it.
He was gone.
The cameras recorded his last moment and the police arrived. Reporters trampled to get angles. People whispered my name and my face. The HVAC units hummed and the sky was a flat grey, like a sheet pulled taut.
The fallout was immediate. His labels collapsed. Former friends scrubbed their names from his brand. His PR people released statements of regret and confusion. Lawyers circled like vultures. "A tragic accident," some said. "A despairing end."
But the public punishment had already done its work. He'd been seen. He'd been exposed to the hunger of the world and found wanting.
19
Later, when the paper stopped spinning, I went to a clinic. The pregnancy test I had once scheduled to remove became something I couldn't bear to abandon. On the operating table my heart thudded like a nervous animal.
I felt the fetus move once, a fleeting crucible. For the first time a pang of something like tenderness struck me. I thought: if the child is mine, maybe I could rebuild a small thing that won't learn to weaponize love the way Franco did.
In a very human and private turn, I let the pregnancy go on. I didn't tell anyone. I packed little clothes in the back of a closet and learned to cradle a future like an ember.
My plan, always, had been to leave. To take Benjamin and Pappa and the child and start somewhere quiet. But fate had a different plan, and so did I.
20
After Franco's death, the industry dissolved his public life into a police file and a funeral notice. People who had once cheered stood in line to condemn. I had what I needed: the scattered shards of his cruelty, compiled and witnessed.
The evidence I had collected became a blade that cut through the public myths. Contracts were canceled. A scandal investigation opened. People who had given him platforms found it hard to look at themselves in the mirror.
And yet there was the note on his desk. Weeks later, when movers cleared the study, a small piece of paper fell into my hands. His handwriting, fragile and precise, read:
"I finally found peace. But my dear, you're still in the mud. Good luck."
I folded the paper and put it into my wallet. I was not sure whether the message was pity or provocation. Maybe both.
21
Benjamin came back into my life. He healed slowly—physically and then, in a fashion that took longer, emotionally. He did not ask for me to be someone else. He sat with me. "I don't want to be a person who needs saving," he told me once. "I want to be with someone who can see the good in me."
"I don't know if I know how," I said honestly.
"Then learn," he said. "With me."
We developed a new, careful language of consent and mutual repair. He met Pappa and said the dog's name out loud like a religion. We went to cheap dinners, to parks where the heat baked the air into love. I taught myself to answer a phone without flinching. He taught me that love could be quiet and steady.
"Do you hate him?" he asked once, fingers lacing with mine.
"I hate what he made me think love was," I said. "But not him now. What use would hatred be?"
22
Months later, a hearing convened on Franco's brand and the evidence his empire had hidden. Executives testified in camera-rich rooms. "I didn't know," one said, a tremor in his voice. "We were trying to protect the brand."
"How much did you see and ignore?" the lawyer asked. The room registered the question like a wound. People winced.
Ewan Schwarz had been the one in the company easily willing to throw me out to save his station. He sat in a small chair across from me, his face a study of polished contempt and then, as the proceedings moved, the slow collapse of a man who had leaned on cruelty like a prop.
"Ms. Clark," the judge said to me, "do you wish to speak?"
I stood.
"You asked me once why I couldn't leave. You told me I had to be careful with my life. You said, 'You made me do things.' Today I say to you as I said then: look what you made me do."
The papers reported on the legal repercussions for people who had enabled him. Contracts were voided; a few executives lost cred. People who had once underwrote his image now reaped the consequence of complacency.
23
But the punishment I most wanted was not only institutional. It was the public undoing I had engineered, the moment when those who had loved his public face had to look at the raw footage and feel the mismatch in their palms. It was the look in eyes that had once applauded him as he flinched and tried to bargain. It was the hissing silence of people who realized the man they had championed was a different man in the dark.
Ewan's punishment was different. He didn't jump from a rooftop. He didn't end his life in a dramatic flash. He was slowly stripped: job offers rescinded, industry dinners where he'd once presided now passed him over. People who had once sought his company found excuses to leave. He tried to call; his number went unanswered.
He ran into a crowd at a benefit and found himself sitting alone while the room rearranged itself around whispered judgments. "Do you see him?" someone hissed. "He helped ruin a girl."
He begged in public interviews until his voice became a boring routine; he pleaded with old friends until they left him on read. It was not dramatic, but it was a crumble, and it was visible: the slow erosion of social capital that is, in our world, a kind of water torture.
24
There were nights I woke and repeated the phrase to myself, almost like a charm. "Look what you made me do." It was a mirror I held up to everyone who had looked at Franco and preferred charm to conscience. It was also what I had said to myself for a long time: look at what you let them make you into.
Still, there were quieter punishments. At one industry dinner, Ewan was called to the stage to speak about ethics. The chair he was given held microphones; the crowd waited, used to the same smug tales. "How long did you ignore?" a woman in the first row asked when he began.
Ewan's face showed every shade of a man unspooling: first a practiced smile, then a flicker of irritation, then blankness, then the pale sheen of shame. He stumbled through platitudes. That night, a dozen young designers walked out mid-speech. Cameras caught his eyes: a man watching a bridge he had helped burn collapse. It was public and prolonged. People recorded and laughed and cried.
25
My own punishment for him had been surgical. I didn't kill him. I didn't ruin him by blood. I took his image apart and held it up. I let the world decide what to do. That was enough.
In the months after the show and the rooftop and the hearings, I built a life arranged round small, durable things: Benjamin's slow jokes, Pappa's snore, the note in my wallet, the baby's tiny kicks in the quiet.
I wrote in cheap notebooks. I learned to cook a bland stew we both liked. I taught my child the word "kind" before it could truly understand what the word meant. I learned to be less like the girl who had a game and more like the woman who wanted to protect a small heart from being used as a weapon.
26
On the day my child was born—a small, stubborn thing with Benjamin's chin and my eyes—I held him and whispered, "You will not be taught cruelty as love. You will not be taught that power is the only measure. We will teach you the rest."
Benjamin cried then, unashamed and honest. "You made me better by letting me stay," he said. "You made me human again."
I laughed then, a sound like relief. "Look what you made me do," I said, this time as a joke between two people who had rebuilt.
27
There are things I still do at night. I sometimes climb to our small apartment balcony, finger the little paper from Franco's desk, and watch the city. Sometimes I whisper the old line out loud. "Look what you made me do," I murmur in the dark, and it is both accusation and a test.
Once, in a dream, Franco's deer eyes hovered in my window. I woke up and found Benjamin's hand warm over my belly. "Are you okay?" he asked.
"I am," I answered.
We raised a child in quiet. We protected him the way people protect a candle in the wind. We taught him to ask before he took. We taught him to say sorry when he hurt. We taught him that love is to give, not to possess.
28
If you ask me if I'd do it again—the public exposure, the slow revenge—I'd say yes and no. I would do the thing that saved my son and the lives Franco threatened, but I would also like to be kinder to my younger self who learned to weaponize pain in order to take back agency.
At the end of the story, I keep Franco's last note in my wallet, folded and fragile. It reads like an epitaph, both pity and spite. I keep Pappa's collar in a drawer. I keep a small stone from the rooftop—a terrible souvenir that means a terrible end.
When my son asks what the stone is, I tell him that sometimes people break. "But we collect the pieces and make something else," I say. He smiles like a sun I have not yet learned to earn.
"Look what you made me do," I tell my son once, and he looks puzzled.
"What did I make you do?" he asks, serious in the way children are when they think they've lost something. His voice is an honest, hammering thing.
"You made me brave," I say. "You made me stop running."
He laughs and throws the small stone. It bounces and rolls into the grass, like a small, irreverent comet.
29
The city keeps turning. People forget. People forgive. Sometimes people remember. My life isn't a tidy moral. It is messy and hard and full of the small breaths that mean the world.
One morning I found a stranger at the door—an editor with a camera, gentler than the rest. "We'd like to tell your story," she said. "If you want."
I looked at Benjamin, sleeping with our child tucked into the crook of his arm, Pappa's snoring like a small engine nearby. I thought of the rooftop and the runway and the tiny note that said "Good luck."
"Tell it," I said. "But tell them this: look what you made me do."
The End
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