Face-Slapping10 min read
My Replacement Bride: Salt, Blood, and the Island
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I found the video first, then the silence in my body.
"It’s just a joke, right?" I whispered to the phone with trembling fingers. The clip kept looping—two people I thought I knew in a bed, reckless and unsteady, kissing like they belonged to each other.
"Stop watching," my sister had texted; then she sent the clip.
"No." I pressed my thumb against the screen until it hurt. "No, no, no."
My stomach tightened like a fist. "Baby," I said aloud to the child inside me—my small, steady heart beating under my ribs. "I’m here. I love you."
I tried to stand, and the world tipped. Carpet rose like a wave and swallowed my feet. I fell, and the sound of my body on the floor was both thunder and apology.
"Miss—" the maid's voice was sharp. "Madam! Madam, wake up!"
Hands lifted me, hands that smelled of disinfectant and worry. "Call him. Call Doctor Andersson," the housekeeper said. I could hear the panic in the steward's voice, but all I wanted was the image to stop—his face, her laugh.
In the hospital, I woke to white and the distant keening of machines. "Where is he?" I croaked.
The nurse’s eyes dropped. "I’m sorry. The baby—" she covered her mouth. "The baby didn’t make it."
"No." The word left me hollow. I grabbed the IV stand and lunged for the door. The world blurred into a smear of lights and people. "My baby—"
"Miss! Miss! Sit—" someone seized me. "You fainted during delivery—"
My feet found the car keys on the side table without my willing it. I sat behind the wheel like a shadow, hands numb and eyes dry from too much crying. The streets passed like a film I couldn't change.
"He’s outside," the steward shouted from the hospital steps. "Mr. Andersson—"
A black car tore forward. "Giana!" he shouted, and I recognized the voice—Leon Andersson—my husband, my betrayer.
"Stop, please," he screamed as I swerved toward the bridge, as if words could stop metal and speed. He ran, and I drove. I drove until the sea opened up like an answer.
I didn't know if I wanted to die or to meet my child across the water. The guardrail approached and I saw the wet shine of ocean. I closed my eyes and smiled.
The car made a beautiful, awful parabola into saltwater. "Giana!" He screamed my name, and everything went black.
I woke to a hospital light and a thin, patient voice by my bed. "You’re alive."
I should have been grateful. I should have been relieved. Instead, my phone blinked with messages. One clip played on loop—my sister Finley with Leon in a hotel room, their laughter like knives. Betrayal is a small, sharp thing that keeps cutting even when you think you’ve learned to avoid it.
"I thought you would forgive." My father’s voice when he learned what happened was soft and terrible. "You have to save the family. Finley ran. She left us to rot. Take her place—Marry him, Giana."
I looked at him. "You want me to...?"
"Just for a while." His hands trembled. "They said if the union fails, our company will be ruined. You can come back in six months."
I swallowed. "You want me to pay for everything I’ve been given with my life."
"It's debt paid in an old way. Fifteen years you stayed. This is the return." His eyes were broken open with something I could not fix.
So I packed, and I drove to an island that smelled of salt and loneliness.
He was waiting for me, sitting like a king in a small throne of wheels.
"You’re the replacement?" Sven Yamashita’s voice was low and amused. He looked nothing like a broken man. "Cute."
"I—" I said. "I’m here to take care of you, Mr. Yamashita."
"Call me Sven." He said it like a dare. "You’re small, Giana Curtis. You look fragile. Stay three meters away from me."
"Three meters?" I blinked. "Is there—"
"You heard." His eyes were winter. "And stop pretending."
I had been prepared, in a way, for cold. I had not prepared for the way his hand could crush my wrist in a look, nor for the time he would suddenly pull me to his lap after a private massage session and whisper at my ear: "So fast, so eager."
"Let me go," I said, embarrassed and furious at the heat flushing my face.
He smiled. "Why? If you can make my nerves sing, why not practice more?"
Days on the island passed like an education. I learned to massage, to apply balms, to read charts—because Sven made me. He wanted me to understand his body as a language and to read it like a map. He pushed, he tested, he sneered. "You pretend too well," he would say. "I know the type from your world."
"Type?" I would answer. "Your sister called me a martyr."
"She’s efficient." He said nothing more. "Do as I ask."
One night, I ran. I needed to breathe away from his scathing looks and his impossible hands and the island’s constant, knowing wind. The forest swallowed me. I lost my way and the night became teeth and breath and the crackle of animal movement.
A wolf—huge and green-eyed—leapt.
I was on the ground and the world narrowed to pain. Sharp claws tore my shoulder. I tasted iron and panic. "No—please."
A man's voice split the air. "Per! Down!"
He stepped out of shadow with the wolf calming at his heel. He looked like a shadow carved into a man: tall, a face like a blade. Sven.
"You idiot," he said quietly when he pulled me into his arms. "You’re supposed to be where I can see you."
I should have hated him. Instead, I clung to him like a child. I slept in his arms as if in a harbor.
"You belong to me," he said later, in a voice that made my heart do a small, traitorous thing. "You're mine to humiliate or to keep."
"Sven," I whispered, "why me?"
"Because revenge tastes better when it cuts deep." He smiled, and in the night his hands were gentle enough to be a lie.
Time changed things. When I massaged, his leg would twitch. When I read, his face softened. "If you want me to stand," I would tell him, "you must want it too."
He looked at me long and let the world slide out of focus. "You will regret being kind," he said. "I don’t forgive."
Then came the gala—an invitation to the city in a glossy card. Leon Andersson, the man who broke me, was to be celebrated at a corporate dinner where old money met new deals. Sven told me he wanted to go "for three hours of trouble."
"We will expose them," he said. "Public humiliation tends to be effective."
I did not realize then he meant public in the way that shreds reputations—under chandeliers, on the big screen, before the board, before cameras that never blink.
That night the ballroom smelled like oil and roses. I was made up in a dress that belonged to someone else’s life and I learned to act like a counted piece on Sven's chessboard.
"Smile," Sven told me simply. "When they realize they have lost you, they will crumble."
Finley Lundberg sat with Leon at the head table, laughing like a woman who owns the light. Leon's hand was on her back, possessive and sure.
They did not see the video until they were already mid-toast.
Sven raised his glass, and the lights dimmed. "A brief presentation from our legal team," he said.
The screen burst to life with messages and videos: secret hotel tapes, hotel receipts, private chats where Leon boasted of "using her as a prize" and Finley calling the pregnancy "an inconvenience to be erased." The room went cold.
"What is this?" Leon demanded, too late. His voice cracked like a rope under weight.
"It’s truth," Sven said, and the cameras zoomed in.
"Turn it off!" Leon lunged. Men at his table sat up. The crowd murmured. Phones flicked on, recording, already feeding streams. "It’s fake! Photoshop! Set-up!"
"Is it?" Sven smiled slowly. "Or is it testimony? You two seem fond of honesty in private but not in public."
Finley stood, face showing for the first time something other than studied smugness. "You're lying!" she shrieked. "This is slander!"
"Speak quieter," Sven said pleasantly. "The microphones are live."
Leon, who had grown arrogant behind his money and status, showed a furious heat split into a panic. He tried to seize the console, to cut the feed, to reclaim the narrative.
"Do you have any idea what you did?" I stood then—my voice raw. "Do you know how you laughed while I lost more than my child? You fed me lies and then left me to die in the ocean."
They looked at me as if I had become something new under the chandelier—no longer the obedient replacement. The cameras loved that.
Leon’s face went from color to pale to the suction of guilt. "Giana—" he started.
"Don’t." I said. "I watched you kiss my sister. I watched you trade in promises. I watched you tell her to throw the baby away. Do you hear yourself?"
The crowd shifted. Someone in the back whispered, "They said their marriage was for business—" Another began to clap. A ripple of discomfort moved through the guests.
"Call security," Leon said, voice thin. He approached the stage, but hands around him restrained him.
"No," Sven said. "This is for shareholders, for the family, for the city that thought you moral."
The social cameras did the rest. They streamed the video in ten seconds. The room filled with the excited noise of spectators watching a ruin being constructed in real time.
"I never meant to—" Leon stammered. His bravado evaporated. He went through a choreography of denial to shame. "This is not true. She set me up. We were—"
"Stop," Finley screamed, hysterical. "My reputation—"
"A reputation built on humiliated others," Sven said. He gestured to me. "She was the one who paid for your math, your degree, your charm."
They tried to cling to each other. Leon fell to his knees on the polished floor. A woman at a neighboring table recorded as if it were spectacle. Someone laughed; someone cried. Phones were raised like banners.
"Please—" Leon mouthed to me, eyes wet, "I can—I'll fix this. I will."
"Fix it?" I echoed. "You are asking for forgiveness on your knees in a ballroom while half the city watches your lies. Fix it? Fix what? The lives you used? The child you abandoned?"
The crowd’s voice rose—not all in fury, but with the terrible savor of people observing the fall of an arrogant man. Someone clapped. Someone hissed. The cameras recorded the humiliation in frames that would not be erased.
Leon’s reaction: first shock; then fury; then raw, frantic denial; afterwards, a crumble into pleading; then the ugly scrabble for public sympathy.
"Please, Giana." He reached up, palms filthy with panic. "Please—"
"No." I walked past and he flinched, as if the air around me had teeth. "You lost the right the moment you laughed at my belly."
Finley tried to run—her heels slipped on the lacquered floor. She tripped into a waiter’s tray; the soup spilled across her dress like a burning brand. The room gasped. Someone recorded. A bouquet was thrown—accident or not—and landed at Leon’s feet.
"You promised me everything," he said on his knees, voice a cracked violin. "I promised to—"
"A promise to you is just a currency you spend on someone else’s chest," Sven said, his voice iron. "You are finished. You will issue a public apology, you will pay restitution to those you damaged, and you will resign from every board and committee you disgrace. The Hartmann account with your firm is frozen until we audit."
That night, in fifty different timelines, the video replayed.
I described his collapse for five minutes straight, but the punishment scene needs length. Let me be specific:
They had their moment of proud strut and whispered plans to keep privileges. Then Sven played the messages from Leon: "No one needs to know," and "She’s useful while pregnant; when she miscarried, it was perfect timing"—and Finley’s replies: "I’ll handle her; I have his ear." The room's noise drained away. Leon's face lost color. "It’s doctored!" he cried, throat thick.
Then Sven commanded the lights to focus on them. All the phones zoomed in. A thousand strangers watched the unraveling like a slow, delicious storm.
"Do you understand shame?" Sven asked. "You sold that child’s future. You told her husband to make a show of love while you were welcome in his sheets. Now you will answer for what you made me see."
Leon’s denial was a thin, fluttering leaf. He clutched his suit jacket. "I loved her," he sobbed. The lie dissolved into puddles of regret.
"Love doesn't say, 'Keep it quiet, let’s take what we want.' Love holds," I said. "You used people to make yourself large."
"Please, we'll pay—" Leon begged, voice breaking. "My family—"
"They have to live with what you did," I said. "They have to live with who you are."
Guests stood; some whispered; some applauded under their breath. A woman took a photo and the camera flash was a white bloom. Some recorded as if preserving the lesson.
Then public censure hit. Boards revoked their endorsements. Sponsors texted their cancellations. Finley’s fashion ambassador contract dissolved within an hour. Leon’s investors convened in the morning and demanded resignations. He lost his reputation like a man losing his breath.
At the climactic moment, Leon tried to salvage his dignity by lunging to the stage, trying to rip the laptop from where the evidence ran. Security restrained him, but not before hundreds of onlookers had turned on him with a predator’s relish.
He fell to his knees under bright lights and said, "Please." He sputtered promises, then shame, then bargaining. The progression was visible: smugness—confusion—denial—implausible excuses—begging.
People took pictures as if photographing a natural disaster. Someone shouted, "You pig!" A table of women stood up and booed; a man in a suit recorded the scene and posted it with the caption: "This is what arrogance looks like." The recording trended.
They went from power to pleading in under ten minutes. That’s the public punishment I had been promised. It was played over and over for weeks. The news anchors dissected the morality. The boardrooms examined the legal exposures. Their names sank.
"What will you do now?" Sven asked, quietly.
Leon looked like a man who had been carved. "I—I will fix this," he whispered.
"No," I said. "You will live with it."
The aftermath followed: press releases, lawsuits, apologies that felt like paper bandages. Finley’s face was photographed at an umbrella stand, hair covering an eye, walking away from the cameras. Leon retreated into meetings and then into silence. They had been powerful, and power turned on them like a mirror. The public punishment took their air.
After, Sven sat beside me on the island’s cliffs. "Did it feel like justice?" he asked.
"It felt like a mirror," I said. "People looked and saw themselves and you poured salt."
He made that rare, small smile that wasn't cruelty. "Good," he said. "I wanted to make him watch his empire break."
When everything was said and the cameras stopped spinning, I stayed on the island because leaving felt impossible. Sven and I had made a truce of pain and tenderness. He still greeted me with a cool cruelty most days, but his hands were gentler than before.
"Do you still hate me?" I asked once, as wind moved low over the rocks.
"Sometimes," he admitted. "Sometimes I want to see you with resentment. But mostly I want you to see me for what I am."
"And if you stand?" I asked.
"I might," he said. "Or I might let you see me fall."
He never forced me into stages or public displays. He watched me with the ferocity of a man who has finally learned what to guard. I learned to massage his legs with patience and confidence. We both changed.
The island kept its wolf—Per, who would rest his great head on my lap once I had earned his trust. The island kept its wind. And I kept a small, white stone in the pocket of a dress for the child I lost, a reminder that even in the ruins of betrayal, we can choose to become architects of new lives.
"Are you happy?" Sven asked me on a night when the stars had fallen thick over us.
"I am learning to be," I said.
He slid a ring on my finger—not a promise but a pact. "Then stay," he murmured. "Stay and keep the wolf from the doors."
I did.
The End
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